CS 112A, CS 112B, CS 112D

We currently have three courses that deal with Visual Basic. These all use the .Net version of Visual Basic, currently Visual Basic 2008.
CS 112A is an intro course with no prerequisite. For CS 112B and CS 112D I assume you have programming experience similar to that of CS 112A and if your experience is in another language, I assume you will spend extra time picking up the VB syntax. You could also take CS 112A concurrently. You can take CS 112B and CS 112D in either order.
With CS 112B and CS 112D we start with console programs since they are simpler than using Visual Basic forms if you have no windows form experience. In CS 112A we use both Console and windows forms applications from the start of the class.

CS 112A is an introductory programming class. If you are comfortable with another programming language such as Java or C++ you could take CS 112A to gain experience with events or creating forms with controls and events. Or you could move to CS 112B or CS 112D. Many students who take CS 112A have some previous programming experience and still find this course worthwhile.

Topics covered include

• expressions
• selection structures
• validating data
• loop structures
• creating functions and subs
• single dimension arrays, List (of T), and structures
• We use Try blocks for error handling.
• We create windows applications with forms and console applications
• We use event handling with form controls.
• We do some work with text file I/O, images, and audio files.

CS 112B is a second level programming class. It focuses on the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) features of Visual Basic. Earlier versions of Visual Basic (such as VB6.0) were not object oriented and had only partial oop concepts. With the .NET version of VB, we have a fully OOP.

Topics covered include

• A brief review of (or intro to ) the VB syntax and the Visual Studio IDE
• A brief review of (or intro to ) event handling
• Object-Oriented Design philosophies and terminology
• Defining Classes, Abstraction and Encapsulation
•     Problem Domain classes
•     Class versus instance members
•     Properties
•     Objects
•     Constructors
•     Custom methods
•     Overloading
•     Exception handling
• Inheritance
•     Subclasses
•     Abstract classes
• Interfaces
• Association relationships
• Serialization

CS 112D is a second level programming class. It focuses on the ADO.NET features of Visual Basic. We focus primarily on using SQL Server as the DBMS but touch on some of the other data providers For CS 112D I assume you understand how to write SQL statements to do Select with joins, Updates, Inserts, and Delete statements. You do not need extensive SQL experience. We do use oop terminology in CS 112D but you do not need to know how to create classes, etc. We actually use some oop terminology in CS 112A.

Topics covered include

• Connections
• DataReaders
• Using command objects
• Using stored T-SQL procedures from Visual Basic with parameters
• Creating and using in-memory DataSets
• DataAdapters
• Updating DataSets and persistent databases
• Intro to using Binding with VB controls
• Intro to LINQ