When I pay $60 for a book on VB .NET or any other programming language in Visual Studio, I expect the code supplied to work when both the Option Explicit and Option Strict are set to TRUE. At the very least Option Explicit should be set to TRUE. It is bad practice to write any program where these are set to FALSE. WROX books should not be teaching bad coding practices. WROX needs to have a policy consistent with this and it needs to communicate this requirement vigorously to their authors. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of an object "item" is. Declaring it as an "object" only sets up a late binding condition when one isn't necessary. Learning the "item" object type is part of what the reader needs to learn; this is a situation that WROX books need to avoid.

It would be useful to hear what other readers think about this issue.