Its been a while

[Scratchpost]

I haven't programmed much in years, and I want to get good at it so I can make games. When I took a class on programming, the teacher let us use this book that explained the language, then added exercises (practice examples) for you to do (homework). I need another one of those, or something with challenges (like you would have in a high school textbook, homework), to help me get better. I don't know of any books or online websites with this, can someone direct me to a book or something online? I'm mainly looking at working VB .net 2010.

[k1net1k]

vb.net isnt the most popular of languages, but there are still plenty of tutorial sites and forums out there.
probably http://www.vbdotnetheaven.com or http://www.devarticles.com/c/b/VB.Net/ or http://www.programmersheaven.com/2/VB-NET-School

[dandymcgee]

vb.net isnt the most popular of languages, but there are still plenty of tutorial sites and forums out there.

There certainly are. Visual Basic used to be the sort of defacto language for teaching complete strangers to programming how to program. This is the approach my high school computer science class took, and honestly I didn't help me at all. We were also tasked with making a fairly large game project which VB6 forms, which really is not what it was meant for at all. One thing that is an absolute must if you plan on making any sort of playable game in visual basic is to learn something like XNA as well. Windows forms applications were not designed for making games (aside from maybe tic-tac-toe), and as such should not be used to do so. Trust me, there are better ways to practice masochism.

Another recommendation I have, while not a necessity, is to take a look at C#. It's a little closer to C++ / Java programming than VB, and much more pleasant to use. I know from experience that the industry standard for quick-n-dirty GUI apps has moved from Visual Basic to C# in the last ~5 or so years. I'm currently employed at a small software company that does remote database management, and I spend much of my time there either porting old VB code to C#, or writing new modules for their system in C#. Even if you decide to start of with VB, if you choose to learn XNA alongside it almost all of that will be easily applied to C# in the future. That said, if you're open to something new at least give C# a look and see if it suits your fancy.

[k1net1k]

yeah i was going to suggest c# but i refrained. the world needs someone to update all those vb apps kicking around finance offices and library counters

[dandymcgee]

yeah i was going to suggest c# but i refrained. the world needs someone to update all those vb apps kicking around finance offices and library counters

Well if you know C#, converting a VB app to C# isn't all that difficult.

[wtetzner]

VB.NET is very similar to C#. It mostly just differs in syntax (and a few little things, like automatic coercion of strings to numbers and vise versa). It is very different from VB6 and earlier.

Anyway, switching from VB.NET to C# would just be an exercise in learning the annoying syntactic differences.