Notice: this course covers
the older Visual Basic 6.0 programming application. Microsoft no
longer sells VB6. If you want to learn VB6, you'll have to find a used
copy somewhere like eBay or Craigslist. We will be updating this course
for use with Visual Basic 2013 soon. If you've purchased this
course within the last year, you'll get a free upgrade when it's
released.
If you want to learn how to program
in Visual Basic, 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.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 cliché, 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 briefly discuss control arrays. 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! |