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In this chapter, you were introduced to OOP and got a brief history of Visual Basic. Now that you have an understanding of what constitutes an OOP language and why OOP languages are so important to enterprise-level application development, your next step is to become familiar with how OOP applications are designed.

Successful applications must be carefully planned and developed before any meaningful coding takes place. The next chapter is the first in a series of three aimed at introducing you to some of the techniques used when designing object-oriented applications. You will look at the process of deciding which objects need to be included in an application and which attributes of these objects are important to the functionality of that application.

In this chapter, you were introduced to the goals of the object-oriented design process and UML. You learned about some of the design documents and diagrams produced using UML. These include the SRS, which defines the scope of the system; use case diagrams, which define the system boundaries and identify the external entities that will use the system; and class diagrams, which model the structure of the classes that will be developed to implement the system.

You saw how modeling the class structure of your applications includes identifying the necessary classes, identifying the attributes of these classes, and establishing the structural relationships required among the classes. In the next chapter, you will continue your study of object-oriented design. In particular, you will look at modeling how the objects in your applications will collaborate to carry out the functionality of the application.

This chapter introduced scenarios, sequence diagrams, collaboration diagrams, and activity diagrams. You saw how to use these diagrams for modeling object interaction. Additionally, you learned how some of the UML diagrams might be used to help model the user interface of the application.

The goal of this and the previous chapters was to introduce you to some of the common modeling diagrams and concepts involved in software design and UML. In Chapter 4, you will take the concepts developed thus far and use them to implement a solution design for a sample case study.

Now that you have analyzed the domain model of an OOP application, you are ready to transform the design into an actual implementation. The next part of this book will introduce you to the Visual Basic language. You will look at the .NET Framework and see how Visual Basic applications are built on top of the framework. You will be introduced to working in the Visual Studio IDE and become familiar with the syntax of the Visual Basic language. The next section will also demonstrate the process of implementing OOP constructs such as class structures, object instantiation, inheritance, and polymorphism in the Visual Basic .NET language. You will revisit the case study introduced in this chapter in Chapter 10, at which time you will look at transforming the application design into actual implementation code.

This chapter introduced you to the fundamentals of the .NET Framework. You reviewed some of the underlying goals of the .NET Framework. You also looked at how the .NET Framework is structured and how code is compiled and executed by the CLR. These concepts are relevant and consistent across all .NET-compliant programming languages. In addition, you explored some of the features of the Visual Studio integrated development environment.

The next chapter is the first in a series that looks at how the OOP concepts—such as class structure, inheritance, and polymorphism—are implemented in VB code.

This chapter gave you a firm foundation in creating and using classes in VB code. Now that you are comfortable constructing and using classes, you are ready to look at implementing some of the more advanced features of OOP. In the next chapter, you will concentrate on how inheritance and polymorphism are implemented in VB code. As an object-oriented programmer, it is important for you to become familiar with these concepts and learn how to implement them in your programs.

This chapter gave you a firm foundation in OOP’s most powerful features: inheritance and polymorphism. Being able to implement these features is fundamental to becoming a successful object-oriented programmer, regardless of the language you use.

In the next chapter, you will take a closer look at how the objects in your applications collaborate. The topics covered include how objects pass messages to one another, how events drive your programs, how data is shared among instances of a class, and how exceptions are handled.

This chapter described how the objects in your applications collaborate. You saw how objects pass messages to one another, how events drive your programs, how instances of a class share data, and how to handle exceptions.

In the next chapter, you will look at collections and arrays. Collections and arrays organize similar objects into a group. Working with collections is one of the most common programming constructs you will need to apply in your applications. You will examine some of the basic types of collections available in the NET Framework and become familiar with how to employ collections in your code.

In this chapter, you examined the various types of collections exposed by the .NET Framework. You learned how to work with arrays, array lists, hash tables, dictionaries, queues, stacks, and generic-based and strongly typed collections.

This chapter is the final chapter in a series that introduced you to the various OOP constructs such as classes, inheritance, and polymorphism as they are implemented in VB code. You should also have a firm understanding of how class structures, object collaboration, and collections are implemented in a VB application. You have been introduced to the VS IDE and practiced using it. You are now ready to put the pieces together and develop a working application.

The next chapter is the first in a series in which you will revisit the UML models you developed for the case study introduced in Chapter 4. You will transform these models into an application. In the process, you will investigate data access using ADO.NET, creating a Windows Forms-based GUI, creating a web form-based GUI, and using web services.

This chapter is the first in a series aimed at introducing you to building the various tiers of an OOP application. To implement the application’s business logic, you learned about ADO.NET. You looked at the various classes that make up the System.Data.SqlClient namespace. These classes retrieve and update data stored in a SQL Server database. You also examined the System.Data namespace classes that work with disconnected data.

In the next chapter, you will look at implementing the interface tier of an application through traditional Windows Forms. Along the way, you will take a closer look at the classes and namespaces of the .NET Framework used to implement rich Windows Forms-based user interfaces.