When it comes to Visual Basic, what are the most important topics to know?

First, let me thank you for using VBForums. Your patronage is appreciated.

We are currently doing a little research, so you'll see questions like the topic of this thread ins several areas. We are trying to understand what is considered important to developers (you) in given topic areas.

In this case, what do you consider important topics, tools, features, technology around Visual Basic? What is it topics would get your attention? What topics do you think are most important for developers?

Post your thoughts (or opinions) in this thread. Feel free to state your level of experience on the topic as well since those will experience likely have different opinions than newbies!

Brad!
Site Admin

Level of Experience: 4 years of programming all in VB.Net

Important
Topics: Option Strict
Tools/Features/Technology: Intellisense and LINQ

What Topics Would Get My Attention
Anything advanced graphics related, ie - DirectX 12 is now available in VB.Net(I know its not, but you get my point)
Any new programming features, for example when LINQ was introduced to me this was revolutionary to the way I program.

This... is a really broad question. Every time I try to answer it I end up writing a few pages. Important topics for who? Readers of the forum? Which kind of readers, there's a scale from clueless to expert with many phases between. I could rattle off a ton of topics I wish everyone had a firm grasp on, and most of it isn't in the ToC of your average book. I could be more specific if I had a better idea of what you were fishing for.

Level of experience: I've been a professional developer for 12 years, 2 of those were VB .NET and the rest C#.

Important topics? I think it depends on who you ask/want to serve.

For the kinds of people who ask more questions than they answer, it seems the most harmful myths are that creating classes or helper methods makes their code harder to follow. Anyone with experience knows the converse is true. I see a lot of code that looks more like VB6/VBA from incoming .NET developers, topics about how to shed those habits would be nice. Discussion of unit testing is a must, nobody does in newbie books and that's when it's most important to learn. Lambdas are pretty much required for modern development, and they're another thing most people shove in the "I never need to learn that, it's too hard" bin.

For the people who answer more questions than they ask, important topics will be a mix. I'm more interested in application of patterns and discussion of architecture. I think even the expert crew needs great discussions of testable design and my ears would perk at articles about tools for task management.

I think my number one thing that bothers me is the inconsistency of say typing in MessageBox. then select Show followed by pressing enter and you are off that line while in C# you remain there on Show. MessageBox.Show is simply an example, could be any time one presses enter after selecting a member. Of course if you never plan on using C# or perhaps Javascript this is a moot point.

I am an advocate for coding with Option Strict On yet would guess if a developer coming from VB6 was forced to use Option Strict On that would be a deterrent for them embracing VB.NET. Some place there needs to be a message presented to developers when say using VB.NET for the first time they are encouraged to use Option Strict On.

As VS2015 (and this is not VB.NET spectfic) dropped model first for EF hopefully Microsoft comes up with some good examples for VB.NET developers as in general most are done in C# which should not be an issue for a seasoned VB.NET developer but can be for those just starting out in VB.NET.

I am attending a MVP Summit in November, should be a discussion on this topic as there was a private group of MVP's discussion VB.NET and what it might take to be better for VB.NET developers.

Way to many to list
... but I think that one of the most important things in ANY language is the coding structure, i.e. making sure that there are rigidly defined layers of abstraction.

... more specific to VB ...

• LINQ is def a must
• Option infer (I normally take this for granted ... but it is VITAL to good code standards)
• Threading
• Generics
• Lambda functions / subs
• I think that $"Hello{1000+2:c}" is great in VS2015 ... but don't know what it is called :P
• and for long nights in the office I think pizza is good too :) ... mmmmm ... pizza....

@i00,

5th bullet is String interpolation.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by i00

Way to many to list

... more specific to VB ...

• LINQ is def a must

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why though?

