Computer Science Essays VB Net

Computer Science Essays VB Net Microsoft VB.NET is part of the .NETframework. Discuss the impact of VB.NET on the Visual Basic programmer. Abstract The impact of the introduction of the .NET framework withspecific reference to the effect on the Visual Basic programmer will beconsidered. A brief overview of the development of Visual Basic and the .NETframework will be given and a comparison of the two will be made withparticular focus on object orientation. Changes to web application developmentand database connectivity will be explored. Issues surrounding the portabilityof legacy Visual Basic code will be examined. Conclusions will be drawn onregarding changes to the role of the Visual Basic programmer. Visual Basic evolved from the Beginners All-PurposeSymbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) language created by John Kemeny and ThomasKurtz at Dartmouth College. BASIC began as compiled language and was used for asignificant amount of application development. A BASIC interpreter wasdeveloped by Paul Allen and Bill Gates of the Microsoft Corporation for theAltair. This was released in 1975 and began Microsofts long relationship withBASIC culminating in the release of Professional Development System BASIC.(Mack, G. 2004) In 1989 Bill Gates predicted, Futureversions of BASIC will increasingly provide support for this kind ofprogramming. The programs will look different from the BASIC were all used to.A visual BASIC program will be a mixture of code, programmer-written objects,and visually specified objects. (Jacobson, M) In 1987 Alan Worthcreated Ruby, a graphical programming environment that was combined with PDSBASIC to create Visual Basic. Visual Basic 1.0 was released in 1991 and wentthrough six incarnations leading to Visual Basic 6.0 in 1998. This marked thestart of a phase change in Microsofts programming architecture and six yearslater Visual Basic 7 was released as part of the .NET framework (Mack G, 2004,AddressOf, 2003). The purpose of the history listed above is to give contextto the installed base of Visual Basic code. Visual Basic has been extant for 14years and has remained unchanged for the last 6 of these. John Kemenys vision was to create a language of suchsimplicity that every computer user could write code. While this vision is yetto be realized Visual Basic 6.0 has the best claim on being its inheritor. Dueto its ease of use VB 6.0 has been used to create a vast installed base ofcode. This presents a number of issues to both the VB programmer and to theuser/owner of the system. VB 6.0 To address an issue like the impact of VB.NET on the VB 6.0programmer it is necessary to consider what purpose VB 6.0 serves. VB 6.0builds applications for the Windows environment. It is a fully-fledgedprogramming language with support for the standard control structures, datastorage and file I/O. VB 6.0 exhibits a degree of interoperability throughMicrosofts Component Object Model (COM) specification. VB 6.0 is object awareand can with careful programming be shoehorned into behaving as an objectorientated programming language (Deitel, H 1999). VB 6.0 is an appropriate language choice to support aproject team engaged in rapid prototyping or in the Windows environment. Theprefabricated components and drag and drop design tools allow GUI constructionin short time frames. VB 6.0 would also be an appropriate tool to supportprojects based Rapid Application Development paradigm for similar reasons. Inthe context of a RAD project other tools will either be integrated with VB 6.0or supplant it as some point in the project cycle. VB 6.0 has strong support for building web application andweb front-ends to server applications using sockets and TCP/UDP and HTTP. VBScript is supported in HTML. VB 6.0 would be an appropriate tool for e-commerceprojects. VB 6.0 may be an appropriate choice for SMEs attempting tocode a project in house given the simplicity of the language, the abundance oftutorial information available and the speed of development. SMEs that adoptthis approach may consider that having made the initial investment in VB 6.0technology and training continuing to support VB 6.0 makes good business senseparticularly if initial projects are successful. This attitude may continue,and involve VB 6.0 in project were it is not the most appropriate technologicalchoice. VB 6.0 excites a range of opinion among its users and thewider programming community. Supporters of VB 6.0 can reach evangelical fervourin its defence, to the extent that Microsofts decision to cease supporting VB6.0 resulted in a petition that has garnered close to six thousand signaturessince 8th March 05 including 243 Most Valued Professionals (MVPs)(Whitelist, 2005). Among such gurus VB is generally praised for its simplicityand is credited with encouraging non-programmers to become programmers. This isvery much in line with John Kemenys original vision. .NET .NET is heavily influenced by the ideas of portabilitygarnered from the Java project of Sun Microsystems. A Java program compiles