Pre-requisites

• Experience of programming with Visual Basic 5 or 6
• Understanding of basic Web concepts
• Familiarity with ADO and SQL
• Awareness of COM

Course Benefits

VB.NET represents a radical redesign of the hugely successful Visual Basic concept. Visual Basic has been rewritten from the ground up to take full advantage of the .NET platform, which will form the basis of Microsoft's product strategy for the foreseeable future. This is truly revolution, not evolution!

This course offers experienced VB users a three-day immersion in the product, which introduces the key concepts and answers the questions about the capabilities of the new platform, implications for existing applications, deployment, and many other issues.

You Will Learn How To:

• Understand the reasons for moving to the .NET platform
• Explore the major new features of the VB.NET language
• Create Web Services
• Compare ADO.NET to classic ADO
• Use Web Forms and Windows Forms
• Integrate .NET and COM components
• Understand Managed Execution

Course Content

VB.NET Grand Tour
The .NET Vision| Visual Studio.Net Architecture | ASP.NET | The New IDE | Web Services | Windows Forms and Web Forms | Console Applications | Class Libraries | ADO.NET

Language Features
Creating .NET Projects | NameSpaces | Data Structure and Language Highlights | Classes and Inheritance | Structured Error Handling | Exploring the Base Class Library | Compatibility with VB6 | The .NET Type System | Threads | C#

Web Services
Benefits of Web Services | SOAP, HTTP and XML | Creating Web Services | Testing Web Services | Discovery | Generating Web Service Proxies | Using Web Services

Windows Forms
Benefits of Windows Forms | Windows Forms compared to the lassic VB 'Ruby' Forms mode | .NET Events | Visual Inheritance | Code-free re-sizing | Using ActiveX Controls

ADO.NET
Benefits of ADO.NET | ADO.NET compared to classic ADO | DataSets | Managed Providers | Data Binding, DataSets and XML | Typed DataSets

How .NET Works
The Common Language Implementation | Assemblies | Metadata and Intermediate Language | Garbage Collection | Versioning and Side-by-Side Execution | The End to DLL Hell | Managed Execution | COM InterOp

Web Applications
Web Forms and ASP.NET | Creating Web Forms | Server controls and HTML controls | Web Form Events | Using ASP.NET objects | Web Forms and Data Access | State Management

Practical Sessions

• Explore the Visual Studio .NET IDE and Help system
• Use the new error handling system
• Explore the .NET Base Class Library and use inheritance to create a new class
• Create and test a Web Service
• Investigate .NET assemblies and versioning
• Create a .NET class that inherits from a COM class
• Use ADO.NET to browse and update data
• Explore XML and typed DataSets
• Build a console application
• Build a Windows Form Application
• Use visual (form) inheritance
• Create a Web Application and experiment with Server
• Controls and Events