What is the difference between Visual Basic 2005 Express edition & Visual Basic 6.0 Professional?

Question

I have a book on Visual basic 6.0 Professional.
1. Is there any site where i can download this software for free?
2. Or else can i use Visual Basic 2005 Express edition software with the book i have?

Answer 1

For basic concepts(like events, looping, classes, ect..) you can use the VB6 edition.

VB6 came in three main flavor a Student, Pro &Enterprise editions. The biggest differencesbeing that the Student edition lacked the ability to create user control, lacked some controls like a masked edit box, and lacked a copy of MSDN and other tools.

For learning more than beginning concepts I would recommend that you use the newer version. Spend $30 on a good book or use the free Microsoft tutorials.

A big difference between VB6 and VB2005 is how controls like option buttons are treated. IN VB6 they are indexed like myopt(0),myopt(1) ect. In VB2005 there isn't an index for these controls so the concepts you learn in VB6 about looping through index values of option buttons has to be relearned.

Control event handling has changed.

The paradigm for connecting to databases is different between VB6 & VB.net. To simplify:VB6 uses ADO connections and recordsets make frequent and longer (sometimes continuous) connections to a database. In VB.net you work with a copy of the database and update the DB with the changes. THe idea is to make fewer quick and limited connections to the DB.

Answer 2

To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing called VB 2005 express edition. However, there is the SQL Server 2005 Express edition. If that's the case, yes, you can access data stored in SQL server 2005 from a VB 6.0 application. If you built an application using VS 2005 , then no, you cannot open except from VS 2005. Hope this helps

Answer 3

You can't use VB 6.0's book on VB2005. VB2005 is part of the .NET Framework. It has completely different nature & approach from VB6, although they have similar syntaxes.
VB2005 is completely OOP, while VB6 are not completely OOP.
They use different compiler & classes. .NET uses CLR & MSIL which are used by other .NET labguages like C#, C++.NET, J#, ASP.NET.
VB2005 is running on .NET 2.0. And .NET 3.0 is on the way.
Are you familiar with Java? If you do, VB2005 is more like Java without C-like syntaxes, but VB-syntaxes instead. You'll find C# is more like Java, with Microsoft's taste.

Simply, you're book is obsolete.