Moving from COM+ to .NET: Drill down to Serviced Components
(10/13/2001)
This short but highly informative article by VB-2-The-Max member Enrico Sabbadin answers to the question "Is COM death?", which has been hanging around the programmersÆ community since the release of the .NET PDC Technology preview (more then one year ago). Having played with two beta versions of the .NET framework, most of us agree that COM is actually dead as a binary standard. The interface based programming model is still alive though: looking back at the last decade, the validity of this approach is actually the main lesson in software design the Æ90es left us. There is another question that may be posed though, "Is COM+ dead?" the answer is no. In its first release the .NET framework will still rely on COM+ to provide services like object pooling, transaction management and all that kind of stuff needed to develop enterprise-level applications. Read the entire story in our Article Bank.
Effective Visual Basic tips from DevelopMentor guys!
(10/13/2001)
 | Effective VB is a technically concise, highly approachable series of concrete, best-practices guidelines for successful VB development, coming a team of instructors from DevelopMentor: Brian A. Randell, Doug Turnure, Joe Hummel, Justin Gehtland, Ted Pattison.
Effective Visual Basic has four goals: to help developers learn superior VB practices; identify the best solutions to common design and coding problems; apply VB to new technologies such as COM+, MTS+, MSMQ+, XML, and the Web; and leverage the full power of n-tier application and database environments. Drawing on Scott Meyers' classic Effective C++ for inspiration, a world-class team of VB instructors presents more than 50 best practices for building Visual Basic code that is more robust, efficient, scalable, and maintainable. |
Read a selection of tips from Chapters 3 and 4, assembled by Addison Wesley especially for VB-2-The-Max.
Mention VB-2-The-Max and save $300 on VB.NET training!
(10/6/2001)
Sign up now for Wintellect's West Coast publics to be held in Kirkland, WA the week of November 12-16. Register now and receive a complimentary .NET Jumpstart CD featuring excerpts from forthcoming .NET books by Jeffrey Richter and Jeff Prosise.
You can choose between Programming the .NET Framework with C# as taught by Jeffrey Richter, and Programming Visual Basic.NET as taught by Francesco Balena. Even more interesting, just mention that you read this text on VB2TheMax and you will save $300 on the VB.NET course!!! For more information and detailed course program, click here to visit Wintellect's web site.
Get the most XLS with Wrox's "Professional XLS"
(10/6/2001)
 | XSL is a key technology for working with XML, and is comprised of two parts: XSLT is the official language for transforming XML from one format to another, whether for restructuring/selectively processing the data or presenting the data for display; XSL-FO is a proposed vocabulary for incorporating information concerning how the document should be arranged for presentation. A related standard, XPath, is the language for addressing specific parts of an XML document. Professional XLS by Andrew Watt and other authors takes an applied, tutorial-style approach to teaching the core fundamentals of the XSLT, XPath and XSL-FO specifications. You'll learn how to create well structured and modularized stylesheets to generate your required output, how to change, filter, and sort data, and how to incorporate other content for presentation purposes. The book explains what XSL is and what it is for; describes the XPath language for specifying locations in an XML tree XSLT basics, the core features of the language and additional features and techniques to enhance and improve your applications. |
Read Chapter 3 XSLT Basics from our Book Bank.
Sample chapter from "XSLT Programmers Reference"
(9/29/2001)
 | XML has firmly established itself as the universal standard for managing data for the web and is now being implemented on a wide scale. XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language), a vital companion to XML, is used for two main purposes: to format or style XML data so that it can be displayed in a browser and to transform XML data (XSLT). When you transform an XML document, you manipulate the data into a new structure, for example, re-ordering the data. This enables the same data store to be used in an unlimited number of ways. XSLT is a flexible, customizable, and cross-platform language. XSLT is a notoriously difficult language to understand, but Michael Kay's XSLT Programmer's Reference, while being a complete reference to the recommendation, will also give code examples showing how it all ties together and can be effectively employed in a real-world development scenario. |
Read Chapter 1 XSLT in Context from our Book Bank, courtesy of Wrox publisher.
October articles added to our Magazine Bank
(9/29/2001)
Search our Magazine Bank for new articles appeared on leading magazines such as VBPJ, MSDN Magazine, and SQL Server Magazine. As usual, all the articles can be searched by category or by author.
