Advanced Visual Basic 6: Hardcore Programming Techniques DevelopMentor: Amazon.co.uk: Matthew Curland: Books

Amazon.co.uk Review

Written by a Microsoft insider and well-respected VB expert, Matthew Curland's Advanced Visual Basic 6 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 Visual Basic is perfect for intermediate to a advanced developers seeking to overcome bottlenecks in performance and functionality in their favourite programming tool.

The underlying message is that Visual Basic lets you work more efficiently with Microsoft COM if you implement a few extra routines that look under its hood. A custom library of routines (called VBoost) comes with the book, on the accompanying CD-ROM. Each chapter shows how to use this code, beginning with new ways to use pointers and access COM internals to enhance performance with such features as arrays, strings, threads and classes. The most 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 using custom routines). For the real guru, there's even a section on how to use inline assembly language within Visual Basic. Later sections turn to a host of techniques for multithreading, doing more with windows and how to manage and customise 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 Visual Basic with faster, more versatile programs. --Richard Dragan

Product Description

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.

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

The best serious VB book available 8 Jun 2001

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Matt's book is, without question, the best book on VB I have read. Concise and intelligence, it provides real insight into what VB does under the covers and a huge arsenal of techniques for getting the best results out of it. It is also a great antidote to the usual overly simplistic VB tutorials. Both intermediate and advanced VB programmers will find their code improves immeasurably both through using his techniques and being able to review the code of a master at work. Using his approach to arrays and strings I have been able to get performance gains of up to 10 times on one project I have been working on. The author even took the time to answers some queries that I had. All in all highly recommended.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Excellent 25 Jan 2006

Probably one of the best books on VB6. Pretty easy to follow and to the point.

Quality content, but only for the real hardcore programmers. 5 Oct 2004

By Michael R Oldroyd

I have heard that over 2 million people own a copy of Steven Hawkings "A Brief History of Time" but most of them don't get past page 50 or so because the subject matter is just too hard. This book is A Brief History of Time for VB developers.

Matt Curland was originally part of the MS team that developed VB, and was (in part?) responsible for Intellisense, so he's well qualified to talk at any level about VB6. His writing style is clear and concise, but to have any chance with this book, you will need to read it carefully from start to finish in order.

The book is particularly concerned with performance code.
String manipulation in VB6 is notoriously slow and Matt has some neat ways for speeding things up dramatically. There is quite detailed coverage of lightweight COM objects, and he has a very neat section which culminates in the code for a generalised quicksort algorithm that can work with any data type.

VB6 is pretty long in the tooth of course now, and very few of the things you learn here will be transferable to VB.NET, however if you are a VB6 hardcore programmer. If you bought and appreciated Bruce McKinney's and Dan Appleman's VB6 books, then this should also be on your shelf somewhere.