Visual Basic Resources

For 17-770/46-863: Introduction to Human Computer Interaction for Technology Executives

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

Getting Visual Basic

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

It's downloadable. 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.

Alternatively, Tepper and SCS are also both part of the MSDN Academic Aliance, providing free downloads of Windows XP, Visio, Visual Studio and other things

However, we are told that this can be difficult to deal with:

"In general you need your administrator (SCS, Tepper, etc) to give you (and each of the other students) a personal MSDNAA account, at which point you can go download stuff from MS. Download only works for products that the admin has enabled as such; you may need to go and borrow discs (after getting the codes online)."

If you do not want to use your own machine, the computers in the clusters in Wean 5202 and 5204 currently have Visual Studio.NET, 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 Andrew Ko)

PowerPoint slides used in class: lecture07.VBTutorial.ppt

Code used in class example: AverageThreeNumbersCode.zip

Zip of QuickTime movie of in-class example: 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.

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

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 last year: