Microsoft .NET is an advance in programming technology that greatly simplifies application development, both for traditional, proprietary applications and for the emerging paradigm of Web-based services. .NET is a complete restructuring of Microsoft's entire system infrastructure and represents a major learning challenge for programmers developing applications on Microsoft platforms. There is substantial change to the Visual Basic language. The new version of the language, Visual Basic .NET, or just VB.NET, is now a fully object-oriented language with features such as interfaces, inheritance, and polymorphism.

This two-day course is designed for the experienced programmer to help you quickly come up to speed on the VB.NET language and to learn the fundamentals of GUI programming using Windows Forms. It is current to .NET 2.0, which introduces important new features, such as generic types and partial classes. It is designed so that it can be run with either .NET 1.1 or .NET 2.0.

The course concisely covers the essentials of Windows programming using Microsoft's VB.NET programming language. It starts with a brief chapter, ".NET: What You Need To Know," which gets you up and running in the .NET environment with a minimum of fuss. The next two chapters cover VB.NET language essentials and object-oriented programming in VB.NET. The next chapter discusses how VB.NET relates to the .NET Framework. The following chapter provides a succinct introduction to creating GUI programs using Windows Forms. The course concludes with an overview of the new VB.NET features provided by .NET 2.0, including example programs to illustrate each important new feature. An appendix explains the fundamentals of working with the Visual Studio .NET development environment.

The course is practical, with many example programs and two case studies. The goal is to bring you up to speed quickly in writing VB.NET programs, including GUI applications. The student will receive a comprehensive set of materials, including course notes, and all the programming examples. The book Application Development Using Visual Basic and .NET is recommended as a supplement to the course.

Prerequisites: The student should be an experienced application developer or architect. Some background in object-oriented programming would be helpful.

Objectives: After successfully completing this course, you will be able to:

• Acquire a working knowledge of VB.NET programming
• Learn about important interactions between VB.NET and the .NET Framework
• Learn how to implement simple GUI programs using Windows Forms
• Gain a working knowledge of generic types and other new features in VB.NET 2.0

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