Preface
Most of us learn to cook at an early age, starting with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and quickly progressing to macaroni and cheese. But very few people make it to the advanced cooking stage, whipping up new culinary creations in the blink of an eye and dazzling all who taste the literal fruits of our labor. And for most of us, that’s OK. We don’t expect any more than the ordinary, the mundane, on our daily plates.
But in the programming world, things are different. Users expect the moon when it comes to software quality, and if you can’t deliver something more than just the mundane, you’re sure to get an earful. Visual Basic 2005 is a good tool for writing great programs, but it is also very good at letting people write ordinary software. Ordinary cooking usually only results in ordinary food, but ordinary programming can lead to something much worse: bugs. So how can you take your programming to the “master chef” level?
For those of you who have limited creative talent in the kitchen, and even for experts who are just looking to try something new, there are cookbooks galore at your local bookstore and smiling chefs each Saturday morning on your local PBS station. For Visual Basic programmers, locating a similar type of cookbook of “programming recipes” has been somewhat difficult—until now. The book you are now holding, Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook, is the recipe book you have been looking for. It’s chock full of tasty software development tidbits that you can try right ...