Summary
Today's lesson covered several different topics that are important to you as a Visual Basic programmer. The first is the need to properly plan out what your application will be, as well as the design of the application. This way, you can create an application that will look and perform well. It also discussed the importance of proper programming structure and conventions as you code your application. Testing and documentation was also shown to be very important to the final application. By testing the application, you'll hopefully find and fix most problems before users experience them. And if users have any questions, the documentation and online help you provide with the application should be detailed enough to answer them.
You've also taken a brief look at what's new in Visual Basic.NET and how to make the transition from Visual Basic 6 to the new release. The Upgrade Wizard was briefly discussed, showing you how Visual Basic.NET helps in the upgrade process. You also were introduced to the new platform on which Visual Basic.NET is based. The .NET Framework provides you with many new features and capabilities to design and deploy more professional applications, both on the desktop computer and the Internet.
You've also reviewed the steps to take when starting a new Visual Basic project and how to manage the different components that can be included in the project. Also, the project properties that would affect your application have been discussed so that you can choose to change the ones that make sense for your application. Some of the newer controls available in Visual Basic were covered to give you a flavor for what they can do. You also saw the concept of combining controls to create an integrated, complex dialog-box function—the file-copy function example.