• Lambda functions / subs

Both are LINQ, The difference between those two syntaxes is purely syntactic https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397947.aspx

Has a .NET slant because that's where my mind is at...
(in no particular order)
* Everything is an object
* understanding string manipulations (including the difference between & and + in concatenations)
* Understanding reference vs value objects
* Working with databases - this includes SQL, ADO, ADO.NET, DAO, etc...
* Lambdas
* Generics
* Option Infer/Explicit/Strict
* How to use the IDE to debug

-tg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ident

why though?

• Lambda functions / subs

Both are LINQ, The difference between those two syntaxes is purely syntactic https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397947.aspx

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Not really .. I mean you can declare lambda functions that you pass (as prams) into functions etc... I would not really classify this as linq... I mean javascript you wouldn't really say supports linq ... but you can call lambda functions like this.

Kris

lambdas and linq aren't the same thing... you can use LINQ w/o using a single lick of lambdas and you can use lambdas w/o using linq. It just happens that functional linq makes use of lambdas in such a way that people confuse one with the other, when that's not the case.

-tg

In my over a century of dog-years programming:

The common topics which reoccur are graphics programming, basic file I/O, correct error handling, the simplicity of threading.

I'm going to be a little snarky and add that, as primary evidence that unit testing is undercovered and undervalued at all levels of VB experience, I'm the only person that's mentioned it in a thread involving a half-dozen professionals.

I'd argue that this happens in all languages... it's not unique to just VB.

-tg

Here's a popular guide to learning Python. Note unit testing is part of the material. It's also exercise 47 in another guide. I don't have any Ruby tutorials handy other than the Ruby version of that last Python one (where it's also exercise 47), but when I was big into learning Ruby it was part of every tutorial path I followed. It's a big part of the Java community, it's a big part of the C# community, and people using Haskell, Go, and several other popular modern languages eat, breathe, and sleep unit testing. It's only in the VB community that I find a near-100% rejection of automated testing, a practice that the professional development community has decided is vital.

I spent my first couple of years in the VB .NET community and while I knew of automated tests, I never met a person who advocated for them. Day 1 of my first C# job I was told I couldn't submit code without a suite of NUnit tests, and that's persisted for 10 years across 3 different jobs. One place valued automated tests so much, they wrote their own test framework because they were using C# before NUnit existed. It is very unique to the VB community, and a big factor in perpetuating the stigma attached to the language.

I liked the way dday arranged his post, so I will copy it and fill in.


Level of Experience: 3.5 years of programming in VB.NET

Important Topics:
ADO.NET/Database Connectivity
API Integration

Tools/Features/Technology:
Object Browser
Intellisense
LINQ

What Topics Would Get My Attention:
Straight-Forward 3D modeling and graphics
Design Android and iOS in VB.NET
Microsoft-Designed Fluid Animation API for WinForms

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sitten Spynne

I'm going to be a little snarky and add that, as primary evidence that unit testing is undercovered and undervalued at all levels of VB experience, I'm the only person that's mentioned it in a thread involving a half-dozen professionals.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sitten Spynne

Here's a popular guide to learning Python. Note unit testing is part of the material. It's also exercise 47 in another guide. I don't have any Ruby tutorials handy other than the Ruby version of that last Python one (where it's also exercise 47), but when I was big into learning Ruby it was part of every tutorial path I followed. It's a big part of the Java community, it's a big part of the C# community, and people using Haskell, Go, and several other popular modern languages eat, breathe, and sleep unit testing. It's only in the VB community that I find a near-100% rejection of automated testing, a practice that the professional development community has decided is vital.

...

One place valued automated tests so much, they wrote their own test framework because they were using C# before NUnit existed. It is very unique to the VB community, and a big factor in perpetuating the stigma attached to the language.

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Well some (most?) of the "half-dozen professionals" above have previously stated in other threads that they use C# and web technologies as their primary language and not VB. While I agree that "unit testing" is not something that is universally covered as say "threading", I would also argue that it is not "VB experience", but "experience" in general.

