Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 1999

Introduction

In its six versions, Visual Basic has evolved from the simplest programming language for Microsoft Windows to an exceedingly complex development environment, capable of delivering virtually anything from tiny utilities to huge n-tier client/server applications. For this reason, the job of writing a book that encompasses all the language's features has become a daunting task, and I was actually intimidated when I began to write this book. I would have preferred to write several books on specific topics, or at least this is what I thought at first.

It took me some months of hard work, but in the end I managed to put everything I wanted to write about in one big tome. I believe that from the reader's point of view this is much better than having to deal with a collection of books or one thick volume written by several authors. One big book by one author ensures a uniform approach to problems and no redundancy. Nevertheless, Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 has been such a large undertaking that I like to think of it as many books in one. The following list will help you to understand what you'll find in it.

A survey of the new Visual Basic 6 features Visual Basic 6 includes many new features, especially in the database and Internet areas. Among these are ADO, DHTML applications, and WebClasses, just to mention the outstanding ones. I have explored these new features and shown you how you can take advantage of them to create the next generation of your applications. But at the same time, I've noted some of their rough edges, so you won't be lost when you find that something doesn't work as expected. This is one of the advantages of a book that isn't rushed to the market as soon as the product is released.

A demystifying tutorial on object-oriented programming You've been able to build classes using Visual Basic since version 4, yet a relatively small number of developers actively use objects in their applications. This isn't surprising, after all, since most of the available OOP code examples are "toy classes" that deal with dogs, fleas, and other animals. This hardly stimulates the imagination of programmers who must deal with invoices, products, customers, and orders. You won't find the source code for a complete object-oriented invoicing application in this book, but you'll surely learn a lot about practical uses of classes in Chapters 6, 7, and 9 or by browsing the 100 classes on the companion CD, some of which can be immediately reused in your applications. And in Chapters 16 through 20, you'll see how you can leverage your OOP skills to create ActiveX controls, local and remote ActiveX components, and exotic variations such as components for ADO, RDS, and ASP.

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