Murach's Visual Basic 2005

A Practical Introduction to Visual Basic


Review by SQL-Server-Performance.com

Murach’s Visual Basic 2005
By Anne Boehm
840 pages. Mike Murach & Associates. $52.50.

Find out more about this book, or purchase it, from Amazon.com.

Some days ago, a coworker asked me to look at one of her applications. Something wasn’t working as expected, she said. That reminded me that I still have Visual Basic 6.0 installed on my laptop in order to be able to support this software. So, I found myself debugging the code and thinking that, to say the least, VB 6 was in a very matured stage of its lifecycle and not really a trendsetter anymore.

Because the application I was debugging is considered mission-critical and will stay in use for the medium term, I decided that it should be ported to VB.NET to make it future-proof. That is, if they would let me. So, in the next days I will send this proposal out to the IT department for approval and provision of the software. We’ll wait and see what happens next.

If they approve the proposal that will mean I will deal extensively with VB.NET the next time around. Which makes me glad that I have Murach’s Visual Basic 2005 on hand to do some sort of preliminary work. After reading about how to upgrade VB 6.0 to VB 2005, I’m quite confident that my proposed migration won’t turn out to be a complete rewrite of the software. Although, looking at certain pieces of that software, a complete rewrite wouldn’t be a bad idea anyway. Sometimes the code is appallingly poor. But it works, and that’s (sadly) all that matters in the end.

Have a look at the table of contents for the Murach book:

  • Introduction to Visual Basic Programming.
  • The Visual Basic Language Essentials.
  • Database Programming.
  • Object-Oriented Programming.
  • Files, XML, User Interfaces and Deployment.
  • Reference Aids.

The book is designed similar to the C# book in the same series and, like all Murach books, serves only one purpose: to get someone going quickly. Unfortunately, I don’t know the predecessors of VB 2005, so the reading takes a bit longer for me but I am well able to follow the explanations of the author. The well-established, paired-pages format fulfills its purpose once again. As the C# book helped me to get into C# programming, so this book will help me manage the task of the migration (if it is to come). Check out Murach’s Web site to get your own impression of the book. While you’re there, you can download the two sample chapters and the complete source code.

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