As I am primarily a VB developer (my business's choice) striving to be nothing but the best, constantly learn new things and expand my knowledge, its insulting for you to undercut my knowledge because of your experience in handling people who say they know a language and methodology. Mileage may vary. People writing bad code or code with limited knowledge will appear in any language and that claim is a sweeping generalization. I could find some JS that would make your eyes weep.

Lastly, I highly doubt unit-testing has any kind of stigma attached to the language. I could just as easily write all my apps in C# tomorrow, deploy, and not test anything.

Unit testing is a developers tool and should not be a focus of Visual Basic, specifically.

While lambdas and LINQ are nice, far too many don't get the basics before using these tools - which can be difficult to troubleshoot even for skilled developers, let alone those who have no idea that breakpoints exist. They do demonstrate some fairly advanced programming concepts. I wouldn't consider these 'essential' tools, as you can do anything without these features (they are 'nice to have' features).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jayinthe813

.
What Topics Would Get My Attention:
...
Design Android and iOS in VB.NET
...

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I think that would get most people's attention, but the answer is going to be [for iOS] Swift.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SJWhiteley

I think that would get most people's attention, but the answer is going to be [for iOS] Swift.

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Xamarin can sort of do it, but it's painful. To use Xamarin with VB, you have to use the Visual Studio plugin. To build for iOS with the Xamarin Visual Studio plugin, you have to have an accessible, licensed Mac running the Xamarin build host, and you can only test while at the Mac. It's quite painful, but definitely possible.

Quote:

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Lastly, I highly doubt unit-testing has any kind of stigma attached to the language. I could just as easily write all my apps in C# tomorrow, deploy, and not test anything.

---

The stigma is attached to VB developers in general. The joke is they'd rather bite-sized tutorial cookbook posts rather than large-scale discussions of writing better code overall. I don't like the stigma, and I do what I can to chastize people that believe in it. But this is the only community where every time I mention unit tests I get booed and hissed at. The only one.

Unit testing is undervalued by the VB community as a whole, and it is worse off for it.

From what I have seen unit testing is ignored by many developers more so with vb.net vs c#. At the beginning of each work day we get lastest version from TFS then run unit test where from time to time test will fail not because of bugs in the code but one developer might make changes to a database and the Entity Framework models but not check in the model changes and this is one place the unit test pick up an issue. We will run various scenarios say a DTO, controller and repository where some might do one layer which might not pick up on an issue while just testing one layer is not sufficient. Lastly one can write both good and bad unit test where this can lead to issues with missing issues and/or messing things up in the dev database which is not good if working with a team like mine which consist of ten developers (we take on very large enterprise wide solutions which teams split between front and back end solutions).

What do you consider important topics, tools, features, technology around Visual Basic?

Unit testing
Interfaces
Entity Framework (code first)

What is it topics would get your attention?
Machine learning
Azure (cloud architecture)

What topics do you think are most important for developers?
Option Explicit
Performance monitoring/tuning/analysis
Unit testing
Structured exception handling
Code quality

option strict on (lol)
KNOW you can use While loops for everything and anything :bigyello:

I just started learning VB.NET 2 weeks ago when I took those tutorials in the Microsoft Academy by Bob Tabor. That guy is a good teacher.

But now I am trying to fix applications that we have where the programmer took another job and also trying to start my own projects. The biggest thing I am struggling with is how to structure my code so that I run into less problems down the road...trying to develop a programming style I guess. I do reading on this when I can, but I keep running into pages and pages on what I should call my variables and whether I should use a lowercase letter in the beginning or not! Right now that is far and away the very least of my worries.

There is this whole massive universe I am swimming in right now of sub procedures, functions, address of, class files, references. Like where is a good place to start? Do you just design the first WPF faceplate and take off or are there prudent things to do first?

Then I can write all of my code in one large waterfall dimming and if thenning as the pointer falls or I can put that code in a class file and call it when I need it. But then if I do that, should that code be a sub procedure or Function? as far as I can tell, one returns an object that I must then do something with and the other one doesnt.

