Visual Basic 2012 Unleashed

Visual Basic 2012 Unleashedis the most comprehensive, practical reference to modern object-oriented programming with Visual Basic 2012. Written by Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, a long-time leader of the global VB community, this book illuminates the core of the VB language and demonstrates its effective use in a wide variety of programming scenarios. Del Sole covers both Visual Basic 2012 Professional Edition for professional developers and the Express Edition for hobbyists, novices, and students. Writing for VB programmers at all levels of experience, he walks through using VB 2012 for data access, user interface development, networking, communication, and many other tasks. For those moving from structured languages, including VB 6, he offers detailed guidance on building effective object-oriented code. He also demonstrates how to make the most of the underlying .NET platform to write more robust and powerful software. This book's broad coverage includes advanced features such as generics and collections; a thorough introduction to the Visual Studio 2012 IDE and Visual Studio Team System; a full section on data access with ADO. NET and LINQ; practical overviews of WPF and WCF; coverage of web and cloud development with Silverlight and Azure; and advanced topics such as multithreading, testing, and deployment.

Alessandro Del Sole, Microsoft MVP for Visual Basic, is well known throughout the global VB community. He is community leader on the Italian VB Tips and Tricks website that serves more than 42,500 developers, and a frequent contributor and blogger at MSDN’s Visual Basic Developer Center. He is the author of six books about .NET development with Visual Basic.

Part I – Learning the Basics of VB
1. Introducing the .NET Framework 4.5
2. Getting Started with the Visual Studio 11 IDE
3. The Anatomy of a Visual Basic Project
4. Data Types and Expressions
5. Debugging Visual Basic 11 applications
6. Handling Errors and Exceptions
Part II – Object-Oriented Programming with Visual Basic 11
7. Class Fundamentals
8. Managing an Object’s Lifetime
9. Organizing Types within Namespaces
10. Modules
11. Structures and Enumerations
12. Inheritance
13. Interfaces
14. Generics and Nullable Types
15. Delegates and Events
16. Working with Collections  and Iterators
17. Visually Designing Objects
Part III – Advanced Language Features
18. Manipulating Files and Streams
19. The My Namespace
20. Advanced Language Features
Part IV – Data Access with ADO.NET and LINQ
21. Introducing ADO.NET and DataSets
22. Introducing LINQ
23. LINQ to Objects
24. LINQ to SQL 
25. LINQ to DataSets
26. Introducing ADO.NET Entity Framework 
27. Manipulating Xml Documents with LINQ and Xml Literals
Part V – Building Windows Applications
28. Creating WPF Applications
29. WPF Common Controls
30. Brushes, Styles, Templates, and Animations in WPF
31. Manipulating Documents and Media
32. Introducing Data-binding
33. Localizing Applications