Opinions on Visual Studio Pro 2010 (1 Viewer)

[browninaz]

Hello all,

I am currently enrolled in Visual Basics Programming l and start the first week of January.

I have no idea how to write VB code and I just recently learned to write html, CSS and tie my shoes...

All joking aside, is anyone familiar with Visual Studio Pro? Is it worth the couple of hundred dollars (with a serious student discount)? Is this class going to teach me how to write VB code? And will I be able to use it to program my large and lovely database?

Anyways, just wanted to throw this out there to all my fellow computer geeks.

 

[NeutronFlux]

An Access forum probably isn't the #1 place to ask about stuff that doesn't have much to do with Access. In your case, the best responses should come from a VB.NET forum. Although, I do have a bit of experience with VB and Visual Studio Professional, so I'll share that with you. First, if you're a student, you can get Visual Studio Professional for free. If your school has a MSDNAA program (or whatever they call it now), there is a lot of Microsoft development software you can get for free. Otherwise, try Dreamspark. All of the licenses you get from these MSDN programs should be full licenses that do not expire. If for some strange reason, you can't get it, you can probably try the Express versions. They may not have all the features, and you can't do every .NET language in the same program, but they still work quite well. You don't need to spend a few hundred dollars as a student. Whether your class will teach you how to write visual basics is something you should probably find out through a course outline or asking the instructor/professor. From the name, it sounds like you should learn some basics. I doubt it will cover integration with databases, but VB is certainly capable of doing so. Visual Studio Professional can handle that fairly easily. In the future, it may also be worth looking at how VB.NET integrates with ASP.NET for web applications.

 

[browninaz]

Sorry about the post being mis-posted. I am so new at this that I don't really know any type of code outside html and css. I figured that the general section would be the most likely place to ask a question like this...

I really thought that the class that I am taking would teach me programming code similar to what is used in Access.

 

[Galaxiom]

VB.NET is kind of similar to VBA to a point. Indeed VBA can be pasted into Visual Studio and it will modify it (mainly by removing the Set keyword which is not necessary in VB.NET) then prompt with suggestions for required changes.

This is one of the great features of Visual Studio. It has like VBA Intellisense on steroids. It highlights Loops and If blocks too so it is actually much easier to debug.

The fundamental language difference is that all the variables are objects (hence no need for Set). So for example a date variable isn't normally manipulared or formatted by a separate function but instead by methods of the object variable that holds the date. The syntax can be quite verbose.

VB.NET also has encapsulated routines for doing what is normally done in blocks of code in simpler languages. For example connecting to database. However it still supports the longhand coding.

It also builds its own xml config files. You just fill in the boxes in the interface and refer to the values in the code. No need to read and write to text files like one does with ini files in simple scripting languages.

One of the cute things it does when compiling is to publish the code right into a webserver and create a page with a link to the installer.

Once you get your head around it, VB.NET is actually quite straight forward and pleasant to work with.