Visual Basic 2005, Introduction to

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such, we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work, including the final exam.

Lesson 1
The best way to learn programming is to write programs. To get started, you need to obtain and install Visual Basic 2005. In our first lesson, you'll learn which of the different editions of Visual Basic 2005 may be right for you, and how to install Visual Basic 2005 on your computer. You'll then create your first Windows application, and learn how a Windows application works.

Lesson 2
In the first lesson, you were able to create a working Windows application with just a few mouse clicks. In this lesson, you'll find out what Visual Basic 2005 did behind the scenes to create this application. You'll also learn about properties, which are characteristics of an object?such as its size and color?and how to change those properties.

Lesson 3
Windows applications are all about events, such as the event that's caused by a user clicking on a button. In today's lesson, you'll learn about event procedures. Later, you'll get your feet wet in Visual Basic by writing your first code.

Lesson 4
So far we've been focusing on the form, perhaps the most important part of a Windows application's graphical user interface, or GUI. However, a form's primary role is to host other controls that enrich the GUI of Windows applications?menus, toolbars, buttons, text boxes, and list boxes. In today's lesson, you'll learn how to add controls to your form, and how to write code for these controls.

Lesson 5
Most computer programs store information, or data. Today you'll learn all about data types, which represent different varieties, such as numeric or text, of data. You'll also learn how to store that information in a variable.

Lesson 6
As a former professional chess player, I've marveled at the ability of chess computers to play world champions on even terms. The reason the chess computers have this ability is because they can calculate far more quickly and accurately than people can. In today's lesson, you'll learn how to use arithmetic operators to harness the computer's calculating ability.

Lesson 7
As your programs become more sophisticated, they'll often branch in two or more directions based on whether a condition is true or false. For example, a calculator first needs to determine whether the user chose addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division before performing the indicated arithmetic. In today's lesson, you'll learn how to use comparison and logical operators to determine a user's choice.

Lesson 8
Once you know the user's choice, you'll want to execute different code based on that choice. In today's lesson, you'll learn how to use If and Select Case statements to execute alternative code statements.

Lesson 9
When you were a child, your parents may have told you not to repeat yourself. However, sometimes your code needs to repeat itself. For example, if your application's user enter invalid data, your code may continue to ask users whether they want to retry or quit until they either enter valid data or quit. In today's lesson, you'll learn how to use loops, which repeat code execution until a condition is no longer true. Then you'll learn about arrays, which may hold multiple values at one time, and work very well with loops.

Lesson 10
Many textbooks are several hundred pages long. Imagine how much harder a textbook would be to understand if it consisted of only one very long chapter, rather than being divided into manageable sections? In today's lesson, you'll learn how to similarly divide up your code into separate procedures.

Lesson 11
When I finish writing something for the evening, I close my word-processing program, and maybe even shut down my computer. Of course, the next evening I don't have to start over. What I wrote the previous evening is preserved. However, up until now our programs haven't saved data so that it's available even after the application exits. In this lesson, you'll learn how to write code that reads from and writes to a text file. You'll also learn how to add Open and Save dialog boxes, such as those used in sophisticated programs like Microsoft Word, so you can open a text file to read from it, and save to a text file to write to it.

Lesson 12
Nobody's perfect, right? Well, your applications won't always run perfectly either. Sometimes they'll stop due to a runtime error, also called an exception. In our final lesson, you'll learn how to prevent and handle exceptions.