toan intermediate bytecode that is then interpreted by the Java Virtual Machine(JVM) (Horstmann, C. 2001). .NET adopts a similar strategy of compilation ofcode to an intermediate language Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL). TheCommon Language Runtime (CLR) then compiles MSIL to native code. Where .NETbuilds upon the Java project is by including multiple front-end programminglanguages and giving them all the capability to build MSIL. With the .NET framework Microsoft has embraced ObjectOrientated philosophy. IL is fully OO compliant and fully supportsencapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism (MSDN 2005a). VB.NET Of the various front-end languages of the .NET frameworkVB.NET has undergone the most radical evolution. To take advantage of theinteroperability offered by the CLR (i.e. that code written in one language canfreely interact with code from another language) VB.NET has had to become fullyobject orientated. Comparing this with the previous method of achievinginteroperability, (i.e. COM, DCOM and ActiveX) a platform specific binarystandard, Microsoft considers the advantages of complete interoperabilitysufficient to warrant the wholesale change of the VB paradigm to OO. (Deitel, h1003) VB.NET introduces exception handling to the VB 6.0programmer. The advantages offered by exception handling are in improving thereadability of code and in improving the efficiency of code. This is in linewith Microsofts view that the .NET framework is designed for scalability. Theinline error handling of VB 6.0, particularly in large scale applications willcreate code that is difficult to maintain. The .NET framework Class Library makes concurrencyprimitives available to the .NET languages. VB.NET therefore allows thecreation of multithreaded applications. This capability represents asubstantial increase in the complexity of software that can be created by VB.NETover VB 6.0. The VB 6.0 graphics library has been supplanted by GraphicsDevice Interface (GDI)+ API. Although VB 6.0 is unlikely to be the graphicstool of choice it is worth noting that VB 6.0 graphics will not upgrade toVB.NET graphics, and will need to be rewritten in using the GDI+ vectorgraphics tools. These changes, while not syntactically or conceptuallyproblematic for previously object-oriented languages such as C++, have asignificant impact on VB. VB 6.0 can be described as object aware. It iscapable of creating classes and supports interfaces, but has no support fordirect method implementation inheritance. VB 6.0 is based on an event drivenprogramming model. In the previous section some of the difference between VB6.0 and VB.NET have been discussed. The following section considers the changebetween the two languages in the context of web development and databaseconnectivity. One of the most common uses of VB 6.0 was createapplications with database connectivity. Microsoft created a number ofconnection controls (e.g. DAO, RDO, ODBC and ADO). VB 6.0 supports each type ofconnection and the choice of connection is largely based on the supportprovided for it by the database. VB.NET includes a range of support for theseconnection types, with the exclusion of DAO and RDO data binding capability.VB.NET also includes support for ADO.NET. The changes offered by ADO.NET aresummarized in the following paragraph. The most significant change in ADO.NET the separationbetween the physical data model and the logical model used by the control.ADO.NET thus provides a disconnected programming model allowing for greaterscalability, which is particularly valuable for providing web access. ADO.NETis a rebuild of the ADO control incorporating XML support from the ground upwhich again contributes to its usability over the web. XML can be used to movedata between computer, which contributes to the interoperability of ADO.NETwith non-Windows platform and also solves the problem in ADO 2.0 of having tomove binary (COM) files across firewalls. The following paragraph considers theimpact of these changes on the VB programmer. (McManus, P. 2003) While ADO is separate from VB, it is included here due to itbeing a common use for VB programmers. The impact of ADO.NET as part of the.NET upgrade will be to allow VB programmers to continue building front-endapplications to databases with the added facility to support many moreconcurrent users and the added flexibility of XML. This provides an opportunityfor VB 6.0 programmers to continue their professional development with familiarsyntax and programming philosophy but at the same time begin to consider objectconcepts. Another area that has seen significant change with theintroduction of the .NET framework is web programming. ASP.NET now supportsVB.NET code rather than the older model where ASP add-ons would be written inVB Script, a subset of VB 6.0. This gives the VB.NET programmer access to allof the features of the language when running server-side applications. Additionally, VB.NET can be used to create Web services.These are class libraries that can be access via a Remote Procedure Call (RPC).The VB.NET programmer can therefore produce SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol- an open XML compliant standard) compliant services or consume them via theInternet (WC3, 2004, Buyens, J. 2002). VB 6.0 has been around for six years and VB since 1991. Itis arguably the worlds most popular programming language. There is therefore asubstantial volume of VB 6.0 code in use today. VB will continue withoutsupport for some years hence but Microsoft is encouraging users to upgrade toVB.NET. Part of Microsofts strategy to facilitate this upgrade is theprovision of a code conversion tool within the VB.NET IDE. Microsoft claimsthat 95% of code will upgrade without difficulty and for that which does notthey have provided a simple to use tagging system with dynamic help to allowthe programmer to refactor the code quickly. The issues raised by the code convertermay be trivial type conversion issues or non-trivial issues such as connectingto legacy COM files. The code converter assumes that the VB 6.0 programmer isready to work in the OO paradigm and leads to an oversimplified view ofconversio (Piquet, L. 2002). While the automated code converter is a useful tool forquickly arriving at code that will build and run, it does not address issuessuch as the refactoring required to make the original source comply with theprinciples of object orientated design, the extensive retesting of working(possibly mission critical) code that would be required before substitutioncould occur or the extensive retraining program required for VB 6.0 programmerswithout wider language exposure to be confident in using VB.NET (MSDN, 2005b). Conclusion For the purposes of this discussion VB 6.0 programmers arecategorised into the following groups; formally trained (Computer Sciencegraduates), work based trained (other graduates/non graduates using VB 6.0 in aprofessional context). For formally trained graduates in CS then the changes inVB.NET may not be significant. CS graduates are likely to be aware of ObjectOrientation and have had exposure to a variety of programming languages. Theseprogrammers are more likely to view VB as a tool and be using it for what it isbest suited for i.e. prototyping in RAD projects and building desktopfront-ends to other more powerful applications (e.g. databases). For the second class of programmers with exposure only to VB6.0 there will one of two reactions. Some will see the enhancement to thefunctionality in VB.NET as an opportunity to develop new skills, to integratemore effectively into project teams and to take on more responsibility withinprojects. Others may see the added complexity and conceptual jump to OO asbarriers to productivity, progression and job security. Microsoft has committed to the .NET framework and looks setto make object orientation the dominant programming paradigm for theforeseeable future. The impact of VB.NET on the VB 6.0 programmer will besignificant in the medium to long term. RAD will continue to be a widely useddesign methodology and VB.NET programmers with an understanding of OO will havea valuable skill set in rapid prototyping. Microsoft is expecting the marketfor Web services to undergo significant growth. VB.NET will remain a strongcontender for developing web applications and database front ends on thedesktop. The future of a VB 6.0 programmer is as any other programmerin their ability to adapt to new programming paradigm, learn new skills andfind new opportunities, so the impact of .NET will depend ultimately on whetherthe programmer sees opportunities or barriers. References and Bibliography AddressOf.com (2003) Timeline: BASIC to Visual Basic .NEThttp://addressof.com/blog/articles/VBTimeline.aspx(accessed 26/04/05) Buyens, J. (2002), Web Database Development Step by Step,Microsoft Press, Redmond, Washington Deitel, H.; Deitel, P. and Nieto, T., (1999), VisualBasic 6 How To Program, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey Deitel, H.; Deitel, P. and Nieto, T., (2002) Visual Basic.NET How To Program, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall, Upper SaddleRiver, New Jersey Horstmann, C. and Cornell, G. (2001) Core Java Volume 1 -Fundamentals, Sun Microsystems, Palo Alto, California Jacobson, M. A History of Basic, http://www.softexsolutions.com/crc/programming/historyOfBasic.doc(accessed 26/040/05) Jones, P. (2003), Visual Basic .NET A Complete Object-OrientedProgramming Course Including Unified Modelling Language (UML), Continuum,York Road, London Mack, G. (2004), The History of Visual Basic and BASIC onthe PC, http://dc37.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/compsci/gmack/info/VBHistory.htm(accessed 26/04/05) McManus, P. and Goldstein, J., (2003), Database Accesswith Visual Basic .NET 3rd edition, Addison-Wesley, Boston MSDN (2005a) Overview of the .NET framework, http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cpovrintroductiontonetframeworksdk.asp(accessed 27/04/05) MSDN (2005b) Migrating, http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/using/migrating/default.aspx(accessed 27/04/05) Piquet, L. (2002), Abandoning the Fantasy of VB MigrationWizardry, http://www.devx.com/vb/article/16822(accessed 27/04/05) WC3 (2003), SOAP Version 1.2, http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part1/(accessed 27/04/05) (2005) A Petition For TheDevelopment Of Unmanaged Visual Basic And Visual Basic For Applications, http://classicvb.org/petition/(accessed 27/04/05)

