Microsoft Visual Basic is an extremely popular programming language in which it is increasingly important to understand an array of different technologies and how they interact with each other to really exploit its power and flexibility. This book introduces the reader to the concepts of the application design cycle, showing how to design, code, test, deploy and maintain an application. Technologies covered include UML, VB coding, the MS Solutions framework, MTS, ASP, XML and SQL Server. Each technology is explained through explanation and code illustration, clearly demonstrating how they tie together and may be distributed over a Windows environment.
Getting started with Visual Basic is easy, but for serious enterprise development, you need to master a lot more.
Beginning Visual Basic 6 Application Development puts enterprise-level programming into the hands of intermediate VB users with a capable tour of all facets of multi-tiered development. This book is all you need to start using server-side objects and Web-based interfaces with VB.
What's best here is the comprehensive, yet approachable, guide to all the Microsoft tools, APIs and standards needed for using VB to create large enterprise-level applications. This means looking at the three tiers for application partitioning--user, business, and data services--along the lines of Microsoft's recommended practice. The authors cover all the steps needed to design and code applications in today's corporate environments, along with a solid introduction to UML diagrams. Wherever possible, they make use of tools (like the VB Class Builder) to speed up development, and the title is chockfull of actual screenshots to help you along.
These project design techniques are illustrated through an online banking application. The authors walk through all the steps required to build it on all three tiers, from the underlying database schema (created in SQL Server 7 and then accessed through stored procedures and ActiveX Data Objects), plus business objects for simulating basic banking transactions. Despite some high-level material, this text is anchored in a practical, very hands-on sample application that you can build and deploy on your own.
Later sections turn to the user interface or presentation layer. First, the application is built using a traditional standalone client, and then the book presents a Web-based HTML interface generated with Active Server Pages (ASPs). A final section looks at XML for sharing data between applications.
It's hard enough to use VB with objects for the beginner, and mastering all the standards (with such acronyms as UML, COM+, SQL, ADO, MTS, HTML, and ASP) is even tougher. Beginning Visual Basic 6 Application Development covers all the necessary terrain and gives intermediate developers what they need to tackle serious enterprise projects with VB. --Richard Dragan, Amazon.com
Topics covered: Introduction to enterprise applications: scalability, reliability and high availability; Microsoft Distributed InterNet Architecture (DNA) basics, tour of Microsoft tools and standards (MTS, IIS, ASP, COM, MSMQ, UDA, SQL Server, COM+), case study for an online banking application, software development methodologies compared (the traditional "waterfall" approach, the Microsoft Solutions Framework, MSF, and the Rational Unified Process), object-oriented design tutorial, Visual Basic classes and the Class Builder tool, COM, ActiveX and DCOM basics, Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), adding transaction support to VB components, deploying VB objects, Unified Modelling Language (UML) diagrams, logical and physical database design, tutorial for SQL and stored procedures, querying and updating databases using ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), building the data and business services tier, GUI design, creating VB forms for users and administrators; testing, deployment and maintenance; HTML and ASP tutorial, and XML used with Visual Basic.
