.NET - beginers stumbling blocks

Folks,

I have to write an internal course for VB6 and VBA/Access programmers moving to .NET 2005 - problem is that I have been using .NET for so long that I have forgotten which bits of it were most confusing to me when i started. Anyone starting out on the .NET learning curve want to give me some reminders?

What I have got so far is:

• Forms, controls and components
• Object oriented programming in .NET
• The garbage collector
• Serialisation (XML and binary)
• Data access (ADO.Net and System.data.SQLClient)
• Exception handling
• Printing

Well if your also writting for Access developers then you will want to cover ADO.NET.

Maybe you should also include working with Xml Files. (XmlDocument, XmlStreamReader/Writer,....)
Important in a lot of Projects!

Value types and reference types. I'd also include forms as a separate entry to just OOP because everyone seems determined to treat forms differently to other objects. Printing too.

Exception handling and variable declaration?

Sending emails too. Maybe take a look at the 101 .NET Tutorial demo projects subjects and pick some of the more popular ones.

I would include types conversion so it wouldn't be language specific:

VB Code:

Dim SomeIntegerVar As Integer = 25
Dim SomeTextVar As String
 
SomeTextvar = SomeIntegerVar.ToString() 'vs CStr(SomeIntegerVar)
 
'and so on...

Remember to tell them to forget everything they know about connecting to databases because it no longer applies. (Among other total losses of existing knowledge that using .net causes.)

eyeRmonkey did a thread in vb.net for a conversion chart of VB6 -> vb.net a few weeks ago.

do these provide any help?


--The End While statement replaces the Wend statement of VB6.

--The indexing of arrays in VB.NET starts at zero, and you can’t change this behavior.

--The Call statement of VB6 has disappeared. Also, the parentheses around the argument list are mandatory,
even if the subroutine or function doesn’t accept any arguments. You can no longer call a subroutine
with a statement like

VB Code:

ConvertText myText

You must enclose the arguments in a pair of parentheses:

VB Code:

ConvertText(myText)

--VB.NET doesn’t support arrays of controls, which used to be the simplest method of adding new controls
on a form at runtime. With VB.NET, you must create a new instance of a control, set its properties, and then
place it on the form by adding it to the form’s Controls collection.

--The Class_Initialize method of VB6 has been replaced by the New subroutine, and the Class_Terminate
method of VB6 has been replaced by the Destruct subroutine in VB.NET.

--In VB6, amounts of money were usually stored in Currency variables. The Currency data type turned out to
be insufficient for monetary calculations and was dropped from the language.