Advanced Visual Basic 6: Power Techniques for Everyday Programs (Developmentor Series) - Softcover

Curland, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201707128 ISBN 13: 9780201707120

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2000

Synopsis

In Advanced Visual Basic 6, two of the world's leading VB experts take experienced developers "under the hood" with VB, introducing powerful techniques for writing high-performance, reusable code that leverages the close relationships between VB, COM, and OLE Automation. This book presents advanced VB programming from a COM data type approach, helping developers build more robust, effective code -- and overcome obstacles that appear as they "push the envelope" with VB. Developers learn how VB describes arrays, and how to duplicate that definition manually to perform simple type casting, and gain unprecedented control over how their programs use memory. The authors introduce best practices for interface-based design using normal VB class modules; show how to partition code for optimal reuse; and more. Next, they present advanced techniques for creating COM lightweight objects; and alternate memory management techniques that allow the creation of complex systems with many objects and minimal overhead. The book also covers threading, type libraries, component versioning, and more.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Curland is a long-time member of Microsoft's Visual Studio development team. Visual Basic's IntelliSense feature is his most visible contribution. A frequent and popular speaker at VBITS, he also contributes black-belt articles to the leading VB journal, VBPJ, and is the co-author of Object Programming with Visual Basic 4 (Microsoft Press).

0201707128AB04062001

From the Back Cover

"This book takes you to places that no other book on VB and COM has ever dared to go. If you're a Visual Basic developer who refuses to recognize the commonly accepted limitations of VB, this book is definitely for you. You'll learn programming techniques that will give your applications unbelievable boosts in performance and flexibility."
--Ted Pattison

In Advanced Visual Basic 6, leading Visual Basic expert Matthew Curland demonstrates powerhouse techniques programmers can use to write high-performance, robust, and reusable VB code. Readers learn how to leverage the close relationships between VB, COM, and OLE Automation, extending the envelope of VB's capabilities and building high-quality, object-based systems.

Key topics include how to:

• Control VB array variables explicitly to directly access arbitrary memory locations
• Call pointers to standard, cdecl, and class module functions
• Aggregate complete interface implementations into any VB object
• Override functions on any interface, including those implemented automatically by VB
• Turn any user-defined type into a lightweight COM object
• Minimize memory usage in systems with a large number of objects
• Safely create and manage threads in ActiveX EXEs and DLLs
• Interact with messages to customize windowed and windowless UserControl objects

The web site accompanying this book contains extensive source code samples to enable all techniques without external DLLs. It also provides integrated type library add-ins for creating and editing referenced libraries, modifying binary compatibility files, and customizing the type libraries that VB generated for ActiveX components.

With this compendium of best practices, sophisticated techniques, and valuable utilities, VB programmers will gain a deeper understanding of VB's inner workings and be able to extend its object-oriented capabilities.

0201707128B04062001

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201707128
• ISBN 13: 9780201707120
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 516