I guess there is just a ton of ways to skin the cat. I get the feeling sometimes that I have somehow accidentally leveled Moscow. I get this feeling because while there are all these different ways to write your code, the intellisense seems to get supremely ignorant about casting and certain syntax...where you get the impression that VB.NET must be coded in a very rigid structured and specific way.

Anyways just maybe an overall 10 or 15 minute video on a touch of history of how some of this coding practices came into being and what is the mindset behind their purpose. I think this would greatly assist people when they are starting a project or even a block of code and they are trying to decide whether to take the red pill or the blue pill.

Reference vs Value types seems to be one of the more complex (not basic) issues that get lots of responses on here, so I'd say that it's a topic that catches lots of people by surprise.

leadhead:

This is kind of a bad place to ask that question, but I feel your pain. Inheriting someone else's code is much harder than writing your own from scratch. It's one of the worst ways to have to learn a language, because you don't understand "practices", let alone good or bad ones. There's a book devoted to it, bit if you're two weeks in it's way over your head.

I don't know what kind of recommendations you want. I think the bad news is there's no good path that won't take several months for you to get up to speed. A sad thing is, when it comes to patterns, practices, and being a new developer there are far more resources available for a C# than VB .NET. The languages are very similar, and information in one often transfers naturally to the other. But there's still some cognitive dissonance to deal with that's worse when you're new.

If you don't want to look at any other language at all, I think you should continue to ask questions here. Learn to read MSDN, and if you see anything you don't understand ask about it, even if it's not something you're stuck on. Sometimes the documentation's obtuse. Sometimes something isn't as useful as it looks. Most of us have been down any particular feature's road a time or two and can offer guidance. Skip books for "Beginner VB", look for "Intermediate". They tend to have more meat and a little less filler. But, in general, books that focus on VB are about teaching you what features are available, not how to write good code. There are very few architecture/design books with VB as the focus.

If you don't mind devoting a few hours here and there to reading, and don't mind seeing other languages, I do have a few recommendations, in rough order of difficulty.

First, you should look for Code Complete. It alternates between 5 or 6 languages because it talks about the general theory of "What practices lead to better code?" instead of, "How do I use one language to write good code?" This is a great beginner book because it focuses on a lot of nuts and bolts topics like choosing between For/While/Do..Until loops that many other books assume you already know. There's a whole chapter about using If statements effectively.

From there, Clean Code is also a good read. It focuses on C#. It also focuses on higher-level issues like, "When and how do I write classes to be effective?" It will pair very well with Head-First Design Patterns, which uses Java but nothing too complex or unfamiliar to a .NET developer. After those two you're very much ready for The Art of Unit Testing, another C#-focused book that talks about how to write code that can be proven correct with other programs. Very few VB people study this concept, but almost every other language's practictioners start with it.

At this point, you're very ready for Working Effectively with Legacy Code, which is a book about exactly what you're doing: living life inside a codebase that's inherited. You can skip to it if you wish, but I think the books I listed first are a good background to help you get more out of it.

From there, you can branch out to denser books like The Pragmatic Programmer or Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#. Those focus on very high-level software architecture decisions, and while they focus on certain languages, everything they say is applicable to almost any code you write. They're like the advanced versions of Code Complete, but you need the books in the middle before you read these.

This is a road that doesn't end, and it can take months to fully process what any one of these books states. You can't really speed up the process, but if you try very hard you can make it take longer.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sitten Spynne

leadhead:

This is kind of a bad place to ask that question, but I feel your pain. Inheriting someone else's code is much harder than writing your own from scratch. It's one of the worst ways to have to learn a language, because you don't understand "practices", let alone good or bad ones. There's a book devoted to it, bit if you're two weeks in it's way over your head.

