Introduction to VB.NET by Alex Hedley

Welcome

If you want to learn how to program in Visual Basic .NET, this is the course for you. This course is designed for students who have never programmed before. However, even if you have been using Visual Basic for some time, you will benefit from the good, solid fundamentals that this course teaches - it's a great refresher for experienced developers as well. We have also had students come back and tell us that they picked up a few tips and tricks, even though they've been programming for years with Visual Basic .NET.

Resources

• Full Course Lessons Page
• Course Topic Outline

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Topics Covered

We'll begin by talking about some of the fundamentals of programming, such as definitions, terminology, and such. We'll talk about Object-Oriented Programming, and how Windows programming is different from classic DOS-based programs. We'll discuss properties, methods, and events, and other VB-specific terms.

Our goal, however, is to get you building a program in today's class, so we're not going to spend too much time on theory and definitions. We'll get right into building a basic calculator application. We'll show you how to create a basic VB Project. We'll show you around the VB interface, and what all of the different windows, frames, and options are.

We'll discuss forms and how they work. We'll create some command buttons and text boxes. We'll talk about object properties. We'll discuss subroutines, and we'll write some code to make our command buttons come alive. We'll learn about basic functions and statements, like MsgBox. We'll even write the classic "Hello World" application that most programming courses start with. Yes, it's cliche, but we couldn't resist.

Next we'll spend time going over object properties in detail. We'll show you how to change object properties such as name, caption, colors, and so on. We'll discuss proper naming conventions for your objects. After properties, we'll talk about labels and text boxes. We'll show you how to get data from the user with text boxes. We'll teach you how to interact with the data that the user types in, so you can make your programs interactive.

We'll discuss basic debugging and what to do with syntax errors. We'll discuss string concatenation. We'll learn the Val function to convert text strings to number values.

We'll go over some real basic error handling to deal with errors in your code. We'll build a simple calculator program to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers.

No basic programming course would be complete without a discussion of the IF/THEN statement. We'll show you how conditional statements work. We'll learn how to exit a sub when needed. We'll show you how to properly indent (format) your code. And don't worry if you don't know what these terms mean right now - they're programmer terms, and we'll fully explain all of them to you as we're going along.

Finally, we'll show you how to compile your program into a standalone executable file that you can run outside of VB, and that you can put on a disk to share with others.

Again, this is the perfect beginner course for anyone who wants to learn VB. If you're not sure whether you can program - don't worry. We take you through all of the examples step by step. Even if you've been using VB for a while, you will benefit from the review, and you may even pick up a few useful tricks!

What's Next?

VB.NET Beginner Level 2 is currently still in production, check back soon.

Keywords

vblz, vb, vb.net, .net, learning, zone, Programming basics, VB interface, forms, subroutines, MsgBox, command buttons, captions, build a calculator