We have also added new items to our MS Knowledge Base Bank. You can browse them by category, or search them by clicking the Include MSKB Bank checkbox in the search options.
Learn as many HTML secrets as you can
(9/22/2001)
 | HTML 4.01 Programmer's Reference by Chris Ullman and others is a book for web programmers of any level, from beginners getting to grips with the basics of HTML coding, to more advanced programmers who need a comprehensive HTML reference guide that is completely up-to-date with the new 4.01 specification. Here's a list of topic discussed: The basics of HTML programming: text formatting, links, images, forms, tables, and frames, including all elements and attributes Using Style Sheets with HTML (covers CSS 1, 2, and 3) Basic HTML Scripting techniques, including DHTML and the DOM standard levels 1 and 2 Using multimedia in HTML pages via embedded objects, including Flash animations and Java Applets Accessibility and interoperability (including aural style sheets and cross browser coding), and internationalization Deprecated and browser-specific (IE and Netscape) HTML features XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 New and Upcoming HTML standards. |
Read Chapter 10: Embedding Objects online, courtesy of Wrox publisher.
PropertyWindow ActiveX control
(9/22/2001)
This PropertyWindow control is similar to the one found in the VB 6 IDE. You
can add how many properties you want and specify if a property accepts
string, numerical, boolean or exadecimal values, or even decide to have a
custom behaviour when the user clicks on a certain property, for example
opening a color picker. Download it now from our File Bank.
The ultimate API Viewer utility for VB5 and VB6
(9/15/2001)
API Viewer 2001 by Christoph von Wittich is a very powerful replacement for VB5 and VB6 API Viewer. It supports multiple languages (including Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and even Chinese!), and comes with the API declaration of WindowsXP, so you get access to approximately 6500 functions and 55600 constants! Download it now from our FileBank
Professional VB.NET is now available
(9/15/2001)
 | This comprehensive book by Rockford Lhotka and others takes an in-depth look at the new and enhanced features of VB.NET and provides the professional programmer with the knowledge needed to build real-world applications and fully utilize the power of VB.NET. Professional VB.NET is primarily aimed at experienced Visual Basic developers who want to make the transition to VB.NET. It will also be of benefit to programmers with a good grounding in VB.NET who want to step up to a professional level. Here's a brief list of main topics discussed in this book: An introduction to the .NET Framework and Common Language Runtime (CLR); Deriving classes from base classes using inheritance; Handling errors with the Try...Catch structure; Developing multi-threaded applications; COM and .NET component interoperability; Accessing data with ADO.NET and XML
Building web applications with Web Forms; Creating custom controls for Windows Forms and Web Forms; Creating and consuming Web Services. |
Read Chapter 12: Inheritance and Interfaces from our Book Bank, courtesy of Wrox publisher.
Learn how to create your own VB Add-Ins
(8/4/2001)
Why should you create Add-Ins? We programmers always feel that we are short of several features while working with Microsoft tools, it seems that Microsoft hasnÆt yet developed the tool we needed. This article by S.S. Ahmed shows you how you can use the IDE's Extensibility Object Model to design your own add-in.
VBMaximizer 1.04 is more powerful than ever
(6/9/2001)
 | VBMaximizer, the ultimate VB6 add-in that adds over 70 commands to the Visual Basic IDE, has been improved even further, with two brand new commands. Now you can save and restore all VB IDE settings with a click of the mouse (great when you re-install VB6 or apply a service pack), and can display information on all the open windows in the system, without leaving VB. And of course, you can do improved find and replace, apply code templates to procedures and property stylesheets to controls, beautify and optimize your code, create methods and property procedures, error handlers, automatically rename controls according to your company's policy, as you were able to do will all previous versions. |
VBMaximizer 1.04 comes with an extended Code Librarian that contains over 40 new routines. Registered users can download and merge these new routines to the library they already own.
VBMaximizer Enterprise comes with 10-user license and complete source code for a price less than other products charge for a single-user copy. Go to download page or take a 12-step tour of all the major features of this product.
(Almost) Better than Microsoft's site itself!
(7/29/2000)
After several weeks of hard (very hard) work, we have selected over 3,500 new Knowledge Base articles for our MSKB Bank section, which now includes over 5,500 articles - dutifully grouped according to their main topic, type, expertise level - and covers:
- Visual Basic - versions 5.0 and 6.0 (VB4 if the article applies to that version as well)
- SQL Server - versions 6.5 and 7.0, including DTS, SQL-DMO, OLAP, MSTDC, and replication NEW!