I don't know what kind of recommendations you want. I think the bad news is there's no good path that won't take several months for you to get up to speed. A sad thing is, when it comes to patterns, practices, and being a new developer there are far more resources available for a C# than VB .NET. The languages are very similar, and information in one often transfers naturally to the other. But there's still some cognitive dissonance to deal with that's worse when you're new.

If you don't want to look at any other language at all, I think you should continue to ask questions here. Learn to read MSDN, and if you see anything you don't understand ask about it, even if it's not something you're stuck on. Sometimes the documentation's obtuse. Sometimes something isn't as useful as it looks. Most of us have been down any particular feature's road a time or two and can offer guidance. Skip books for "Beginner VB", look for "Intermediate". They tend to have more meat and a little less filler. But, in general, books that focus on VB are about teaching you what features are available, not how to write good code. There are very few architecture/design books with VB as the focus.

If you don't mind devoting a few hours here and there to reading, and don't mind seeing other languages, I do have a few recommendations, in rough order of difficulty.

First, you should look for Code Complete. It alternates between 5 or 6 languages because it talks about the general theory of "What practices lead to better code?" instead of, "How do I use one language to write good code?" This is a great beginner book because it focuses on a lot of nuts and bolts topics like choosing between For/While/Do..Until loops that many other books assume you already know. There's a whole chapter about using If statements effectively.

From there, Clean Code is also a good read. It focuses on C#. It also focuses on higher-level issues like, "When and how do I write classes to be effective?" It will pair very well with Head-First Design Patterns, which uses Java but nothing too complex or unfamiliar to a .NET developer. After those two you're very much ready for The Art of Unit Testing, another C#-focused book that talks about how to write code that can be proven correct with other programs. Very few VB people study this concept, but almost every other language's practictioners start with it.

At this point, you're very ready for Working Effectively with Legacy Code, which is a book about exactly what you're doing: living life inside a codebase that's inherited. You can skip to it if you wish, but I think the books I listed first are a good background to help you get more out of it.

From there, you can branch out to denser books like The Pragmatic Programmer or Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#. Those focus on very high-level software architecture decisions, and while they focus on certain languages, everything they say is applicable to almost any code you write. They're like the advanced versions of Code Complete, but you need the books in the middle before you read these.

This is a road that doesn't end, and it can take months to fully process what any one of these books states. You can't really speed up the process, but if you try very hard you can make it take longer.

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Sitten, Thank you so much for taking the time to post all of that. Your recommendations of books I think is what I need to understand programming and to think more like a programmer does. I have started with Code Complete as you have recommended. This is EXACTLY what I am looking for.

I know the thread is old...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jayinthe813

I liked the way dday arranged his post, so I will copy it and fill in.

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I'll copy dday and jay...

Level of Experience: 8 years of programming in VB.NET, prior 8 VB6, prior 20 digital mini computers...

My most recent incarnation of a UI is a JavaScript/jQuery RIA with home-grown VB.Net IIS-hosted web methods.

VB.Net and IIS still offer incredible benefits to the functionality that I can squeeze into a browser app.

Important Topics:
Rich Internet Applications
Developing Backend web methods in VB.Net
Complex web interaction - upload / download / EXCEL / pdf / reporting

Tools/Features/Technology:
Web technologies / libraries - jQuery, for instance
IIS

What Topics Would Get My Attention:
JSON
Android and iOS development with VB.NET backend
Web UI libraries / tool kits / code bank
4GL architecture

Posting to this thread is fine even as it gets old. The question of what is important in VB will evolve as time goes on. :)

Hi

I will share some of my personal thoughts too :D......

Im going to give what i believe to be crucial practices and ideas for individuals, i know there are some really good programmers here and i dont know you personally but i do believe from your posts your working in team environments and so you will likely understand this but on a much larger scale.

