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Welcome to Visual Basic 2008, the most mature version yet of the most popular programming
language for building Windows and web applications. In modern software development, however,
the language is only one of the components we use to build applications. The most important
component is the .NET Framework, which is an indispensable component of every application; it’s
actually more important than the language itself. You can think of the Framework as an enormous
collection of functions for just about any programming task. All drawing methods, for example,
are part of the System.Drawing class. To draw a rectangle, you call the DrawRectangle method of
the System.Drawing class, passing the appropriate arguments. To create a new folder, you call the
CreateDirectory method of the Directory class, and to retrieve the files in a folder you call the
GetFiles method of the same class.
The Framework contains all the functionality of the operating system and makes it available to
your application throughmethods. The language and the Framework are the two ‘‘programming’’
components, absolutely necessary to build Windows applications. It’s possible to develop applications
with these two components alone, but the process would be awfully slow. The software
development process relies on numerous tools that streamline the coding experience, and these
tools are provided for us by Visual Studio 2008.
The third component is an integrated environment that hosts a number of tools enabling you
to perform many common tasks with point-and-click operations. It’s basically an environment
in which you can design your forms with visual tools and write code as well. This environment,
provided by Visual Studio 2008, is known as an integrated development environment, or IDE.
You’ll be amazed by the functionality provided by the tools of Visual Studio 2008: you can actually
design a functional data-driven application without writing a single line of code. You can use
similar tools in the same environment to design a fancy data-driven web page without a single line
of code. Visual Studio even provides tools for manipulating databases and allows you to switch
between tasks, all in the same, streamlined environment. You realize, of course, that Visual Studio
isn’t about writing applications without code; it just simplifies certain tasks through wizards and,
more often than not, we step in and provide custom code to write a functional application. Even
so, Visual Studio 2008 provides numerous tools, from debugging tools to help you track and fix
all kinds of bugs in your code, to database manipulation tools.
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This book is intended for experienced (intermediate to advanced) Visual Basic .NET developers that
wish to be introduced to the world of refactoring. To get the most out of the book, you should have a
good command of Visual Basic .NET and especially object-oriented programming in general.
If you are a beginning programmer, you will not be able to use this book as your primary source. This
book will not teach you the basics of programming in Visual Basic .NET. There is no reason, however,
not to get acquainted with refactoring as early in your career as possible. As you learn to program your
first classes, you can use this book to learn how to design them properly and how to correct any mistakes
you might have introduced into your design.
If you are a VB 6 programmer, then you will not be able to successfully apply many of the refactorings
that I deal with in this book because of differences between Visual Basic 6 (or previous) programming
languages and Visual Basic .NET. In the case, however, that you are trying to upgrade your VB 6 code
to VB .NET, you might find this book of great use. I have dedicated a whole chapter, the last one in the
book, to the subject of upgrading VB 6 code to .NET. The chapter itself, however, builds upon material
exposed earlier on in the book.
You might also find this book very useful as you are making the transition as a programmer from VB 6 to
Visual Basic .NET. This book exposes some of the common mistakes that newcomers from VB 6 to VB .NET
make and teaches you how to deal with those mistakes.
This book makes no assumption on the type or domain of your application. It can be a typical web application,
a web service, a framework, a component, a shopping cart application, a new Facebook widget,
or a shooter game, but whatever it is, as long there is some VB code in it, you will find the techniques
explained in this book valuable.
Most of the refactorings I deal with in this book are standard refactorings applicable in any fully objectoriented
language. This means that if you program in some other object-oriented language, for example
C#, as long as you are familiar with VB .NET syntax and you are able to read code examples, you will be
able to use and apply the information exposed in this book.
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The idea for this book came out of discussions with Scott Christiansen, a leading
developer using Microsoft technologies. While working together at a consulting company
we spent numerous lunches kicking around ideas for a book and agreed that
multithreaded development was an ideal subject. Soon after our discussions, I began a
conversation with Manning Publications; this book is the end result.
Rather than focusing on abstract concepts, this book looks at the motivation behind
each concept, not just the implementation. Readers of this book should know how to
develop in the .NET platform. It is not assumed that you have written multithreaded
applications, or programmed at a low level. All concepts beyond those required to
write a single-threaded application in .NET are covered in great detail.
This book is intended primarily for architects and developers. Other players in an
organization will also benefit from reading this book, but the primary focus is on
designing and implementing multithreaded applications.
Since .NET does not require a single language, all examples in this book are available
from the publisher’s web site in both C# and Visual Basic .NET. Removing syntactical
hurdles allows you to focus on the concepts. The examples alternate between the languages,
showing that the fundamental issues relate to the .NET framework, not a particular
language.
The code examples in the book are intentionally terse. Rather than including all
code relating to an example, only the relevant elements are included. This highlights the
relevant portions of code, allowing you to focus on the concept and not be drawn into
the unrelated detail. All code examples are available in entirety from the publisher’s
web site.
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Joomla! is life!
It is an open-source project that is in constant motion. It is unpredictable, sometimes indescribable, partially controversial, now and then slightly sleepy, and provincial. Despite this, or perhaps exactly because of this, it has been extremely successful for two years now and is popular with millions of users worldwide.
There is a stable, widely used, and popular version 1.0x. For the past two years, developers have hammered, tinkered, forged, modified, disagreed, deleted, expanded, and hammered again.
Two incredibly exciting years have passed since the foundation of Joomla! 2005.
The Joomla! team has organized and established itself in these years, it has enhanced Joomla! 1.0 up to version 1.0.13 and has now taken the biggest development step so far with version 1.5.
The users of the system have been equally ambitious. Many of them have converted their websites from Mambo to Joomla! And many users have come brand new to Joomla!, and there are still some people in this world that don't know the system.
Joomla! is the most widely used open-source Web Content Management System in the world.
One year after the foundation of the project, in the fall of 2006, the development team reported approximately 5,000,000 Joomla! installations on public web servers that were being used more or less continuously. There were 45,000 registered developers with 1,100 projects that expanded Joomla! with additional functionalities. There were 450,000 entries from 50,000 users in the forum at joomla.org.
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