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Any VB jockey who's been around for more
than a couple of years knows who Dan Appelman is. And of course,
if you've ever been to a Microsoft Tech-Ed or Professional Developer's
Conference, you also know what he looks like - he's the tall, lanky
geeky guy who looks like he stays up 23 hours a day figuring out
new ways to do cool stuff.
I've learned a lot from reading Dan's books on
the Win32 API and reading his articles. His Desaware controls and
tools are prized by advanced developers. And his somewhat irreverant
writing style is, well - shall we say "unique"? Appelman
of course, with his guru counterpart Gary Cornell, is one of the
founders of aPress. In my opinion, these guys have built a marvelous
high - quality technical book publishing house in just a few short
years - something that is extremely difficult to do in today's competitive
climate for even the best-capitalized entrepreneurs.
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And that's why I was so excited to get my hands on this
book. Mind you, I'm a VB programmer (I wrote my first code in Applesoft
BASIC) but for the last year and a half almost all of the new studying
I"ve done has been to master C#. I looked at VB.NET and I looked
at C#, and I made a decision. And now guess what? My company's getting
heavy into .NET (that's good!!) - and the directive came down that they
want us to all use VB.NET (uh-oh, not so good..). Maybe its because they
think VB programmers will have an easier time migrating and maintaining
code? Who knows - I'm happy just to be able to write and test production
code against the .NET platform. I just hope they don't ask me to do any
operator overloading or create any cool XML Documentation for my classes.
What I did find out was that my studying of C# made it much easier to
understand VB.NET. I also learned that VB.NET is actually a full-fledged
first class object - oriented member of the .NET family.
I stayed up very late and pored over this book the first
night at home. Then I brought it to work and went through it again. Then
I took it home and got out my yellow highlighter and started going through
it again. This is a very different book. Dan's not going to show you how
to write Winforms, or any of the stuff the other 25 VB.NET books do. What
Dan does instead is show you all the things you did that were BAD. Then
he shows you why when you start using .NET, they will still be BAD, and
he explains in great detail exactly why they are bad. He does this in
a most instructive, detailed and entertaining way.
Appelman talks about adoption strategies, concepts of COM
and the Common Language Runtime, inheritance, memory management, threading
and much more. There's plenty of code in this book and it's probably more
instructive than most of the sample code you've ever seen about .NET,
because the approach is completely different, yet very digestible and
valid.
For example, take this sage quote: "If you must
port code, using the Upgrade Wizard as a first step is probably a necessity.
However, as I stated in Part One of this book, I believe it will not make
economic sense to port code in most cases. VB.NET is best used for new
code development."
Dan, I couldn't agree more! And his explanation of how
bugs can creep in and exponentially affect total cost of ownership in
the development cycle is outstanding. It should be required reading for
every developer - and their manager!
I can't say enough good things about this book. It's thorough,
it's empowering, its complete. If you are looking for a book about how
to write VB.NET programs and use Winforms and ASP.NET and so on, this
is probably not the best choice. But if you really want to feed your brain
with a master VB mechanic taking you under the hood and explaining in
detail the inner workings of why things are the way they are, then Moving
to VB.NET by Dan Appelman is a one-of-a-kind that you simply won't find
anywher else.
The only thing I didn't like about this book is that Appelman
gets carried away with footnotes. He often uses the footnote improperly
in the literary sense as a device to inject his opinions and afterthoughts,
or to plug one of his other books, or whatever. Only a few of the footnotes
are really worthwhile and the result is a kind of "boy who cried
wolf" syndrome where your eyes are constantly shifting to the bottom
of the page wondering if what you're about to read is really worth losing
your place.
But that's a minor issue. Moving to VB.NET by Dan
Appelman (560pp) published by aPress, is tremendous. Highly Recommended!
Peter Bromberg is an independent consultant specializing in distributed .NET solutions
Inc. in Orlando and a co-developer of the NullSkull.com
developer website. He can be reached at info@eggheadcafe.com
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