Visual_Basic_NET_Programming_Sybex (VBL).pdf下载

Introduction At first, .NET was no more than a distant echo in my consciousness. For a long time—it seems like years, and actually, it was years—I heard the distant beating of publicity drums regarding .NET, and I couldn't care less. My concern has always been to work with high- quality programming tools that are solid, rather than playing with the latest technology toy, and I am ever suspicious of publicity campaigns. Visual Basic 6 worked well enough for me, my consulting clients, and the readers of my books. Why should I bother taking the time to understand this .NET thing until it was tried-and-true technology? What's the .NET Strategy? Before we get to my "Aha!" moment—and I've had several epiphanies related to .NET and Visual Basic .NET—I would like to step back for a second and consider exactly what .NET is and what it is not. This is particularly confusing because some things that Microsoft calls .NET are a matter of "vision," some are marketing terms, and others—such as Visual Basic .NET—are grounded technologies that are here today. (I mean, what could be more grounded as a technology than a programming language?) Pushing aside the clouds of confusion that swirl around the terminology, Microsoft's .NET strategy involves three related offerings: • .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET, a runtime platform and development environment that works with languages including Visual Basic .NET • .NET Enterprise Servers, a set of enterprise server products such as Biztalk Server, Exchange Server, Mobile Information Server, and SQL Server, which happen to have been given the .NET moniker for marketing purposes • .NET MyServices, also sometimes called Hailstorm, which is a vision for creating services, such as the Passport user authentication service, that can be drawn upon as utilities by myriad distributed applications The domain of this book is the first of these: applications written in the Visual Basic .NET language, using the Visual Studio development environment, targeting the .NET Framework as a runtime platform. You can think of the runtime platform that .NET applications are written for as being analogous to the Java runtime "sandbox" that Java applications target, except that, at this point, the .NET Framework is primarily deployed on Microsoft Windows platforms.