Contents

• Introduction
• Before You Begin
• Features in Visual Basic 2005 How to Program, 3/e
• Teaching Approach
• A Tour of the Optional Case Study on Object-Oriented Design with the UML
• Teaching Resources for Visual Basic 2005 How to Program, 3/e
• Deitel® Buzz Online Free E-mail Newsletter
• What's New at Deitel
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• About Deitel & Associates, Inc.

"Live in fragments no longer, only connect."—Edgar Morgan Foster

Welcome to the world of Windows, Internet and Web programming with Visual Basic, Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET 2.0 platform! This book presents leading-edge computing technologies for computer science students, software developers and IT professionals.

At Deitel & Associates, we write computer science textbooks for college students and professional books for software developers. We also teach this material in industry seminars at organizations worldwide.

This book was a joy to create. To start, we put the previous edition under the microscope:

• We audited our Visual Basic presentation against the most recent Microsoft Visual Basic Language Specification, which can be found at www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=
  6d50d709-eaa4-44d7-8af3-e14280403e6e&DisplayLang=en.
• All of the chapters have been significantly updated and upgraded.
• We changed to an early classes and objects pedagogy. Now readers build reusable classes starting with a very friendly treatment in Chapter 4.
• We updated our object-oriented presentation to use the latest version of the UML (Unified Modeling Language)—UML™ 2.0 —the industry-standard graphical language for modeling object-oriented systems.
• We added an optional OOD/UML automated teller machine (ATM) case study in Chapters 1, 3–9 and 11. The case study includes a complete Visual Basic code implementation of the ATM in Appendix J.
• We added several multi-section, object-oriented programming case studies.
• We incorporated key new features of Microsoft's latest release of Visual Basic—Visual Basic 2005—and added discussions on generics, .NET remoting and debugging.
• We significantly enhanced our treatment of XML, ADO.NET, ASP.NET and Web services.

All of this has been carefully scrutinized by a substantial team of academics, .NET industry developers and members of the Microsoft Visual Basic development team.

We believe that this book and its support materials have everything instructors and students need for an informative, interesting, challenging and entertaining Visual Basic educational experience. In this Preface, we overview various conventions used in the book, such as syntax coloring the code examples and code highlighting. We also discuss the book's comprehensive suite of ancillary materials that help instructors maximize their students' learning experience, including the Prentice Hall Instructor's Resource Center, PowerPoint® Slide lecture notes, companion Web site, SafariX (Pearson Education's WebBook publications) and more.

Visual Basic 2005 How to Program, 3/e presents 220 complete, working Visual Basic programs and depicts their inputs and outputs in actual screen shots of running programs. This is our signature "live-code" approach—we present concepts in the context of complete working programs.

As you read this book, if you have questions, send an e-mail to deitel@deitel.com ; we will respond promptly. For updates on this book and the status of Visual Basic software, and for the latest news on all Deitel publications and services, visit www.deitel.com regularly and be sure to sign up for the free Deitel^® Buzz Online e-mail newsletter at www.deitel.com/Newsletter/SubscribetotheDeitelBuzzOnlineNewsletter/tabid/2015/Default.aspx.