Visual Basic Expert : Home Page

Welcome to visualbasicexpert.com. This site is devoted purely to the Visual Basic developer's community. Its aim is to encourage communication between Visual Basic developers accross the world and to provide information (primarily practical and innovative source code) to help you as a developer to solve your technical requirements.

My name is Lewis Tandy and I am the author of this site. You may be wondering who I am and so here you go......I am 28 and have over six years experience in developing professional enterprise wide Visual Basic applications. I value intelligence and self worth and as such I am a graduate from the University of Warwick (more), charter member of the Microsoft Certified Professional program (more) and a member of MENSA (more). I currently provide IT consultancy services through my company in the City of London, United Kingdom. This site was originally my personal store of source code but I decided that in the interests of promoting VB and helping other developers I should make it public. I hope that you find the code here useful and this site suites your development needs. If you do have any comments, suggestions or complaints then I welcome your feedback.

Source Code

This is by far the largest part of this site. It is an ever growing repository of source code that can be downloaded or viewed on-line; ranging from the most basic to the most advanced Visual Basic programming techniques; there are currently 205 high quality sample projects covering all aspects of Visual Basic coding (such as subclassing, Hooks, Windows Messaging, COM, Common Controls, APIs, Graphics, Useful Functions, Bug Fixes, Cool Samples, Top Tips, ActiveX Controls, DLLs, EXEs, and more). To help you to find the code of most use to you the code samples are graded for difficulty with a graphic as follows:


Easy	Intermediate	Advanced
pure VB code	difficult VB code / API usage	complicated API usage

Book Reviews

There is a wealth of Visual Basic related reading material out there. The difficulty is finding out what is good and what isn't. I hope that this section will help you to do just that. In my recommended reading section I review the books that I have been particularly impressed by over the years.

Useful Links

I have been building a repository of the most useful Visual Basic related links intended to make life easier for me and you. If you know of a good link that I have not yet included then please mail it to me and I will add it to the site.

On-Line Training

Visualbasicexpert.com, in association with Freeskills.com, are offering free on-line training for a range of products; including Visual Basic, SQL Server, Access and much more. This is a partnership that I hope will be of great educational use to you. Note also that Freeskills.com also host a number of discussion forums one for Visual Basic.

Resources

The are a number of resources that I use frequently during my day to day working. I thought that you may find them interesting/useful and so have included them in this page.

Visual Basic in Action

See visual basic code in action at deutscheonlinecasino.de, contact me to get some of the code used to develop these free online casino games..

Live Chat ( users currently on line)

In association with VBChat and numerous other web sites it is now possible to chat on-line live with other Visual Basic users. The number displayed shows you the number of users that can be chatted with. VBChat features live IRC-based chat by way of a browser window that contains a Java applet and a very user-friendly interface. The chat has on average has 10 users chatting throughout the day. During peak lunchtime hours there are over 20. It's a great community and a good forum to post questions and problems. There are currently two chat roms, one devoted to Visual Basic and one devoted to ASP.

Take a look at the exciting (and some would say long awaited) new features planned to be introduced into the next version of Visual Basic including Inheritance, Encapsulation, Overloading, Polymorphism, Parameterized Constructors, Free Threading, Structured Exception Handling, Type Safety, Shared Members, Initializers, Web Forms and more.

The MSDN library is a fantastic source of information for developers. Becoming familiar with how to use it and the type of information it contains could be one of your greatest investments!

MSDN on-line library home page.

Search the MSDN from here.

At the Code Center, Microsoft have categorized the best sample applications and functional blocks of code found in the MSDN Library and across Microsoft's Web sites. You can view the code online, download it, even comment on it.

Microsoft® XML Notepad is a simple prototyping application for HTML authors and developers that enables the rapid building and editing of small sets of XML-based data. With XML Notepad, developers can quickly create XML prototypes in an iterative fashion, using familiar metaphors.

The long-awaited production release of MSXML 3.0 is now available and includes many significant advancements over MSXML 2.5.

Take a look at Visual Studio.NET. Microsoft's next generation Web application development platform. It provides key technologies to simplify the creation and deployment of Web applications and Web Services while leveraging existing developer skills..