Introduction

It has been said the Sir Isaac Newton was the last person to know everything. He was an accomplished physicist (his three laws of motion were the basis of classical mechanics, which defined astrophysics for three centuries), mathematician (he was one of the inventors of calculus and developed Newton's Method for finding roots of equations), astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist. He invented the reflecting telescope, a theory of color, a law of cooling, and studied the speed of sound.

Just as important, he was born before relativity, quantum mechanics, gene sequencing, thermodynamics, parallel computation, and a swarm of other extremely difficult branches of science.

If you ever used Visual Basic 3, you too could have known everything. Visual Basic 3 was a reasonably small but powerful language. Visual Basic 4 added classes to the language and made Visual Basic much more complicated. Versions 4, 5, and 6 added more support for database programming and other topics such as custom controls, but Visual Basic was still a fairly understandable language, and if you took the time you could become an expert in just about all of it.

Visual Basic .NET accelerated the expansion of Visual Basic tremendously. The .NET Framework added powerful new tools to Visual Basic, but those tools came at the cost of increased complexity. Associated technologies have been added to the language at an ever-increasing rate, so, today, it is impossible for anyone to be an expert on every topic ...

Get Visual Basic® 2008 Programmer's Reference now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.