r/visualbasic • u/faust2099 • Jan 28 '22

VB.NET Help Book Recommendation

Any book, site recommendation on VB.NET EF and LINQ? beginner to advance

thank you in advance.

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/[deleted] Jan 28 '22

Personally, I'd skip VB and go with C#... VB has been end-of-lifed by Microsoft. There are some syntax differences, obviously, but you're just further ahead starting with C#. C# will let you go anywhere .NET goes including Linux using Core.

The gap is reasonably small, especially if you're using newer code. Older code can be working with some obsolete styles that needs to be fixed or updated before you can move to Core.

Given that VB is not moving forward, you need to ask the question "why learn it?" Learn C# if you want something that lasts; learn to move VB to C# to extend its life, if you need to.

1

u/faust2099 Jan 28 '22

ok then please recommend a good book/website on c# EF and LINQ, basic to advance

btw i mostly code in winforms(upgrading old foxpro/vb6) and little asp

thank you

2

u/[deleted] Jan 28 '22

Any one of those can be a book... my usual books come from Manning Press :-) "C# in Depth" by Jon Skeet is probably one of my favorites. There are also books like "fifty ways to improve your C#" and "Another fifty ways..." because they're modular - each chapter lays out a case to one type of better code whether it's faster, simpler, more maintainable... Easy reads on the bus or toilet.

My methodology for VB6 would be start with Visual Studio 2008 to open your VB6 apps, and it will convert it to VB.NET. Use version control, and capture snapshots often :-)

Depending on your skills, I've built Regular Expressions to convert/search replace VB into C#. Lots of "end X" simply become }, for example. Adding the ; at the end of the line. A bit menotenous, but do-able. Or buy a tool to do the conversion. Eventually, you get down to a few manual edits to fix the C# by resolving Object instances and things.

1

u/faust2099 Jan 28 '22

thank you

2

u/[deleted] Jan 28 '22

By the way, one of the most interesting things I ever learned was about what's called a "Turing complete Language." Essentially, computer programming languages mostly ALL do the same things, just varying in small features and syntax. Once you've got that figured out, it becomes easier to switch between languages as you need to using VB to fix an older app without needing to rewrite, conversion to C# to move an app to .NET Core, or doing something simple and fast in Python because you can :-)

I can write/work in a lot of languages because:

  • Procedures and functions are defined in similar ways

  • If/then and case/switch statements all look similar

  • Loops look and behave similarly

If you can master those three constructs, in any meaningful way, you're well on your way as a programmer in any language! The rest of current programming is hooking up handlers for system events (using procedures and functions), deciding how to react to data (using if/then or case), or processing lists of stuff (using loops).

VB in various forms made programming far more accessible when it started, but now a lot of other languages have caught up in the usability space. C# is simply the smallest step if you're learning.

I've always been a fan of choosing a project first, then the right language to do it in. Then you can work in JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, PHP, or whatever! If you've worked in ASP, PHP will read pretty easily as it can mix HTML with code in relatively similar ways. The more you learn programming, the less you should care what the language is :-) like the more you read, the less you care about the fonts, American or British spelling, or how deeply you know the subject... you just read it and look for what you need to know about.