Visual Basic 2012 How to Program, 6th edition

Appropriate for all basic-to-intermediate level courses in Visual Basic 2012 programming.

Created by world-renowned programming instructors Paul and Harvey Deitel, Visual Basic 2012 How to Program, Sixth Edition introduces all facets of the Visual Basic 2012 language through a hands-on approach with hundreds of working programs. This book has been thoroughly updated to reflect the major innovations Microsoft has incorporated in Visual Basic 2012; all discussions and sample code have been carefully audited against the newest Visual Basic language specification. The Sixth Edition is updated to Visual Studio 2012 and includes new chapters on Windows 8 UI app development, Windows 8 graphics/multimedia, Windows Phone 8 app development and Windows Azure.

Students begin by getting comfortable with the free Visual Basic Express 2012 IDE and basic VB syntax. Next, they build their skills one step at a time, mastering control structures, classes, objects, methods, variables, arrays, and the core techniques of object-oriented programming. With this strong foundation in place, the Deitels introduce more sophisticated techniques, including inheritance, polymorphism, exception handling, strings, GUI's, data structures, generics, and collections. Throughout, the authors show developers how to make the most of Microsoft’s Visual Studio tools. A series of appendices provide essential programming reference material on various topics.

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• Features thousands of lines of code in hundreds of complete working programs.
• Enables students to confirm that programs run as expected.
• Students can also download the code from the book's Companion Website at http://www.pearson.com/deitel or from the author's website at www.deitel.com.

Outstanding, consistent, and applied pedagogy:

• Icons throughout identify Software Engineering Observations; Good Programming Practices; Common Programming Errors; Portability Tips; Performance Tips; Testing and Debugging Tips; and Look-and-Feel Observations.
• Full-color presentation, including syntax coloring, code highlighting, and extensive comments.

• Late objects approach. The discussion of creating custom classes is now deferred until Chapter 9, but in the early chapters, lots of existing objects are still used. Chapter 10 discusses how to create powerful new classes quickly by using inheritance to “absorb” the capabilities of existing classes, and presents the crucial concepts of polymorphism, abstract classes and interfaces.
• Shorter printed book with optional online advanced chapters. The printed book contains the core content for introductory Visual Basic courses. Several optional online chapters are included for second courses and professionals. These are available in searchable PDF format on the book’s password-protected Companion Website–see the access card in the front of this book. If you are an instructor with a complimentary review copy that did not come with an access card, contact your Pearson Education/Prentice-Hall representative.
• Making a Difference exercises set. The authors encourage you to use computers and the Internet to research and solve problems that of social significance. These new exercises are meant to increase awareness of important issues the world is facing. The authors hope you’ll approach them with your own values, politics and beliefs.
• Includes an optional case study on object-oriented design with UML. Walks students through a system design that is clear to OOD and UML novices, while still demonstrating key OOD concepts and related UML modeling techniques.
• Hundreds of interactive self-review questions and programming exercises.Includes both simple and complex exercises that can easily be tailored to the needs of specific courses and instructors, including “What does this code do?”, “What’s wrong with this code?” and “Using the Debugger” exercises.

SUPPLEMENTS

• Test Bank
  A chapter-by-chapter set of question that can be used by the instructor for quizzes or made available to the student for self-study.
• PowerPoint A comprehensive set of PowerPoint slides, including of all figures and tables in the text, can be used by instructors for class presentations or by students for lecture preview or review.
• Solutions Manual
  Solutions to end-of-chapter Review Questions and Problems.
• Companion Website www.pearson.com/deitel A collection of valuable teaching and learning resources for instructors and students.
• VideoNotes are step-by-step video tutorials specifically designed to enhance the programming concepts presented in Deitel, Visual Basic 2012 How to Program, 6e. Students can view the entire problem-solving process outside of the classroom–when they need help the most. VideoNotes are available with the purchase of a new copy of select titles. Go to www.pearsonhighered.com/videonotes for a brief VideoNotes demo.
  

Visual Basic® 2012, the Visual Studio® 2012 IDE, .NET 4.5, Windows® 7 and Windows® 8

The new Visual Basic 2012 and its associated technologies motivated us to write Visual Basic 2012 How to Program. These are some of the key features of this new edition:

• Use with Windows 7, Windows 8 or both. The book is designed so that you can continue to use Windows 7 now and begin to evolve to Windows 8, if you like, or you can move right to Windows 8. All of the code examples in Chapters 1–19 and 23–31 were tested on both Windows 7 and Windows 8. The code examples for the Windows-8-specific chapters—Chapter 20 (Windows 8 UI and XAML), Chapter 21 (Windows 8 Graphics and Multimedia) and Chapter 22 (Building a Windows Phone 8 App)—were tested only on Windows 8.
• Modular multi-GUI treatment with Windows Forms, Windows 8 UI and WPF. The printed book features Windows Forms GUI; optional online chapters contain treatments of WPF GUI and the new Windows 8 UI. Windows 8 UI apps are called Windows Store apps. In Chapter 20, you’ll learn how to create and test Windows Store apps and upload them to Microsoft’s Windows Store.
• Modular treatment of graphics and multimedia with Windows 8 and WPF. The book features optional online chapters on both Windows 8 Graphics and Multimedia (Chapter 21) and WPF Graphics and Multimedia (Chapter 28).
• Database with LINQ to Entities. In the previous edition of this book, we discussed LINQ (Language Integrated Query) to SQL (Microsoft’s SQL Server database system). Microsoft stopped further development on LINQ to SQL in 2008 in favor of the newer and more robust LINQ to Entities and the ADO.NET Entity Framework, which we’ve switched to in this edition, keeping the discussion friendly for novices.
• SQL Server database. We use Microsoft’s free SQL Server Express 2012 (which installs with the free Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop) to present the fundamentals of database programming. Chapters 12–13 and online Chapters 24–25 use database and LINQ capabilities to build an address-book desktop app, a web-based guestbook app, a bookstore app and an airline reservation system app.
• ASP.NET 4.5. Microsoft’s .NET server-side technology, ASP.NET, enables you to create robust, scalable web-based apps. In Chapter 13, you’ll build several apps, including a web-based guestbook that uses ASP.NET and the ADO.NET Entity Framework to store data in a database and display data in a web page. The chapter also discusses the IIS Express web server for testing your web apps on your local computer.
• Building a Windows Phone 8 App. Windows Phone 8 is Microsoft’s latest operating system for smartphones. It features multi-touch support for touchpads and touchscreen devices, enhanced security features and more. In online Chapter 22, you’ll build a complete working Windows Phone 8 app and test it on the Windows Phone simulator; we’ll discuss how to upload apps to the Windows Phone Store.
• Building a Windows Azure™ Cloud Computing App. Windows Azure is a cloud computing platform that allows you to develop, manage and distribute your apps in the cloud. Online Chapter 26 shows you how to build a Windows Azure app that can store data in the cloud.
• Asynchronous programming with async and await. Asynchronous programming is simplified in Visual Basic 2012 with the new Async and Await capabilities. We introduce asynchronous programming with Async and Await in online Chapter 23.