I want VB training (preferably INSET based)

Horlock

Does anybody know of an education based provider of VISUAL BASIC .NET?

I am a new secondary school teacher who is looking to learn visual basic, but my school is only willing to send me on courses provided by "official" school inset providers.

I'm willing to travel anywhere in the UK - they wont pay of international travel - already tried that one.

I'm willing to spend upto £1000 of school money on this training, but need about £100 per day to cover a supply teachers' costs. Ie I can't go on a 5 day course that costs £1000, but could go on a five day course that costs £500 or a 1 day course that costs £900.

Must be above board!

Any suggestions.

Debt_Free_Chick

Any of these help?

wolfman

As a side note, you may also want to consider C# instead of VB.Net. From my experience it's a lot more common in industry, gives a good introduction and view of OO programming, and you should be able to pickup other OO languages (Java, JavaScript) quite easily having learnt C#.

What type of applications are you interested in? Web apps? Web services? Windows forms? Console apps? Or is it a more overall view you'd like?

Horlock

Debt_Free_Chick wrote:

Any of these help?

Thanks for this will have a look through and see if I can find something

Horlock

wolfman wrote:

As a side note, you may also want to consider C# instead of VB.Net. From my experience it's a lot more common in industry, gives a good introduction and view of OO programming, and you should be able to pickup other OO languages (Java, JavaScript) quite easily having learnt C#.

What type of applications are you interested in? Web apps? Web services? Windows forms? Console apps? Or is it a more overall view you'd like?

Um, slightly tempting particularly as I'm vaguely familiar with both Java and C+ - didn't realise it was a common option.

As far as what for?

I don't really know - my first project is to write a program for writing children's school reports. This could be web-based or a program in and of itself. Shouldn't be difficult, but would be useful if it could read data from an excel spreadsheet - initially just the names of pupils and their percentage from the most recent exam. Then I'm looking at a comment bank of possibilities and space to add personal comments. If I can get this done, it should save me a huge number of hours every summer.

If you want to make recommendations of where to start I will gladly listen.

Only catch is it must run on windows (cos that is all school has) and all my experience comes from Linux.

wolfman

You'll be able to (or should be able to) do everything in VB.Net that you can do in C#, and vice versa. One cost I'd watch out for is Visual Studio. There are free alternatives, although it really does help development.

There are a number of different flavours (you won't need the full version) and you'll be able to get a discount being in education. Or you could try the Express version Microsoft have released, I think they are free.

If you're familiar with Java then I'd go for C#, it'll be much easier to pickup compared with VB.Net. It looks and writes very similar. I myself came from a Java background at uni and switched to C#.

With regards to it running on Windows, by using .Net you're pretty much limiting yourself to Windows anyway, especially if making a web application.

Hmmm, suggestions. It could be done as a web or windows form application. If dealing with lots of data a database may be preferable (instead of Excel). Although if it has to be Excel it can still be done easily.

You could basically store all of the data and comments as an individual record for each pupil, and then loop through each one and generate an html/pdf/etc... output, and/or print them too.

Horlock

Thanks for that last comment. I'll be getting visual studio the academic version - it really is cheap for those in education. It'll cost me less than £100 but I do have a question related to Visual Studio - which I foolishly poised in PC World haha - which is better:
Visual Studio 2003 Professional
Visual Studio 2005 Standard
For academics these cost about the same amount - they don't offer 2005 professional to academics.

wolfman

Hmm, I'd go for 2005 Standard. It's more inline with .Net v2.0 and irons out a few more of the bugs that were in 2003. I certainly prefer it, much slicker.

The only things you'll miss (compared with the pro version) will be things such as SQL Server integration, server explorer, and some deployment tools. Basically things that are aimed at the business developer so they shouldn't really affect you.

Here's a link to show the comparisons:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/products/compare/default.aspx

tomstickland

I taught myself from a text book I bought in Ottakers.
The help files are usually pretty good too, along with web forums.

Horlock

tomstickland wrote:

I taught myself from a text book I bought in Ottakers.
The help files are usually pretty good too, along with web forums.

Yes I've got a few books but I'm rubbish at reading - plus if I can do it on someone elses time and money I'd prefer to.

tomstickland

It helps if you've got a problem to solve. I've got 100s of problems to solve at work, so it's good motivation to play with software.