VISUAL BASIC 2015 IN 24 HOURS, SAMS TEACH YOURSELF

Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic in 24 Hours is perfect for students new to programming, as well as those moving from another language to Visual Basic. It focuses on programming principles. Throughout this book, students will learn to build an application – a Picture Viewer, complete with file browsing, printing, basic graphics drawing, menus, toolbars, and more. As mentioned above, many of the changes won’t directly affect the beginner-level material presented in this book. There are changes to the design environment that will be integrated into the existing material appropriately. The Barnes and Noble edition will include two bonus chapters. The author will swap the bonus chapter on printing with the chapter on controlling other applications using Automation. Other changes worth noting: •Updated screenshots •Refined example material (for instance, the author plans to add a zoom feature to the Picture Viewer project in the chapter on Graphics). •Change to current hour 24 (a 10,000 foot overview) to an appendix, and create a new chapter on sending emails. The new TOC reflects this recommendation. Note that the old hour 23 (deploying solutions) was made hour 24, and the new email chapter is hour 23. If the sales reps ask, coverage of the new 2015 features that will be woven into the appropriate chapters are outlined below: Code Editor UI and Editing (Roslyn) • Light Bulbs are the new home for all quick actions you take in the Visual Studio Editor, including fixes to common code issues and refactoring code. • There are two new core refactoring operations: Inline temporary variable and Introduce local. • Refactoring support for Visual Basic has been added for the first time, and has also been moved to the Light Bulb. • Renaming has also been improved; now it highlights all the instances of the identifier you want to rename, letting you type the new name to all instances at once directly in the editor. • The expression evaluator for C# and Visual Basic has been rewritten. Nameof() provides a refactoring-safe way of getting the name of e.g. a parameter, member or type as a string. • Using null-conditional operators you can get a built-in null check while accessing and invoking members and indexers. • String interpolation: String interpolation provides a concise way of describing string templates that insert expressions into format strings (C# only at Preview, both VB and C# at RTM). • View Call Hierarchy. • Find all References. • Multi-line strings. • References Node is now in solution explorer. • Custom Windows Layouts. Debugging • Conditional statements break only when conditions you specify are met. Think of this as adding an “if” statement to your code and placing the breakpoint inside the “if” statement so it is only hit when the conditions you entered are true. • Hit counts break only after the breakpoint has been hit a certain number of times. These are useful in situations where code is called multiple times, and you either know the exactly when it is failing, or have a general idea that “it fails after at least” a certain number of times. • Filters break when the breakpoint is hit on a specific thread, process, or machine and are useful for debugging code running in parallel. • Tracepoints print a message to the output window and are capable of automatically resuming execution. These are useful for doing temporary logging when you need to trace something and don’t want to have to break and manually track values.