Francesco Balena – Code Architects’ founder and lead author of VB Migration Partner – has written seven Microsoft Press books about VB and .NET programming, including four editions of the Programming Visual Basic series. These books have been translated to many different languages, including Japanese, Korean, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Italian, Spanish, Russian.

You can click on book covers below to jump to Amazon.com and browse readers’ reviews.

The following chapters are available for free download:

 

  • ADO.NET in Disconnected Mode from Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET An overview of ADO.NET and its differences from “classic” ADO. (96 pages)
  • Custom Windows Forms Controls from Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 by Francesco Balena An in-depth tutorial for writing custom user controls with VB.NET. (52 pages)
  • Arrays and Collections from Programming Microsoft Visual C# 2005 In-depth information on getting the most from two of the most useful .NET data structures. (54 pages)
  • Regular Expressions from Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET A detailed reference of Regular Expressions and .NET Regex object. It is especially useful to developers who need to manually adjust code before or after the migration process, for example, by means of VB Migration Partner’s PostProcess pragma. (30 pages)
  • Generics from Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Generics allow you to create classes and collections perform incredibly fast while preserving many advantages of late binding. (40 pages)
  • .NET Reflection from Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Learn how to leverage one of the most powerful features of Microsoft .NET Framework. (58 pages)
  • Custom attributes from Programming Microsoft Visual C# 2005 In the hands of an expert developer, custom attributes can be a decisive factor in improving code reusability and maintainability. (52 pages)
  • Types from Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and C# Developers Coding guidelines and best practices for using .NET classes and structures. (11 pages)
  • Memory usage from Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and C# Developers All the techniques you should learn to keep your .NET code lean and fast. (13 pages)
  • Serviced components from Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and C# Developers Learn how to write COM+, transactional components using VB.NET or C#. (14 pages)
  • Windows API functions from Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6 This chapter uses VB6 code samples, but many concepts about Windows API programming are still valid under VB.NET. (44 pages)