Programming VB.NET

Programming VB.NET: A Guide for Experienced Programmers
Copyright ©2002 by Gary Cornell
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the
publisher.
ISBN (pbk): 1-893115-99-2
Printed and bound in the United States of America 12345678910
Trademarked names may appear in this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every
occurrence of a trademarked name, we use the names only in an editorial fashion and to the
benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark.
Editorial Directors: Dan Appleman, Gary Cornell, Jason Gilmore, Karen Watterson
Technical Reviewers: Ken Getz, Tim Walton
Managing Editor and Production Editor: Grace Wong
Copy Editors: Steve Wilent, Tracy Brown Collins
Compositor: Susan Glinert Stevens
Artist: Allan Rasmussen
Indexer: Valerie Haynes Perry
Cover Designer: Karl Miyajima
Marketing Manager: Stephanie Rodriguez
Distributed to the book trade in the United States by Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.,175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY, 10010
and outside the United States by Springer-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69112
Heidelberg, Germany
In the United States, phone 1-800-SPRINGER, email orders@springer-ny.com, or visit
http://www.springer-ny.com.
Outside the United States, fax +49 6221 345229, email orders@springer.de, or visit
http://www.springer.de.
For information on translations, please contact Apress directly at 901 Grayson Street, Suite 204,
Berkeley, CA 94710.
Phone 510-549-5930, fax: 510-549-5939, email info@apress.com, or visit http://www.apress.com.
The information in this book is distributed on an “as is” basis, without warranty. Although every
precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor Apress shall
have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to
be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this work.
The source code for this book is available to readers at http://www.apress.com in the Downloads
section.
Dedication
To the people at Apress: the best group of people I can ever imagine working with.
Contents at a Glance
Dedication .............................................................................................................. iii
Contents ....................................................................................................................v
Acknowledgments ................................................................................................. viii
About This Book......................................................................................................ix
Chapter 1 Introduction.....................................................................................1
Chapter 2 The VB .NET IDE: Visual Studio .NET ..............................11
Chapter 3 Expressions, Operators, and Control Flow ...................47
Chapter 4 Classes and Objects (with a Short Introduction
to Object-Oriented Programming) .......................................97
Chapter 5 Inheritance and Interfaces................................................. 177
Chapter 6 Event Handling and Delegates ...........................................237
Chapter 7 Error Handling the VB .NET Way:
Living with Exceptions .........................................................265
Chapter 8 Windows Forms, Drawing, and Printing ..........................279
Chapter 9 Input/Output ..............................................................................333
Chapter 10 Multithreading ..........................................................................379
Chapter 11 A Brief Introduction to Database Access
with VB .NET ..............................................................................423
Chapter 12 A Brief Overview of ASP .NET ...........................................443
Chapter 13 .NET Assemblies, Deployment, and COM Interop .........463