1, Designing and Planning

Its very easy to jump in there and just code away like a man possessed. STOP... just hold that urge for a while, i promise you can let this beast out soon. You need a plan to follow, if your building the 'Whole Picture' in your mind as you go along your going to inevitably hit a dead end somewhere that will force you to perform some hack job thats really going to betray you down the road, leave the hack jobs for the minor functionality fixes AFTER your main concept works. So back to planning....Break it down, into tiny tiny chunks, build a spider diagram, lots of family trees for your code, draw stick men whatever it takes to build that essential mental picture of your program before you type a single line of code...... you should never have that feeling that your not sure how to go about something.......

2, Dont think too big

This is something that is also very important and i picked this up from researching the gaming industry although it applies to anything, your not going to develop something with a quality even close to a professional package so dont immediately jump in that very very deep end of the pool. you will get so bogged down and demotivated that you will never finish and possibly give up entirely on programming. This extends from number 1 above, if you find that something you planned is a little to big break it down write it down and put this current project on hold and practice this new concept/functionality until you get it all figured out. Now a big problem just became a big helpful piece of knowledge...Magic

3, Specialize or Generalize

I personally chose both, i actually started out in VB6/.NET in the 90's and i just jumped in and got coding. I got absolutely nowhere professionally doing this, i didnt actually plan on programming as a profession when i started it was just a personal thing. I loved programming, still do almost 20 years later. i actually only started programming professionally about 5 years ago and i found myself at a point where i really needed to think about what i need to do to keep working in this field as a freelancer. Competition is SUPER fierce but there is a BIG gap if you look closely, individuals tend not to specialize in anything anymore they take this 'Full Stack' approach......(not knocking those developers in any way, didnt you get there by working hard and partly specializing in 1 field before learning a new one?) You will eventually learn more things as you go along but dont force it at first, you will get left WAY WAY behind, technology changes so fast that you just cannot master 2 things at the same time AND stay on top of the game. Anyway what did i choose......:), i targeted the small business sector and chose to specialize in Office/VBA which i have come very far in, much further than i had hoped. I still come back to .NET, im working Across several fields right now (Office Dev, .Net, Azure, Database Dev) so im getting along pretty well right now in terms of knowledge. I specialize in VBA but generalize in .NET and Database Dev because the later 2 are just convenient right now, in time i will specialize in those too.

4, Do it Right and do it Well

Never half ass something, if your going to do it do it to the best of your ability, this ability will increase over time, if you goto the gym and lift a 2 kg weight are you going to get stronger???? NO you just become another guy who can write code, you wont discover possibilities and new things that maybe nobody else has discovered.



humm, its not really targeted at VB i know, but i believe if you don't have a good foundation it doesn't matter what bricks you use your just going to fall to pieces.

Thanks :)

Level of Experience: 12 years of programming in VB.Net. VB6 and other languages spotted here and there.

Important
Topics:
Class Objects and Inheritance. How to use them, why to use them, etc.
Option Strict and data types.
Basics of ADO.NET (making connections, pulling data into DataTables, updating via a DataAdapter).
Basics of Threading. How to use them, how to end them cleanly, how to use InvokeRequired/Invoke and Delegates to update a form.

Tools/Features/Technology:
Intellisense
Basics of the Debugger
LINQ (I don't use it nearly as much as I used to these days)
Lists, Dictionaries, Queues

What Topics Would Get My Attention
Advanced graphics as well, such as using XNA or other tools to do basic game programming.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by brad jones

First, let me thank you for using VBForums. Your patronage is appreciated.

We are currently doing a little research, so you'll see questions like the topic of this thread ins several areas. We are trying to understand what is considered important to developers (you) in given topic areas.

In this case, what do you consider important topics, tools, features, technology around Visual Basic? What is it topics would get your attention? What topics do you think are most important for developers?

Post your thoughts (or opinions) in this thread. Feel free to state your level of experience on the topic as well since those will experience likely have different opinions than newbies!

