Visual Basic Resources

For 05-863/08-763/46-863: Introduction to Human Computer Interaction for Technology Executives (Fall, 2008)

As part of this course, you will be expected to learn and use Visual Basic .NET.

Getting Visual Basic

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 Express, a free version of Visual Studio, with support for VB. NET:

It is a free download. For those using PowerPC macs, they can purchase Virtual PC and emulate Windows to run VB. If they have an Intel mac, they can purchase Parallels and virtualize Windows to run VB.

If you already have it, you call alternatively use Visual Basic .Net 2005.

You must use either VB .Net 2005 or VB .Net 2008. (You are not allowed to use C# or Flash or Java or Javascript or any other language.)

If you do not want to use your own machine, the computers in the clusters in Wean 5202 and 5204 currently have Visual Studio 2005 (which includes Visual Basic), and anybody should be able to log into them. They are open 8am - midnight weekdays and 12pm to midnight weekends.

Visual Basic Resources Used in Class

(by Devin Blais)

PowerPoint slides used in class: lecture08-VBTutorial.ppt

Code used in class example: AverageThreeNumbers.zip

QuickTime movie of in-class example (no sound): averages.mov, or as a downloadable zip file (4 meg): averages.mov.zip

Learning Visual Basic

Here are some ways to learn Visual Basic:

A Tutorial on VB by James Fogarty (CMU HCII PhD student) - [PDF]

Microsoft has a lot of free resources: Google is also a good resource for looking for very specific questions about specific types of behaviors (e.g., "compute difference between dates").

Here is a brief "quick reference guide" we got from Anind Dey that was used in 05-630 in 2004.

Here are some additional references recommended for the HCII course 05-630 previously:

The books that are available are all pretty heavyweight and would probably take more time to go through than you have. But if you really want one, this one was recommended by the instructors of 05-630 previously: