Unexpected diamond

When I first got this book, I did not think I would like it very much. After all, how much can one write on upgrading from Visual Basic to Visual Basic .NET?

While I believe most people will rewrite rather than upgrade, having experienced the wizard's decisions, this book has a lot of good advice to both make this an easier task and to make the right decisions in your current code if you have ever thought of upgrading.

While you expect this book to have a good deal on Interop, the gem here is the great explanation of remoting. While web services are the talk of the town, the ability to create server to server communication without creating another layer, is very important. For me, this section, alone, was worth the price of the ride.

For most, the upgrade information will be the most important, which should come as no suprise. If you are currently writing Visual Basic 6, you can learn a lot about setting up your own code to make sure it does not become legacy code when you move to .NET. Even more important, however, is the fact that following these suggestions will help you create better apps, as the suggestions for your current code are good suggestions whether the code will be upgraded or not.

One more nice gem before I sign off. The section on creating global components in .NET is wonderful. While most of your .NET apps are designed to sit in their own directories, knowing how to create shared components is very important for Enterprise development. If you are developing in .NET currently, this section details how to set up your own global components; this is an area where the documentation is a bit slim, so it makes a nice selling point for current .NET developers.

Other Reviews

• One of the books long awaited
• Upgrading to Visual Basic.Net
• Unexpected diamond
• All it takes to migrate