Fotajek

The organizational and financial structure of the Fojtasek companies had been in flux since the spring of 1994. By March 1995, three different financial transactions have been proposed to streamline and restructure the firm: an outright acquisition, a leveraged recapitalization, and a hybrid transaction called â€Å"Private IPO. † Heritage Partners is interested in taking a stake in the Fojtasek Companies by proposing aâ€Å"Private IPO† transaction.The paper will analyze the health of the Fojtasek companies and the economic benefits gained from Heritage Partners’ proposal. Through careful calculations, one would recommend the proposed transactions to take place between Heritage and the Fojtasek family. Founded in 1986, Heritage Partners has developed a business expertise in family companies. Their value-added can be seen in the General Partners, all of whom had successful track records in Private Equity.Of the three elements that distinguish them, the most impor tant is their development of the â€Å"Private IPO† structure. This financial strategy enables majority holding while reducing estate taxation for the founder and management. For the Fojtasek family, they had been seeking potential buyers to restructure their company. Unlike its other product and distribution channel, business in the Baloleum Division has been declining. Additionally, the founder Joe Fojtasek has decided to step down at the age of 73 and hand over his role to his sons.Thus, Fojtasek companies decided to take advantage of the opportunity to radically streamline its structure for future growth—buyout, leveraged recapitalization, or â€Å"Private IPO. † There are two common disadvantages with leveraged buyouts and recapitalizations: a higher credit and default risk that comes with having a high leverage, and a possible loss of majority control that can lead to conflicts of interest. From both Fojtasek’s and Heritage’s perspective, it would be optimal to have a hybrid transaction that would lower debt levels while retaining family control of operation.From Heritage’s perspective, the exchange of securities under a â€Å"Private IPO,† instead of a large cash payout, would not only leave out ambiguities concerning tax obligations but also make financing for the transaction feasible. Moral hazard of family members is essentially reduced as their equity is being tied to the firm. From Fostasek’s perspective, the ability to retain family control of the company makes certain that some or all of management would not be replaced. In this sense, the â€Å"Private IPO† transaction does address the information gap, making this hybrid strategy an optimal strategy in this context.

Principles of Leadership in American Military History Essay

What is the description of a leader? Honor, respect, dignity, self-confidence, kindness, etc.? Moreover, what is the portrait of a leader? Is it the man who is able to stand in front of a crowd of thousands? Or the man who sits in his office, addressing the public through a TV screen? Is it the man who struggles for the rights he was born with, that people refuse to hand to him? Or is it the man who goes to jail after fighting for liberty and justice? These are all fine examples of leaders. It does not matter what their claim is. They all eventually die with honor, gain respect, and had the self-confidence to go public and go the extremes in order to obtain righteousness. There is nothing wrong with a leader failing, but future leaders†¦show more content†¦A portrait of disaster is inscribed into the minds of his audience. After starting out with a simple â€Å"will it be next year or next year?† to procrastinating to the last minute when there is no chance of a vict ory for America, this tells the crowd that perhaps the country is not ready for action, and they are weak. Perhaps they should become better equipped and more prepared. The main idea was to influence the country, and assure them that they are not weak, but to fight harder in order to avoid these situations. Although Henry’s claim was for following through with the war, his score of repetition persuaded the people was handled gallantly and at the time, the sure way to go. In Barack Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he brought the same struggle for unity to the table. Considering the education and wellness of every citizen, he claims, â€Å"If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child†¦If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if she’s not my grandmother.