Programming with Visual Basic 2 day training course from £590.00 plus VAT

This course is an introduction to the Visual Basic (VB.NET) programming language. It will cover the basic building blocks of the Visual Basic programming language, such as how .NET is different from traditional programming, defining variables, control structures (If..Else, loops etc) and operators, before moving on to key concepts such as classes, objects, properties and methods. It will then move on to more advanced subjects such as Shared and Abstract behaviour, enumerations and error handling. It will provide delegates with a skill base from which they can go on to develop .NET applications on either the Windows Forms or ASP.NET platforms.

Please note that this is the .NET version of Visual Basic (version 7 and above). It is not suitable if you want to learn VB6 or below, or Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Please contact us if you are unsure if this is the right course for your VB requirements.

Introduction to .NET

• What is .NET?
• Common Language Runtime (CLR)
• Common Type System (CTS)

Introduction to Visual Basic

• What is Visual Basic.NET?
• Getting started with Visual Basic
• Visual Studio IDE

Getting started

• Creating a project
• The Main procedure
• Visual Basic basics
• Displaying to the console screen
• Adding comments
• Compiling and running the program from the command line
• Compiling and running the program using Visual Studio

Variables

• Variables in Visual Basic
• Declaring variables
• Variable name rules
• Visual Basic keywords
• Assigning a value to a variable
• Strings
• Character data types
• Numeric data types
• Signed and Unsigned
• Byte
• Signed Byte
• Short Integers
• Unsigned Short Integers
• Signed Integers
• Unsigned Integers
• Long Integers
• Unsigned Long Integers
• Real Numbers: Single
• Double-Precision Numbers
• Decimal
• The Boolean Data Type
• The Date Data Type
• Assigning a Date value
• Default variable values
• Constants
• Visual Basic / .NET Data Types
• VB / .NET Data Type equivalents

Properties and methods

• About data type properties and methods
• String properties: Length
• String methods: PadLeft and PadRight
• String method: Substring
• More String methods
• Date properties
• Shared Date properties
• Date methods
• Converting Date to a String
• Date format masks
• Converting numeric data to string

Data type conversion

• Implicit and explicit conversion
• Using Parse to convert data types
• Using TryParse to convert data types
• System.Convert

Operators

• Visual Basic operators
• The + operator
• The & operator
• The -, * and / operators
• The += addition assignment operator
• The -=, *= and /= operators
• Logical operators: =
• Logical operators: <>
• Logical operators: < and >
• Logical operators: <= and >=
• Logical ‘and’ Conjunction: And
• Conditional ‘and’ Conjunction: AndAlso
• The Binary ‘or’ operator: Or
• The Conditional ‘or’ operator: OrElse
• The exclusive ‘or’ operator: Xor

Conditional logic

• Conditional control: If / Then
• Conditional control: If / Then cont.
• Using If on a single line
• Conditional control: Else
• If .. ElseIf
• If .. ElseIf .. Else
• The Ternary If Operator
• Case Switches
• GoTo

Loops

• The While loop
• While cont.
• Do…While
• Do...Until
• The For..Next loop
• Exiting out of a loop
• Continuing a loop

Procedures

• Procedures of a class
• Types of procedure
• Sub procedures
• Declaring a sub procedure
• Procedure parameters
• Specifying procedure parameters
• Optional parameters
• Overloading a sub procedure
• Functions
• What are functions?
• Calling functions
• Declaring a function
• Returning a value from a function
• Overloading a function

Introduction to Classes

• Object oriented programming
• Classes
• Objects
• Member variables
• Creating a class
• Creating a class in its own file
• Creating an object
• Assigning a value to an object
• Accessing class members
• Objects as parameters and return types
• Access modifiers
• The Public access modifier
• The Private access modifier

Properties

• Encapsulation
• Properties
• Coding a Property
• Implementing a Property
• Accessing a property
• Read only Properties
• Write only Properties

Constructors

• What are constructors?
• Constructors with arguments
• Calling a constructor
• The default constructor
• Constructor chaining
• Shared constructors
• Shared constructor execution
• Declaring a shared constructor
• Shared constructor rules

Inheritance

• Introduction to Inheritance
• Examples of inheritance use
• Deriving one class from another
• Adding to a Derived Class
• Overriding Members of the Base Class
• Multi-Level Hierarchies
• Constructors and Inheritance

Shared members and classes

• Shared Members of a Class
• Examples of shared behaviour
• Declaring Shared Members
• Referencing Shared Members

Arrays

• Array Types
• Declaring an Array Variable
• Accessing the elements in an array
• Declaring and populating an array variable
• Changing the size of an array
• Retrieving the length of an array
• Using For Each to loop through an array

Error handling

• Introduction to Exception Handling
• Try .. Catch
• Finally
• The Exception Class
• Catching the Exception instance
• The Exception Message
• Throwing an Exception
• Passing a message to the Exception class

Namespaces and Modules

• What is a namespace?
• Accessing Members of a Namespace
• Namespace Nesting
• Importing a Namespace
• Root namespaces
• Modules