VB .NET Language in a Nutshell

Part II. Reference

This section consists only of one very long chapter (Chapter 8), which contains an alphabetic reference to VB .NET language elements.

The chapter documents the following:

• Statements, such as AddHandler or Structure...End Structure.

• Procedures, such as AppActivate or Rename. These were statements in previous versions of Visual Basic, but now they are methods of one class or another within the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace. The official documentation describes them as functions, but since they don’t return a value, we’ve chosen to describe them as procedures.

• Functions, such as Format or IsReference.

• Compiler directives, such as #Const or #If.

• Visual Basic classes and their members. The two intrinsic objects available in Visual Basic are the Collection object and the Err object.

• Selected classes in the .NET Framework Class Library, along with their members. Documentation of the Framework Class Library, however, is highly selective; we’ve chosen classes and their members either because they replace language elements that were present in VB 6, or because they provide much needed functionality that supplements existing language elements.

When you’re looking for a particular language element but don’t quite remember what it’s called, an alphabetic reference is of little value. For this reason, we’ve included Appendix B.

Finally, two language elements are covered in the appendixes rather than in Part II. With a few exceptions (notably, Like and Is) that are documented ...