Visual Basic Design Patterns VB 6.0 and VB.NET (With CD-ROm) - Softcover

Cooper, James W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201702657 ISBN 13: 9780201702651

Publisher: Addison-Wesley, 2001

Synopsis

Written from a Visual Basic perspective, this guide intends to make you comfortable with using design patterns by laying out the concept of patterns in a practical fashion. Provides one or more complete working visual examples of programs using that pattern, along with UML diagrams illustrating how the classes interact. Softcover. CD-ROM included.

About this title

About the Author

James W. Cooper is a research staff member in the Advanced Information Retrieval and Analysis Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He is also a columnist for Java Pro magazine and a reviewer for Visual Basic Programmer's Journal. He has published 14 books, which include Principles of Object-Oriented Programming Using Java 1.1 (Ventana) and The Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to Java (Ventana). 0201702657AB05132002

From the Back Cover

Design patterns provide programmers with a convenient way to reuse object-oriented code across projects and between programmers, offering easy, time-saving solutions to commonly recurring problems in software design. A practical guide to writing Visual Basic (VB6 and VB.NET) programs using some of the most common design patterns, Visual Basic Design Patterns is a tutorial for people who want to learn about design patterns and how to use them in their work. This book also provides a convenient way for VB6 programmers to migrate to VB.NET and use its more powerful object-oriented features.

Written from a Visual Basic perspective, this book intends to make you comfortable with using design patterns by laying out the concept of patterns in a practical fashion. Organized as a series of short chapters that each describe a design pattern, Visual Basic Design Patterns provides one or more complete working visual examples of programs using that pattern, along with UML diagrams illustrating how the classes interact. Each example is a visual program that you can run and study on the companion CD making the pattern as concrete as possible. Programmers using this book will see significant improvement in their work by employing the following key concepts:

Applying "tried-and-true" object-oriented design patterns in Visual Basic applications.

Helping advance programming skills with the power of patterns.

Understanding the interactions between classes through the use of UML diagrams.

Getting comfortable using design patterns effectively and start using them in day-to-day Visual Basic programming.

The idea behind design patterns is simple: it's a catalogue of common interactions between objects that programmers have found useful, enabling them to quickly and easily employ them in their programs. Visual Basic Design Patterns provides practical advice on how to use these patterns in everyday programming.

0201702657B07122001

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

This is a practical book that tells you how to write Visual Basic (VB6 and VB.NET) programs using some of the most common design patterns. It also serves as a quick introduction to programming in the new VB.NET version of the VB language. The pattern discussions are structured as a series of short chapters, each describing a design pattern and giving one or more complete working, visual-example programs that use that pattern. Each chapter also includes UML diagrams illustrating how the classes interact. This book is not a "companion" book to the well-known Design Patterns text by the "Gang of Four." Instead, it is a tutorial for people who want to learn what design patterns are about and how to use them in their work. You do not have to have read Design Patterns to read this book, but when you are done here you may well want to read or reread it to gain additional insights.In this book you will learn that design patterns are frequently used ways of organizing objects in your programs to make them easier to write and modify. You'll also see that by familiarizing yourself with them, you've gained some valuable vocabulary for discussing how your programs are constructed.People come to appreciate design patterns in different ways--from the highly theoretical to the intensely practical--and when they finally see the great power of these patterns, an Aha! moment occurs. Usually this moment means that you suddenly have an internal picture of how that pattern can help you in your work. In this book, we try to help you form that conceptual idea, or gestalt, by describing the pattern in as many ways as possible. The book is organized into six main sections: an introductory description, an introduction to VB.NET, and descriptions of patterns, grouped as creational, structural, and behavioral.For each pattern, we start with a brief verbal description and then build simple example programs. Each of these examples is a visual program that you can run and examine to make the pattern as concrete a concept as possible. All of the example programs and their variations are on the companion CD-ROM, where you run them, change them, and see how the variations you create work. We show that you can use design patterns effectively in VB6 and then show the same patterns in VB.NET (also called VB7). Since each of the examples consists of a number of VB files for each of the classes we use in that example, we also provide a VB project file for each example and place each example in a separate subdirectory to prevent any confusion. We place the VB.NET examples in a separate directory under each pattern. This book is based on the Beta-2 release of VB.Net. Any changes between this version and the final product will probably not be great. Consult the Addison-Wesley Web site for updates to any example code.If you leaf through the book you'll see screen shots of the programs we developed to illustrate the design patterns, providing yet another way to reinforce your learning of these patterns. In addition, you'll see UML diagrams of these programs, illustrating the interactions between classes in yet another way. UML diagrams are just simple box-and-arrow illustrations of classes and their inheritance structure, where arrows point to parent classes, and dotted arrows point to interfaces. And if you're not yet familiar with UML, we provide a simple introduction in the secondchapter.When you finish this book you'll be comfortable with the basics of design patterns and will be able to start using them in your day-to-day Visual Basic programming work.James W. CooperNantucket, MAWilton, CTMaui, HIOctober, 2001 0201702657P11152001

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0201702657
• ISBN 13: 9780201702651
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256