Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Course

Welcome to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET. In this video series I'm going to introduce you to Microsoft's newest version of Visual Basic .NET. Also, the .NET platform in which Visual Basic .NET is built on. Let me start off by introducing myself to you. My name is Mark Long, I'll be your instructor for this entire video series. And I'd like to let you know what an honor and privilege that I feel it is, to be bringing this information to you. This is some really, really interesting information and you are going to like it. We'll start off with some course objectives and even some course disclaimers if you will. This course if going to introduce you to first of all the .NET Framework. It's really hard to learn anything about Visual Basic .NET without understanding what the .NET Framework is, what it brings us, what it challenges us with, what it offers us and so forth. Then we are going to have a look at the visual studio .NET development tool, or the IDE - the integrated development environment. You really are going to like this thing, if you had previous experience with VB6, you will see some things in here that you will really, really like. Microsoft really did their homework on this. Then of course I want to introduce you to Visual Basic .NET. Now before we get into the course I want to bring some things to your attention. First of all, this course is designed to be like a thirty thousand-foot view of Visual Basic and .NET. There is so much information here that quite frankly it's difficult to determine, what to put in here, what not to put in here. How deep to go with it, how much to say, just there is a lot of stuff going on here. And you are going to like every bit of it. So understand in some places I may disappoint you by not going deep enough into something or not mentioning something or going too far into something and that's just kind of the way it is when you got this much information to go through. I really want to give you just a good foundation on Visual Basic and .NET. So that you can go from here and begin to build your skills on this platform. Now VB had grown up, it has matured incredibly with this release. It has now become a fully object oriented programming development, and we've got some new terms to learn. And let me stress right here: what you do with this course and exactly how you move through this course depends on your background. Now if you are totally new to development, welcome to the family! You are going to find this very useful. But I do want to warn you, if you are totally new to development, you are going to see some things here that at first won't be easily understood, I guess, I should say. Now, I don't want that to intimidate you. But if you look at some things and you're like, wait a minute, that really doesn't really make any sense. Then you are right where you need to be. I always tell my students in live classes that, in a lot of ways development in object oriented languages, is a lot look like looking at those 3D pictures. You know the ones that look just like a mass of colors, but when you get up close to it and you take your eyes off focus a little bit, this 3D image begins to come in, and for some strange reason it usually involves the space shuttle. But that's exactly the way this is, you have to look at it a few minutes. And you kind of have to absorb it, and then suddenly it begins to take on that third dimension and begins to make sense. So that will happen to you. Now, if you are a previous VB6 user, I'm going to talk to you a lot through here and I apologize up front for the number of times I'll say in previous versions of VB. Because that's where most people are that are coming to VB .NET. And so if I can give you some comparison, kind of some common ground that can really help you understand what's happening here. There's some new syntax to be learnt in Visual Basic .NET, not a lot and it's not difficult, matter of fact you'll like it. Most of it has made life easier for you, and I'll point those things out as we come across them. And then there is the new architecture, we have the new memory management system. Lot of things under the hood are totally different from what we know from VB6 and the common environment. And we'll see all that stuff as we go through here. Now in video number 2, I'm going to go through the course description. And not terribly exciting information, but I want to show you in what order we are going to go through the course and what we are going to cover. So that based on your experience level, you may want to go directly to certain areas of the course. And if you are new to it, I would invite and encourage you to go straight through start to finish. But either way we are going to spend about eight hours together. And I think we are going to find it quite informative and very useful. And so anyway that's my go, I'll see you in the next video and we'll talk about where we are headed.