Need Direction

[joelmeaders]

I want to move into creating Business/Data driven applications in VB.Net from MS Access. I would consider myself advanced in Relational Database Design (MySQL, Access, MSSQL) VBA (Recordsets, fully custom CRUD operations using SQL, unbound forms, office automation, classes, basic multi-tier setup on and on).

I've gotten a couple VB.Net 2013 books, Books on Entity Framework 6 and ADO.Net and none of them have good examples of real-world application development, issues, and complications. I cannot stand that every book focuses on bound forms and CD/Book collections. I want to know best practices such as when to use a try-catch-finally block vs if-then "On Error". I want to know whether I can still use old fashioned coded SQL queries with data adapters/readers or have to use linq-sql or entity framework and why. Reporting would be great as well though I have some ideas in the works for integrated CSS3+jQuery report generation.

What I want is a recommendation for a book or very in depth tutorial that deals with real-world application development that has real needs and scenarios from start to deployment, possibly even updates to app and DB after the fact.

 

[jmcilhinney]

I can't recommend a single source for the information you want and such a single source may not even exist. I can answer these questions though:

I want to know best practices such as when to use a try-catch-finally block vs if-then "On Error".

It's basically never OK to use On Error. When ever an exception can reasonably be thrown, i.e. you can't reasonably prevent it, then you use a Try...Catch block. You then have a global exception handler for those exceptions that you didn't anticipate.

I want to know whether I can still use old fashioned coded SQL queries with data adapters/readers or have to use linq-sql or entity framework and why.

Of course you can still use ADO.NET. Some of the other options will give you more for free but, if you're willing to write more code yourself, ADO.NET is fine.