Customer Reviews

Advanced Visual Basic 6: Power Techniques for Everyday Programs

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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

I wish I could give this Ten Stars -- it is well deserved.
Let's face it Visual Basic, by design, has many pitfalls, walls and cages -- with Matt Curland's Advanced Visual Basic 6 any developer can be free to design creatively without keeping track of what they can and cannot do.
This book is a must for Software Engineers developing in VB. After reading many books on Visual Basic and growing utterly exhausted by the phrase "beyond the scope of this book" I have finally found a VB book that caters to the Visual Basic Developer who needs to extend VB beyond the basics and bring professional quality level applications/components to the Windows Market.
The techniques offered are not only applicable to 'everyday programs', but also absolutely indispensable for creating VB applications with a fully professional look and feel.
For any Software Engineer who grew up writing Windows applications in C or COM components in ATL and who want to parlay that knowledge in the Visual Basic Environment, this book will take you there and beyond.
The text on the infamous VBized TypeLibrary is the only concise writing I have ever come across that fully defines what Visual Basic does when you add to an existing interface and rebuild as well as what you can do to prevent additional Interface IDs from being created.
For large development teams sharing components, the binary compatibility tools,(...), are worth the price of admission alone. The binary compatibility tools is a must for any large extended VB project, and the post-build pieces give you simple point and click control over your finished product -- including elimination of external typelib dependencies and changing default interfaces.
I cannot say enough just how much this book has been a great addition in the development of new components and applications.

Matthew Curland is a world class Windows programmer and he really knows about VB6. Skilful people like Mathew Curland mostly write about the Windows platform in terms of C++. But Matthew Curland takes VB to the same level as any other recognized authority in the progr. book market. This guy seem to know secret things about VB runtime that no other available source has ever shared with the many VB users. And he is not just showing of. The book is actually accompanied with some very nice source code that I myself are prepared to use in real life projects. The list of key topics is too long to present but it is exciting, unique and do not exist anywhere else (MSDN, other books). It's a heavy book! Not like other VB books measured in size, but in style. Many chapters present really hard core techniques so be prepared to study the book (read the source code) very carefully. But I feel the return is worth the effort. After reading this book I am converting C++/ATL binaries into VB source code to minimize DLL dependencies. This is stuff I created in C++ because I never imagined VB would stand a chance doing it right. In short its a *GREAT* book and I am not even half finished 'stealing' all Matt's great code.

This book has to be the ABSOLUTE power for VB programming. Infact, its contents exposed many of VB's secrets which I have never seen in many other VB books (and I had read many). The book explains the inner working mechanism of VB as to how it actually works, what really takes place behind the scene, and how it interfaces with COM. By uncovering the VB black box, the book shows you how to by-pass its limitation and squeeze every ounce of performance out of your VB application right down to the assembly language!
I have been waiting for a VB's secret book like this for a long, long time. Guys like Matthew and Ted Pattison whom I consider are a big blessing to the VB community when it comes to advance VB with COM. Mathew's book bridges some of the power of C++ into VB application WITHOUT using C++, while Ted's book is a guide as to how your components intergrated with its host where building a scalable application is concerned (a must read for any developer coding component for ASP or MTS in ANY languages).
Let me give you one example of how this book is a gem. In one of my web project with VB and ASP, I need a way to partition a byte array and send it to a file output stream without having to copy any data to a temporary array in partitioning. I never thought you can do this with VB until Matthew shows how you can grap a hold of the SafeArray descriptor's pointer and manipulate its structure in VB like you would in C. I love this technique so much that I even give it a name - 'The Virtual Array'. (...) CopyMemory and VarPtrArray are the only two API declared functions I used to do the trick. So for those negative reviewers on customs tool and hacking, hmmm... I don't know:)
I believe the only programmers who are capable of writing a VB book like this have to be from the team that created VB itself, and I think Matthew is one of them. So for those VB programmers out there, especially those who find the OleViewer and the Object browser tools are the things next to bread and butter, this book is an absolute MUST have!

