Advanced Visual Basic 6: Power Techniques for Everyday Programs at Dominant Systems Book Store

Written by a Microsoft insider and well-respected Visual Basic expert, Matthew Curland's Advanced Visual Basic 6: Power Techniques for Everyday Programs is a unique guide to extending the reach of VB into COM and object design. This compendium of tips and strategies for doing more in VB is perfect for intermediate to advanced developers who seek to overcome bottlenecks in performance and functionality in their favorite programming tool.

The underlying message is that VB lets you work more efficiently with Microsoft COM if you implement a few extra routines that look under its hood. The more notable techniques use memory more efficiently (including code that creates large numbers of objects faster). More advanced readers will appreciate the in-depth guide to building COM objects programmatically within VB. (The book shows you how to create lightweight COM objects by using custom routines.) For the real guru, there's even a section on how to use inline assembly language within VB. Later sections turn to a host of techniques for multithreading, doing more with windows, and how to manage and customize COM-type libraries for successful real-world deployment. Armed with these custom routines and an expert's-eye view of VB internals, you'll be able to get more out of VB with faster, more versatile programs. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

Tips and strategies for extending Visual Basic by using COM
VB pointers and memory management
Extending VB arrays (accessing underlying SAFEARRAY COM objects and speeding up array performance)
Accessing the IUnknown COM interface from within VB
Binding names and COM vtables in VB
Improving code reuse by using aggregation in VB (overriding functions in child classes and simulating polymorphism)
Improving object cleanup in VB (circular, weak, and strong references and strategies for improving memory use in class hierarchies)
Using COM class factory APIs within VB
Loading DLLs and OCX controls directly
Lightweight COM objects in VB
Strategies for creating large numbers of objects efficiently
Accessing the VB Running Object Table (ROT)
Calling function pointers in VB
Simulating inline assembly instructions
Threads in VB (apartment models, worker and UI threads, and synchronization tips)
Improving VB performance with strings
Generating and customizing type libraries
Binary compatibility of COM objects
Tips for working with windows in VB (subclassing, custom window creation, and windowless controls)
VBoost (custom library of advanced VB routines)

Customer Reviews & Comments
A most well-written book with (for this programmer) some structural problems that do not diminish its technical value as an aid to deeper understanding of the "machinery" behind the "user illusion" of Visual Basic. This book requires a type of deep knowledge about COM and the underlying interface between Visual Basic and the Windows 32 operating system which you will probably not have unless you have been a C/C++ programmer ... or have done extensive work with trying to optimize applications writen in VB using the API interfaces to Windows provided by VB. It offers very complex solutions to very complex problems. Implementing the solutions requires you to depend upon the author's provided bridging-code ... a package called "VBBoost" ... which, for most mortals, will be a set of "black boxes." The problem with that is that as soon as Windows and VB change ... and they soon will undergo a most profound transformation when .Net and VB7 arrive ... how will any real-world solution implemented using the author's bridging-code tools be reliably maintainable ? Or even be usable in the radically different architecture ? Personally, I would not dare use the tools provided by the author ... which he will update and maintain on his web-site as he has time ... for any commercial code. For me there is difficulty with the MS provided controls whose quirks require staying on top of so many Knowledge Base articles, and which often have to be extended through API code to really tap their full functionality. To use the techniques in this book with confidence I would have to spend more time than I wish to going back and learning the depths of COM and Win32 ... and I'd just about have to do that by studying the C/C++ literature ... which I'd then have to mentally translate back to VB. This would undoubtedly make me a better programmer through sleep deprivation, but it is not consistent with my use of VB for rapid prototyping and application development at a fairly high level of abstraction. If you are a VB Guru already ... or are really ready to step out of the "VB Bubble" into the depths of COM and Win32 ... then I think ... as the other reviews attest ... this is THE book for you. The author, imho, has a genius for explaining very complex interactions between the different internal layers of software in Windows. I do not regret buying this book, and I really enjoyed the author's clear, expository, style. To me he writes as cleanly and enjoyably as Francesco Balena, Karl Peterson, and a very few others about such a deeply technical aspect of VB. His web site with updates to the software examples and revisions and corrections for the book shows he is committed to helping people use his work. So, in conclusion, I have to say that while I wish I was at the level where I could understand and use the knowledge presented so well in this book, I am not. I have mixed feelings about writing this review ... as I do about the book; I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from buying this book which is an important contribution to the "distaff" VB literature (a universe until now mainly populated by Appleman and McKinney). What I would love to see would be a book by Francesco Balena, my favorite VB author, that would somehow get me to the point where I could grok Curland's book without spending a year in the C/C+/API gulag. But perhaps Francesco has better uses of his time :) Please do check out this book yourself ! Bill Woodruff, dotScience

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