Brad!
Site Admin

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Level of experience
kind of newbie on VB.NET. I only had a small formal course in programming, but most of what I know was self taught. I lost account on how many languages I used sometime. A dozen, maybe. Nothing matches Visual Studio. Is another league.
I started using VBA macros to accelerate my work, and then moved to .NET. Sometimes I make a setup.exe to share my programs with other people, but mostly I program to do my own work better. So, basically, VB.Net is my "macros on steroids", but a lot of it spreads across offices, the city, and other cities. Sometimes my code goes far away. Once I was contacted from Mexico about how to use a program I shared with my pals.
^What this means is that I generally program for myself, but with an eye on making the program usable by unknown people. Kind of "take this data from Excel and draw this in Autocad", Excel FFT sucks (REALLY, DEEPLY), so make an use defined function FFT to denoise series, read this image and do XXX.
A lot of what I do is stuff that Microsoft should had integrated on Office, but didn't because it stopped improving office long time ago...

Yet I had an old VS.net, and recently I moved to VS 2013 (and downloading the free 2015) which is really another thing. I'm happy, but lost.

What topics are more important to me
Performance
What I consider more important is squeezing the last bit of performance. I love the new classes for parallel processing in .NET, but I wish I could also tap GPGPU processors with the same easiness.

Also, I don't know if I really are using the most appropriate classes for each kind of parallel processing, and integrated help is useless to the worst degree. I wish I had a simple guide: this classes do this, and this one is for this scenario, and this other has this other advantages and weakness.

Documentation
Where to look for documentation? There is no offline help, and I are proxy blocked, so I need to use browsers. But browsers don't tell me the entry point, but some random page, so I end getting anything, and sometimes wrong information. I wish I had a link: VS help entry point here.
Documentation on MSDN frequently lacks links to "examples", "discussion", "introduction", "hacks", etc. It does not understand that somebody reaches those pages from external search engines, do not have context, and is not using them the way the writer intended.

Debugging
I love the integrated profiler, but it became too complex. I wish I could just see the time spent on each line as third party profilers do. There is probably a way, but is not easy to find it.

I also wish I knew how to instantaneously switch between slow debugging run, and fast optimized run for doing the real work.
I wish I could write a line only compiled/run when debugging.

Debugging parallel threads is a hell to me. It looks like other threads keep running when I break one, or I press F10 on debugger, and it behaves as if I pressed F5. I don't even know what to search to learn to fix it.

I do not understand when a thread makes his own copy of a function, or is running shared physical_code_in_memory. If I declare a variable static, it is static only on that thread, on all threads running the routine? Should I declare the function/variable static for parallel, static for single thread? How?
I cannot see that on the debugger or profiler. Who accessed it how many times. If the variable had 10 different values, what values were those?

Regular Expressions
Regular Expressions are extremely useful to me, but I waste a lot of time finding the right string for the data I want to match. Some third party programs are very helpful, but still VS needs some solution that tackles usability for good.

Integration
Integration with office and other programs. User defined functions for excel are a hell. They frequently break randomly or just hang excel for no reason when called lots of times.

I think knowing properly multithread is very important especially in Winforms VB apps.

A good house has a firm foundation
so the basic things in my opinion must be available in a kind of example book
The forum is to answer more specific questions
when a specific question comes up more often then it has to be added to the example book and so on, so the foundation becomes enlarged.

What are basic things?
e.g. how to open and close a file
how to read and write to a file
how to create and use a random access file
how to make an ouput filename containing date and time
how to use a timer
how to make a serial connection
how to catch errors
how to document a program
how to ...
and so on

The example book becomes an universal knowledge base for VB users

i m interested in writing :
games [ litle experiance ]
ai [ some experiance ]
animations :
raytracing [ litle experiance ]
directx [ no working experiance ]
opengl [ some experiance ]
sphere's [ some experiance ]

i m Always willing to learn new stuf

what i already can do :
<links removed by admin>
see bluatigro

<links removed by admin> [dutch]
see titus