I found this book to be absolutely amazing in terms of the type of power it exposes to the Visual Basic developer. Having said that I want to encourage anyone thinking of buying this book. It is not a book for beginners not by a long shot...if you have been programming in Visual Basic long enough to be frustrated by what cannot be done in VB compared to C++ then it is time to purchase this book...I wanted to point out a few things. First and foremost. The author provides the C++ code for the DLL. You can recompile against the Visual Studio.NET framework and you should be good to go. Second, the changes to VB exposed by .NET will require that more than the authors bridge code be tweaked. In fact Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET have little in common at all. So if you ditch this book and it's code for .NET reasons then ditch VB 6 while you are at it.

Last thing. The topics and the examples in this book will give you tremendous insight into Windows Programming. The concepts can easily be abstracted. The author shows you so much about COM, Interfaces, Pointers and memory. If you thoroughly understood the content of this book (which is realistic). You could walk away from Visual Basic 6.0 to a totally different programming language and immediately apply the information this book provides.

So if you are ready to study WITH DISCIPLINE. If you are ready to take your Visual Basic Applications to the next level WITH POWER & STABILITY. Then you are ready to buy this book.

My hat goes off to Matt Curland for finally providing a book that explains how to use Visual Basic to it's full potential.

I used to think I knew what VB could do. It turns out that I knew about as much as my four year old knows about driving from playing with his toy cars. This is a great book, with information that I have never seen anywhere else.

But what I like best about the book is that it does not talk down to you or make you feel dumb as it teaches you things that no one else can. It would be too easy to fall into that mode, many authors do it. But there are a few for VB - Randell, Balena, Kaplan, McManus, and now Curland - who make you feel like you are just hanging out with another developer.

Kudos to Matt for producing this book. Worth the price if it cost twice as much or more!

I've been looking for a great book about Visual Basic for years. This is it. Out of several hundred books in my computer library, this is one of my five favorites. Curland's immediate classic belongs with Richter on Windows, Box on COM, Rector and Sells on ATL, and Shepherd and Wingo on MFC.

I read the book straight through once, and then settled in for a careful study. Advanced Visual Basic read better than many novels, revealed to me the internals of the language, and deepened my understanding of COM.

Congratulations, Matt!

This book even surpasses the possibilities of McKinley's "Hardcore Visual Basic". You almost gain the power of C/C++ type Windows and COM programming.
This book is not easy to read. You do need a C level expertise on Windows' and COM's inner working. Though no ATL or MFC is required.
I did learn a lot of the apparently strange behavior of VB. It is now clearer to me. But should you really apply those grandiose tricks. (For proper clean up purposes you should not hit the stop button anymore.) The answer is the same as for optimization. Don't do it! But if I am really in need? Don't do it! ... After at least ten iterations including solid peer review you might try it. The author makes it pretty easy. (...)
Is this book still relevant after the advent of VS.Net? I think so yes. It is an intellectual joy to read this book. (Why couldn't I read it 1996?) We and many other institutions still write a lot of code in VB 6. Anyhow this probably was my last book on VB 6.

The title does not lie, this is a very advanced Visual Basic 6.0 book. When I was studying for the 2 Visual Basic 6.0 certification exams (which I passed with flying colors), this book provided me with advanced features of Visual Basic. Although the book is not really a reference book, the more experienced or advanced developer will find useful solutions in this book. I highly recommend this book for those experienced developers. This book should not be read by developers who are trying to learn Visual Basic because the subjects discussed in this book may confuse them.

I simply can't accept people give below 5 stars for this book - have they read it correctly / reviewed the same book???

It's BY FAR the best I've seen for the advanced user. Everything that you always wanted to do in VB - and it's here! It's an ABSOLUTE must for any serious programmer.

This book is on the same level of every VB programmers bible - Dan Appleman's Guide to the Win32 API - if that gives you an idea of how good it is.

I can't believe I haven't heard about this book before.