Visual Basic is arguably the most popular application development programming language in use today. Thousands, if not millions, of programmers use it every day to build both commercial and scientific applications. The language is also one of the most maligned programming languages, second perhaps only to Cobol.

The newest version of Visual Basic, Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET), should eventually quiet many of those who call Visual Basic a toy language. Microsoft performed a major redesign of Visual Basic and added many features that put the language on equal footing with the other major.NET language, C#, and with other contemporary languages, especially Java.

One area of the language that has seen significant improvement is VB.NET's object-oriented programming features. In previous versions of Visual Basic, many of these features were partially implemented, not implemented at all, or implemented in a wrong-headed manner. VB.NET provides the programmer with a complete set of object-oriented tools. This book explains in detail how to use these features.

The book is informally partitioned into three parts. Chapters 1 through 6 present the fundamentals of object-oriented programming (OOP) using VB.NET. Chapter 1 provides a review of the syntax of VB.NET. This chapter is especially useful for readers who have experience with an older version of Visual Basic. Chapter 2 discusses the philosophy of OOP, including some sections on object-oriented design and abstract data types. Chapter 3 covers programming with structures, which are similar to user-defined types (UDTs) in Visual Basic 6.