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Last Update: 21 March 2000. Next update due 14 April 2000. Check out Whats New for details.
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21 March 2000
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Microsoft Announce Plans for VB7 -Steve Ballmer's keynote at VBITS
"[by the end of the presentation] you'll surely agree we remain Hardcore, 100% committed to developers as the core audience for Microsoft.
Developers have really been the key to all the success we have had with Windows, and particularly
[we want to show] our committment to the VB community. More applications get
developed and produced and deployed in VB, and we have very exciting plans to help the
developer community, and the VB community in particular, to take advantage of not only
the PC but the internet."
- Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
Although this streaming video
is rather long (55 minutes) it is great stuff. I was surprised that I could still watch it
successfully even on a pathetic 33.6k modem download (we've heard the term DSL over here in
the UK, its just someone decided we should maintain our grasp over the empire by keeping
a stiff upper lip on the matter and staying with our excellent in-house system of two
tin cans connected together by a large amount of string).
Steve Ballmer passionately enthuses
about Visual Basic and there is also an excellent demonstration of a ASP Plus/Visual Basic
showing how you can extremely easily deploy VB code onto a server to support a DHTML web form.
As the demonstrator says, the best thing is "You already know how to do it!"
Visual Basic 7 Is Coming - With Serious New Language Features
And probably the best news of all! For the next version of Visual Basic, Microsoft
are promising to add full object-orientated language support to Visual Basic, including
new Inherits, Protected and Overloads functions, full support for
polymorphism of objects and constructors with parameters.
In addition, there will be native Free Threading support, Structured Exception Handling
(try..catch..finally) and, erm, finally, my all time number one request for the VB language is
getting done:
Dim X As Integer = 1
is equivalent to these statements:
Dim X As Integer
X = 1
Excellent stuff. You can get excited about how good this is going to be by reading the
full details.
Steve Ballmer announced that Visual Studio 7 was expected early next year. There
will also be an interim Visual Studio update to support some of the more advanced VB-web server
integration.
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vbAccelerator NeoCaption Component
There's lots of new stuff to play with in this site update. But check this one out:
a VB skinning component which seamlessly changes everything about the non-client
area of a window:
Now it looks like this...
And then like this...
Setting the skin is a simple matter of creating a couple of bitmaps and setting up the right
colours for other components. Basically, you only need three to four lines of code to
get it running! And if you want the same code to run everytime, why not check out the
capabilities of the XML Property Bag object for total
control over saving and loading persistent object settings?
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20 December 1999
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Moving... (Slight Return)
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The transfer to DataReturn took somewhat longer than anticipated - 4 weeks longer,
not to mention vbAccelerator was lost in space for at least 4 days. Apologies for
the outage, I hope that this will never need to occur again (Hmmm....)
Oh - I'd like to thank everyone who wrote in with kind messages of support.
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Although Some Things Never Change
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Well, its certainly back to normal on the update front. The promised bi-weekly updates
aren't happening - but visit here early next year and I >will< start to post this
material! Coming up: Docking Windows, Icon Editor, Drop-Down Colour Picker, Generic Menu Toolbar, New Icon
menu, Skins, play any AVI including adding true-transparency to an AVI, WinSock component,
System-wide Hooks, MP3s, Owner-Draw Slider, Outlook-style frame and bar components,
Base64 encoding and some long-awaited XML and FTP components....
Also, VB6 binaries and projects for everything, some more sample programs, and
more indexes: control and component cross-indexes, index by API call...
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... Oh! But You Noticed
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Before you start thinking I wasn't going to mention it, certain things have changed
at vbAccelerator. There is the return of the scroll bar on the left-hand side menu.
(Unfortunately it got shy just around the update in August and decided it would
hide well off the left hand edge of IE. Only by delicate coaxing could I
ever manage to get it to come back again.)
Oh ok, then, I admit, there are some ads at the top of the pages. Well, I
couldn't afford to run vbAccelerator
without a bit of assistance anymore.
Sell out? Bad deal? Send your stuff.
Messages containing obscure insults such as
"Thou Cantankerous Bum-Faced
Goat-Breeder" are positively encouraged and will be particularly appreciated.
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18 November 1999
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Moving... (Again!)
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After months of promises vbAccelerator has now signed up to a new provider and should
shortly transfer to DataReturn.
Here's to the next year or so of satisfying our bandwidth demands!
