vbAccelerator How To Articles

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NOTE: this page has been superceded by the version at the new site.

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The How To section provides some extended articles explaining in depth how to use Win32 techniques from VB, packed full of sample code and (possibly) erudite VB knowledge. You may have noticed, however, there aren't many here right now - too many beers and fine wines! But hopefully more will come...

LinkSpoof

No article as such, instead this is a sample from Robert Heinig, demonstrating how to override VB6's Linker to link in pre-compiled C++ or assembler code directly into your VB6 executable. So now there can no longer be an excuse for not having the fastest code on the planet!
Component Base Addresses Covers the why and how of component Base Addresses, including a discussion of their performance and how to determine the Base Address of existing objects. Store Objects against a Control Item's Tag or ItemData property Often in a control you want to associate more information with an item in the control than you can fit into the provided ItemData or Tag property. This article demonstrates three techniques for storing objects against control items, demonstrating how you can write code which performs 100 times faster than the equivalent VB implementations. Subclassing Without The Crashes The introduction of the AddressOf operator to VB5 now allows you to subclass, although it is not nearly as simple as it ought to be.

The SSUBTMR component is a stable and consistent way of working around difficulties in subclassing. You can either use it as an external DLL to provide a (more) crash-proof way of debugging subclassed components, or by including one module and one interface class, you can compile it directly into your application once you are happy the subclassing is working. SSUBTMR is the basis for most of my controls. Associating File Types With Your Application This article describes from start to finish what you need to do to:

Associate a file with your application, including setting a customised document icon and creating as many Explorer menu actions as you want for your association.
Properly detect whether an existing instance of your app is running or not
Sending information cross-process from one instance to another.

There's lots to think about to do this task properly and reliably. But as you will see from the article, by judiciously using the Win32 API, and using the code in the Registry class and SSUBTMR you end up with a fairly small code base to completely solve this task. This article describes code designed for the Goldfish demonstration application.

Creating truly transparent owner-drawn controls
Something I think is quite cool (although, as famous VB hacker Escher once said, this is because I've got a 'brain the size of a walnut'. I'd give you a link to this great fun article, but unfortunately it has been deleted from MSDN. However, the article was called 'Slimy Windows Hacks for VB' and went on at some length about how the author was a rabbit and therefore benefited from great vision due to eating carrots.)

Building Fully-Featured Applications with no dependencies other than VB runtimes
I'm afraid I have had to put this article is on hold due to technical difficulties.

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