- Active Server Pages and Internet Information Server - versions 4.0 and 5.0
- DCOM, Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and COM+
- Message Queue Server - version 2.0 NEW!
- Internet Explorer DHTML programming - versions 4.0 and 5.0 NEW!
- Active Data Objects (ADO) - versions 2.0, 2.1 and 2.5
- Remote Data Services
- ODBC - version 3.0 and later NEW!
- Visual Source Safe - versions 5.0 and later NEW!
- Visual Studio Analyzer NEW!
- Oracle
- SiteServer - version 3.0 NEW!
- The MMC Snap-in Designer NEW!
- Windows SDK Platform - only the articles that might interest VB developers
- Active Directory NEW!
As you see, we have excluded all the articles about older versions of VB and other products, that are not in widespread use today (but continue to appear in all your searches at the Knowledge Base's Home Page. Remember that you can include all these articles in VB-2-The-Max searches; just remember to tick the "Include MSKB Bank" checkbox before clicking on the "Go" button.
The Newsletter, the MS Knowledge Base Bank, and more!
(5/9/2000)
At last, VB-2-The-Max has its own newsletter. Subscribe right now to receive a brand new VB tip or routine right in your mailbox every week, and be informed of the most interesting material just uploaded to the web site. You'll also get links to other new stuff elsewhere on the Internet, plus anticipations about the new products from Microsoft and other VB-related vital information. Just type your email in the field to the left, and click on the GetIt! button.
The newsletter isn't the only news about the site. We have read thousands of Microsoft Knowledge Base article, to extract all those that concern only the latest versions of VB. Then we have grouped them according to topic, type, and level. The result is the MSKB Bank, and we're sure this will be a great aid in your everyday programming chores. In fact, not only can you list the KB articles about a given topic, you can even search KB articles using the Fast Search command in the menu bar. Note that searching the KB takes considerably longer, so you must explicitly select the checkbox to enable this feature.
We've also renewed the Tip, Code, and Bug banks, so that you can explore them using a treeview-like structure. This new format will speed up the navigation through the banks. We've moved all the items in the old Mistake Bank to the Tip Bank, but you can still query for all the common mistakes from the main menu. You can also query for all the optimisation tips and routines, even though all the items are scattered in the other banks.
Other new services are being added soon. Subscribe to the newsletter now, to be sure you don't miss them!
What they tell about us...
(4/10/2000)
In the same week VB-2-The-Max has been mentioned in the April issue of SQL Server Magazine as one of the best VB sites around. Read the story at http://sqlmag.com/Articles/Content/8246_01.html.
Switching to Visual Basic 6?
(6/26/1999)
If you are switching to VB6 probably you're already aware of all its major new features, such as the DataEnvironment designer and WebClasses. You might not be aware, however, of the many tiny details that can make the difference between a joyful porting to the new version and a highly frustrating experience.
We have prepared a list of new VB6 features, more detailed than the one available on VB6 manuals. If you have purchased the Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 book by Francesco Balena (see below), you'll also find direct references to the pages in the book where each topic is discussed in depth.
Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0
(5/10/1999)
 | Francesco Balena's Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 (Microsoft Press) is now available at bookstores and on-line sources. The book (over 1,300 pages + CD-ROM) comprises twenty chapters that cover everything a VB developer should know about VB6, from the basics to the intricacies of object-oriented and ActiveX programming, forms and controls, ADO and the many new designers in the IDE, down all the way to client-side and server-side Internet programming, including WebClasses, ASP and RDS components. |
The book also contains tuturials on SQL, HTML and Dynamic HTML, and ASP programming, plus an appendix on the most useful API functions. On the companion CD you'll find about 2 megs of well commented source code, with a collection of about 100 classes and a library with over 150 reusable, optimized routines.
Want to learn more? Here are the hyperlinks to the Table of contents (14 pages!), the Foreword by Jim Fawcette, the publisher of VBPJ and DevX, and the author's Introduction.
Jump to DevX's MarketPlace to order the book with a discount. Or click here to read reviews from those who already have it. If you already bought the book, visit the Update Page to see the latest additions and corrections.
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