Let’s face it, when you are being paid as a developer, you are being paid to get a job done and not to learn how to do the job. As a developer, I am always finding myself in situations that, while not impossible, are sometimes unfamiliar. When I am in that mode, I spend a fair amount of time researching my problem and trying to understand what is the best solution. This is where Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook comes in.
The Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook is more than just a collection of little tricks and tips to help you learn concepts. It is a well thought out, well laid out book that allows you to quickly find the concepts that you need to solve your problem. Containing more than 300 'recipes,' Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook covers controls, forms strings, math, dates, arrays, multimedia, printing, databases web development, and more. Each section contains between fifteen and forty-five solutions.
Each recipe contains an explanation of the problem, a solution to the problem, and a discussion of the techniques. For example, in the special programming techniques chapter there is a recipe for monitoring file and directory changes. The solution is straightforward. The authors suggest using the FileSystemWatcher object and explain that this object will let you adjust the type of files or changes to monitor and that it contains distinct events for most types of changes.
The discussion takes up three pages analyzing the problem and showing how you can build a test program that watches for changes in a selected directory. The test program is much more than a trivial snippet: you can turn features on and off, you can use wild cards for selecting the files to be watched, and it will display the types of changes that were made to the file.
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