[RESOLVED] A newbie neading help with VB.net and databases.

Hi.

I'm not very experienced with programming. The most I've done is using VBA in excel, using the active cell function to create a database program.

There's two things i'm trying to achieve.

1. Learn a decent programming language.

2. Rewrite my Excel program so that it works faster and doesn't require a paid for program.

So what i've spent the last two days trying to is first decide on a programming language (and I think I've decided on VB.net), and then try and get a database system working.

What I am using is Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 Express (version 10) and .NET Framework (version 4), and whatever version of SQL compact the thing came with.

I thought that for a database, i could either use SQL or use a collection of .txt files to store the information. However, I've been unable to either get either of the methods working, or work out how to even do it (sorry if that made no sense).

Thats why I'm coming here for help.

The program is for a music teacher, and what they need is the following:
-A list of students needs to be stored, with information about each individual student. This all obviously has be be recorded from and retrieved to a userform.

-2 dozen different pieces of information for each lesson, and each student, at least at this stage needs 39 lessons (1 a week for upto 39 weeks (4 terms of school)).

My thoughts were that you could have a database/.txt file that contains a new student on each line, and along a line, after the student name, comes all the student info, and that when ever a student is added to this file, a new database/file is made with the name of the user id of the student (User ID would be given by the first being 0, the next being 1, 2, etc.). This file would have a row for each lesson, and its columns would contain the info coming from or going to the user form.


So. Can anyone help me with my problem. And assuming that I know very little, if not nothing is probably not a bad idea.

Thanks

Halberd

Well for starters you would only need to use 1 database and it should be SQL. You can of course store data in a txt file or excel but this is not a database, SQL Server is.

You would need at least 2 tables in this database, 1 would hold user info the other would hold class info. You may want a third that links classes to users if needed.

I would suggest that you search online for database programming tutorials or samples to help you get started.

That's what I've been trying to do for the last few days, but nothing being overly helpful. They all assume that I know what I'm doing, that I understand exactly what the code does, which I don't. Which is why I was asking for help.

channel9.msdn.com has thousands of video. Take a look at the samples here, to get started. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vb2010samples

Halberd, I am using this to learn c# .net for beginners, it's very good, IMHO ... http://www.homeandlearn.co.uk/ ... it also has VB .net, PHP & Java courses and they are all free ...

Thanks vodkasoda.

Though, after finding about half a dozen different walkthroughs on microsofts site, I found one which wasn't directly linked to the others, and i could actually follow it. So now I have something to work with.

Thanks

Halberd