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...And We Want To Use Up All The Bandwidth NOW!!
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Get ready for yet more new code. In a bizarre new fangled Update strategy
I'm going to be attempting to post new content every two weeks for a bit...
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25 August 1999
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99 Articles With FULL source code
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Another update, and that means more source! vbAccelerator is proud
to say there are 99 source code articles available at the site, many
of them including fully operating ActiveX objects you can incorporate
straight into your application.
Please go visit What's New to check out the
new additions. Its been a while since there was a code update, so there's
quite a bit this time. And still I had to hold quite a few back this time
so October (erm, that would be November -Ed) promises to be another good update.
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Our First VB6 Binaries!
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Well Ain't That Cute? There isn't much here yet, but following a long period of
gestation the first VB6 binaries have been born. You can now use a VB6 native
version of SSubTmr in your projects, and
there are also versions of the Header Control
and UpDown Control. Thanks to Ed Haswell for
his help in compiling the original versions of these binaries.
Since VB6 binaries are not compatible with VB5 ones (they require a different run-time
library) vbAccelerator is rebuilding all ActiveX components for VB6 with a different
filename and ProgID.
The standard for all controls that get converted is to add a 6 to the Project Name (first
part of the ProgID) and also to the file name. So for example, the SSubTmr.DLL implementation
class (ISubClass) for VB5 has a ProgID of SSubTimer.ISubClass. The VB6 binary has a ProgID
of SSubTimer6.ISubClass and a filename of SSubTmr6.DLL.
This may mean a little migration work is needed moving VB5 code over to the VB6 version. But
basically this is just to change the project reference and to add a 6 whenever VB comes up
with an error.
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1 July 1999
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What's All That About Then?
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Sorry to all visitors who tried to reach the site for the last 5 days of June and
were told they could not enter. vbAccelerator aims to move yet again
to another service provider to prevent the problem recurring.
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Great Help
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Thank you to Rod Stephens at VB Helper for nominating vbAccelerator for this VB Guru award. Visit the site
and you can get a real newsletter that even works!
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30 May 1999
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Time for CoolMenus
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vbAccelerator is proud to present the latest version of the
Toolbar and Rebar control.
This version adds support for all the new
features provided in COMCTL32.DLL version 5, such as rebar band Chevrons
and drop-down only buttons. Improved code and internal workings mean the
control is more robust too, with new support for alignment left, top, right
or bottom and flexible customisation, including support for runtime style changes
and button-by-button text-label hiding. But that is not all: it also
implements the new CoolMenu style as seen the most recent
Explorer releases, where the menu bar is smartly integrated with the other toolbars.
The CoolMenu functionality goes further than the Explorer versions.
It has also been designed to work seamlessly with icon menus and in MDI forms
too. Check out the Office 97 Style User
Interface Sample to see the new control in full effect!
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Newsletter AWOL
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Please accept my apologies, but unfortunately the much vaunted joint newsletter effort
from vbAccelerator has collapsed after barely one issue. Sadly the owner of VB Toolshed
received a higher calling (to go and do some real work, apparently) and the newsletter
has disappeared too.
A new newsletter venture is currently under preparation.
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See This!
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Thanks to VB Web Directory for placing vbAccelerator in their
"Must See" sites category.
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21 March 1999
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S-Grid Again
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There were a few teething problems with the release version of the
S-Grid Control. Some display
problems, lack of support for non-standard character sets and a bug
in the sorting logic affecting grids with two rows have now all been fixed.
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... And vbAccelerator ImageList
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Version 1.2 of the vbAccelerator ImageList control
has also been released. This adds
many new features: the ability to import .GIF, .CUR and .ANI files (either
as the first frame or all frames), persistance of Keys, automatic setting
of keys based on the file loaded, automatic detection of transparent
colour when importing bitmaps. In addition, this release fixes bugs in the
image ordering when inserting images, some errors which could cause a
crash if the wrong button was pressed at the wrong time :) and also makes
sure to import the correct resource size from icons containing multiple
resources.
Please note that the S-Grid control demonstration requires this new version.
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14 March 1999
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S-Grid
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The S-Grid Control has just been released!
This all-VB control allows you to create a grid in the style of the Outlook Inbox
and has many powerful
features for creating state-of-the-art user interfaces. Too many features to list
here: download the demo and try it out!
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