† In this, Obama isShow MoreRelatedMilitary Leadership1185 Words   |  5 PagesWithin the U.S. military, leadership is generally considered something of a given. It is a fundamental ingredient of warfare, without which the outcome of a combat operation cannot be assured. The leader is the brain, the motive power of command, upon whom subordinates rely for guidance and wisdom, and depend upon for good judgment. 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The enlisted corps has idolized him, frequently encouraging one another to do that last push up when motivated by fellow marines saying â€Å"Do one for Chesty!† The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that Chesty, using current day leadership theories, was a visionary andRead MoreSun Tzu’s Art of War and The Global War on Terror Essay1715 Words   |  7 PagesArt of War is one milita ry tactical text that has survived for centuries. The author of the text, Sun Tzu left the world with knowledge to carry on for generations. Art of War is a compilation of Tzu’s military strategies, various principles passed down his ancestral clan, and Taoism for the world to study and understand (Galvin and Giles). The military strategist specializes in the manners in which a â€Å"small force can overcome a powerful enemy† (Galvin and Giles 15). 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Giving women the honor of being in the military has changed the military forever. Females have gone through

Gandhi on Providence and Greed - 1649 Words

Gandhi on Providence and Greed Y. P. Anand and Mark Lindley Although Gandhiji is often quoted as having said, â€Å"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not enough for any man’s greed,† we would like to point out that he said something significantly different instead,1 but that 15-20 years earlier, his view in regard to food had indeed amounted to what the famous alleged statement says. The alleged statement is a distorted version of a remark attributed to him by a first-hand witness, Pyarelal, in a chapter entitled â€Å"Towards New Horizons† in Part II of Mahatma Gandhi – The Last Phase (1958 and later editions). Describing some views expressed by Gandhi in 1947, Pyarelal wrote: â€Å"In addition to the economic and the†¦show more content†¦It refers normally to something that is impersonal, and is thus not a god, and yet is utterly beyond human control. However, the passage in question shows that Gandhi included under this same heading the ethical precepts of non-stealing and non-possession of others’ property. And indeed when he used the same term in a similar statement five years later, his English translator rendered it as â€Å"God†: â€Å"God never creates more than what is strictly needed for the moment, with the result that if anyone appropriates more than he really needs, he reduces his neighbour to destitution. The starva- 4. We extend kind thanks to Dr. Varsha Das, Director, National Gandhi Museum, for translating for us the passages cited in Gujarati. tion of people in several parts of the world is due to many of us seizing very much more than we need.†5 And meanwhile, at a public meeting in Switzerland on 8th December 1931, Gandhi said (in English): â€Å"There would be no poverty on Earth if we made a sacred resolution that we would have no more than we need for our creature-comforts. And it would not do for a millionaire to sluggishly say that he owns millions because he needs those for his creature comforts. On the contrary, a man who is poor willShow MoreRelatedExploring Corporate Strategy - Case164366 Words   |  658 Pagesthat is, expensive to produce but inexpensive to reproduce. The manufacturing cost of drugs is usually tiny compared with the amortised cost of RD that led to the discovery. Setting prices that attempt to recoup RD therefore looks like corporate greed in comparison with the very low prices that can be charged for generics. Some companies damaged the industry’s overall reputation. In the USA, pharmaceutical ï ¬ rms paid over $2bn in ï ¬ nes between 2000 and 2003 in cases brought by the US Justice DepartmentRead MoreLogical Reasoning189930 Words   |  760 Pagesdispute. ────CONCEPT CHECK──── Briefly state a counterargument to the following argument: Communism is better than capitalism because communism is designed to promote cooperation among equals whereas capitalism is designed to promote competition, greed, and the domination of one person by another. ────165 Let’s now try to handle all at once many of the points made about argumentation. An answer to this question might distinguish goals from actual practice and point out the specific resultsRead MoreManagement Course: Mba−10 General Management215330 Words   |  862 Pagesto the situation he or she is in and to the nature of the followers. This view is consistent with the situational approach taken throughout this book, yet is barely widely accepted. The belief does not easily fade away that General Patton, Mahatma Gandhi, Vince Lombardi, Golda Meir, and Martin Luther King—or the heads of AOL, GM, Microsoft, and John Hancock—must have had exactly the same qualities. Throughout this and the next chapter, we will be using the terms manager and leader interchangeably