I was asked on Twitter if I had a Visual Basic resource page for teachers and I had to admit that the one I used to maintain was sadly out of date. That’s just wrong. So I went through all the Visual Basic keyworded post on this blog, visited a couple of other sites and put this list together. I’m going to try and keep it up to date. Please let me know (at my main blog) if you find other things that should be here, broken links or any other recommendations you may have.
Curriculum Sites
K-12 Faculty Community Site A source for curriculum resources, teacher forums, and program announcements
Beginner Developer Learning Center A web site for people of all ages who want to learn programming and web development. Tutorials, videos, projects and web casts
Projects and Feature Discussions
Visual Basic .NET Projects - A set of projects for the classroom. There are teachers notes for each project as well as pages that can be duplicated for distribution to students as programming assignments. You can find this (and more) at the K-12 Faculty Community Site as well.
An article I wrote on creating control arrays. This article covers both Visual Basic .NET and C#. It is suitable for beginners. Teachers who are used to teaching with control arrays in Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier will find this useful.
Simon is a simple game I wrote. Simon is a game that involves four different colored buttons that randomly depress and beep. The player then has to press the buttons in the same order that they beeped. This most useful part of this project is a special button class that inherits from the PictureBox object.
Fun With Colors – This little project with about six lines of code may be a more interesting “hello world” than “hello world.” It uses some sliders to select a color to show up in a picture box. This is also a nice way to introduce how computers handle colors. Yes, the code looks like C# but if you remove the semi-colons it works just fine in VB.
When Is A Short Circuit a Good Thing? Confused about the difference between And and AndAlso and Or and OrElse? This post explains it all.
Sshhh… it’s a secret (Matt Gertz) Matt Gertz shows you how to code up and deal with substitution ciphers. Ciphers are a lot of fun and seem to interest both boys and girls.
Prime Numbers, Code Challenges, and Programming Languages Coding up a solution for generating prime numbers. With some added discussion about different programming languages.
Coding 4 Fun A web site for hobbyists and computer tinkerers - sample projects and information for doing fun and interesting thing with programming; often combined with interesting or unusual hardware.
Code Samples A large collection of code samples in Visual Basic for doing all sorts of things. Looking for sample code for students to review and/or use? Send them here. (Provided by Microsoft) See also:
Exceptions, Data Validation and Political Correctness A discussion on the differences between different styles of error handling and data validation.
Software Access
MSDN Academic Alliance A Microsoft program for schools to get Microsoft Development software for labs, teachers, and students for very little money.
DreamSpark for High schools DreamSpark High School provides professional-level development and design tools to students enrolled in an accredited, secondary educational institution at no charge. Sign your school up today and start handing out access codes to students and get out of their way. :-)
Visual Studio Express Editions Free development tools (IDEs) for Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C# and Visual Web Developer
Add ons and Tools
The Visual Studio Learning Pack 2.0 is a software package created by Microsoft to help students learn about computer programming. It consists of the following five components: Sort Designer Control, Search Designer Control, Visual Declarative Designer, Assistant Class Designer and Visual Programming Flow Chart
VB Coding Standards Document Not from Microsoft but still a very interesting look at what coding standards look like in the “real world.”
Career Information
Are you students asking who uses this Visual Basic stuff? Send them to the “I’m a VB” web site for interviews and videos with members of the Visual Basic team and lots of professional developers who use Visual Basic.
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