Book excerpt: Accelerate your productivity with Visual Basic® .NET—and quickly create powerful Win32® applications and high-performance, scalable applications for the Web—with this indispensable tutorial and reference. Building on the success of the author's popular programming book for Visual Basic 6.0, this new book teaches you the best practices for porting and reusing existing Visual Basic code in the .NET Framework as well as for exploiting the language's advanced new object-oriented capabilities. It covers the common language runtime (CLR), multithreaded programs, Windows® Forms applications, GDI+ graphic programming, Windows services, ADO.NET classes for database programs, ASP.NET Web Forms, and Web Services. It includes advanced optimization techniques and tips for leveraging the power of the Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET environment. Topics covered include: Getting started with Visual Basic .NET Modules, variables, and error handling Object-oriented features, including inheritance Delegates and attributes Arrays, lists, and collections Files, directories, and streams Object serialization Regular expressions Threading Assemblies and AppDomains Reflection Windows Forms applications and GDI+ Windows Forms custom control creation Windows services ADO.NET XML ASP.NET Web Forms applications User controls and custom controls XML Web services CD+DVD INSIDE! CD-ROM features: A fully searchable electronic copy of PROGRAMMING MICROSOFT VISUAL BASIC 6.0 Sample applications written in Visual Basic .NET A Note Regarding the CD or DVD The print version of this book ships with a CD or DVD. For those customers purchasing one of the digital formats in which this book is available, we are pleased to offer the CD/DVD content as a free download via O'Reilly Media's Digital Distribution services. To download this content, please visit O'Reilly's web site, search for the title of this book to find its catalog page, and click on the link below the cover image (Examples, Companion Content, or Practice Files). Note that while we provide as much of the media content as we are able via free download, we are sometimes limited by licensing restrictions. Please direct any questions or concerns to [email protected].