Visual Basic .NET Power Tools 2004

Introduction

THIS BOOK ACTUALLY BEGAN in Athens, Greece in 1993. Evangelos Petroutsos wrote a very interesting outline, and several sample chapters, for a book about "fascinating and sophisticated things" you could do with Visual Basic. I agreed with my publisher that his ideas had potential, but Evangelos was a first-time author. I had a track record, though, so the publisher said they'd invest in this "Power Toolkit" book if I agreed to co-author it. Even a small book represents a $50,000 gamble for a publishing house, and this was a very large book.

I merrily agreed because I thought the topics were compelling—fractals, encryption, processing graphics, animated transitions, multimedia, manipulating color palettes, recursion, and other topics that were largely ignored by other VB books. To our delight, the book became a runaway bestseller in 1995. Evidently many Visual Basic programmers were ready for a book about advanced, cutting-edge programming techniques.

In 2002, we decided to revisit this concept. Nearly a decade has passed, and we now have what amounts to a brand new Visual Basic language: VB.NET. We decided to follow the same path that we went down a decade ago: to explore aspects of VB.NET that have been largely ignored in other books, but are useful or interesting, or both.

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