VB6 to .NET tutorials [non-code question]

[deathfxu]

I have used vb6 since shortly after it's release about 10 years ago, and never took the time to make the jump to .net. I have recently been trying to motivate myself, and I wonder if anyone can recommend a good vb6 to .net tutorial for a more hardcore coder like myself.

Any info or words of encouragement are greatly appreciated.


edit: Should I just start off with .net 08?

[vb5prgrmr]

Search the web...

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=tut...p=mss&ei=UTF-8

Good Luck

[Lord Orwell]

the language itself is the same. You just have to learn the functions. I'd say hop into it and whenever you get to a part of a program you don't know how to write, hit the documentation. It's what i do.

[LaVolpe]

I plan on attacking .Net this summer. The proprietary work I do is slowly moving towards .Net; not so-much where I work, but my parent organizations and that is rolling down hill to me in a year if not sooner.

Anyway, I did buy some books and I plan on cheating a bit. I do plan on using this site, PSC and other sites that post complete applications, download some, disect it and learn from it. When I can duplicate their work, then I'll move onto more difficult projects. Eventually, starting writing my own, posting to those sites and get feedback.

Last but certainly not least, I will be a big user of this forum, but as a questioner vs a provider.

[Merri]

Some personal rant...

I managed to live without VB6 for some three - four months. Then I've been back on playing around with it for a while again. For some reason VB6 has a high level of addiction that I've yet to find in other tools.

I've downloaded VB2008EE, but I didn't really get myself to do anything with it. Now that I tried to launch it it wanted me to register. Bothersome, I just closed the window. These small things seem to keep me away from .NET. I also still don't like the idea of a massive framework that I can never learn in it's entirelity, even though it is now installed by default on most Windows setups.

I did also buy REALbasic as it also allows me to code for other than Windows platforms. It has it's problems though, I need to learn how to make the applications feel faster. At least the core is much more modern than VB6, providing things such as Unicode and sorting by default helps quite a bit. However the fact that to do multiplatform coding I have to avoid using Windows API doesn't make things easy for me: learning powerful use of VB6 also meant learning powerful usage of API and understanding COM. All this knowledge feels quite wasted with the new tools.


My greatest issue is that being at non-IT job I don't have the time to spend on learning entirely new things. Adding also having more "life" in my life I'm in serious lack of both time and mental strength to put into learning new programming tools.

[Hack]

Moved To General Developer

Should I just start off with .net 08?

That would be my suggestion.

[deathfxu]

Well I have started now. It's not too bad, but there are a lot of differences. Even basic stuff has changed. There are new datatypes (and different meanings for old ones). In most cases VB has made bad coding practices impossible now, like no Variant data type, etc.

I'll leave this thread open for a bit so as I come across good tutorials, I can put them here for you guys to use if you'd like.

http://www.thescarms.com/vbasic/vb6vsvbnet.aspx - Rating 4 (of 5) - very concise list. 10 minute read-through and covers many of the big coding differences.

[Hack]

Here is a good book for beginners...

http://extra.codeguru.com/displayReview.asp?name=TYVB08

[Lord Orwell]

i miss variants. It made overloading a function a snap. I just had my parameter be a variant and i could pass it anything.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Object is the new Variant....sort of. Everything is derived from Object, but there may be more useful things that you can do with it, and a few things that you can't do with it. I never used Variant, so there are probably more differences than I can think of.

[deathfxu]

I used to write functions that would receive a Variant, and based on what type it was, it did something different. Gone are the days of writing one function to do 50 things based on data type. =/

[Shaggy Hiker]

They aren't dead. Take an argument of type Object and use Object.GetType to figure out the type for the switch. You also have the option of writing generics that deal with type T where T is determined at runtime.

[techgnome]

That's what Overloading is for.... now you have 50 functions that doe one ting (which is how it should be), but the version that's called will be based on the parameter types....

-tg

[Shaggy Hiker]

Right, more than one way to skin a cat these days.