This book has covered a lot of material about programming in Visual Basic. You have seen how to create the interface of your programs with forms and controls, how to perform tasks using the BASIC programming language, how to handle databases, and a host of other things. Although this book provides you with a great beginning in the world of Visual Basic programming, it should not be the end of your learning experience. As a programmer in a rapidly changing world, you should be constantly learning new skills and refining old ones.
To help you in this continuous learning process, this appendix provides you with a look at some of the additional controls you might want to explore, as well as some other materials that will help you learn more about programming in Visual Basic.
As you have seen through the course of the book, the bulk of your Visual Basic programs are made up of controls. These controls are used to build your program the same way ignition systems, radios, and transmissions are used to build a car. Just like a car, you can add optional equipment to your development environment. This is done in the form of custom controls and add-ins. You have probably already seen how a few of these are used, as you learned about the Masked Edit control, Tabbed Dialog control, RichTextBox control, and others in earlier chapters.
Some of these controls provide an enhanced version of a standard control. This is akin to replacing the basic radio in a car with the radio/cassette/CD combination. It still handles the basic functions, but also provides you with more capabilities. Other controls provide completely new capabilities. This is like adding a sunroof to your car.
Although we have already touched on a few of the custom controls and add-ins that are included with Visual Basic, there are a number of others that you might want to look at. The following controls and add-ins provide additional capabilities to Visual Basic that allow you to build better and more complex programs:
You can find out more about these controls and others in Visual Basic's Custom Controls Help file. The Help file provides you with descriptions of the controls and their properties and methods. You will also find some usage examples.
Third-party controls are one of the great benefits of using Visual Basic. Like other custom controls, these controls can allow your application to perform a variety of tasks. Typically, vendors create both "enhanced" versions of the standard controls as well as controls that give you entirely new capabilities. Two of my favorite controls are VSView by VideoSoft and Calendar Widgets by Sheridan.
VSView provides a replacement for the Printer object in Visual Basic. With VSView, you can easily create multi-column tables and handle word wrapping on the page. You also don't have to worry about keeping track of when page breaks should occur. This is handled for you. Also, one of the best features of the product is that you can easily include print preview capabilities in your code (see Figure A.1). This requires some simple code that you can obtain from the samples included with the product.
FIG. A.1
Print preview is made easy with one third-party control.
The other control, Calendar Widgets, provides you with a series of controls for handling dates. These controls make it easier for you to create programs such as appointment schedulers, to do lists, and other date dependent programs (see Figure A.2). One of the best controls in the group is the Date Combo. This control uses a drop-down calendar that allows the user to pick a date with ease (see Figure A.3). It also makes your programming job easier because you know that the dates are valid and are the correct data type. (Handling dates can be one of the greatest pains in programming.)
FIG. A.2
DayView makes quick work out of creating an appointment calendar.
There are a number of vendors that make third-party controls for a variety of tasks. Table A.1 provides a list of some of these vendors, as well as contact information.
FIG. A.3
DateCombo makes selecting dates as simple as a mouse click.
| Vendor | Web Site | Products |
| Apex Software Corporation | www.apexsc.com | MyData Control, True DBGrid, VBA Companion |
| Crescent Division of Progress Software | www.progress.com/crescent | DBPak, PowerPak Pro, Internet Toolpak |
| Desaware, Inc. | www.desaware.com | SpyWorks, VersionStamper |
| FarPoint Technologies, Inc. | www.fpoint.com | ButtonMaker, Tab Pro, Spread |
| Sax Software | www.saxsoft.com | Basic Engine Pro, Setup Wizard, Webster Control |
| Sheridan Software Systems | www.shersoft.com | ClassAssist, Sheridan Components Suite, VBAssist |
| VideoSoft | www.videosoft.com | VSFlex/OCX, VS-OCX, VSView |
| Visual Components, Inc. | www.visualcomp.com | CodeBank, Formula One, First Impression, Visual Developers Suite Deal OCX |
This book has provided you with a lot of the information you need to develop programs using Visual Basic. Obviously, though, there is a lot of information that could not be squeezed into this book. Fortunately for you, there are a number of other sources available to teach you about advanced programming topics.
The first source of additional information is part of the Visual Basic package itself. Visual Basic comes with an extensive set of help files that provide all the details about each control and programming command. If this is not enough for you, VB Books Online also comes with the Visual Basic package. This product provides you with additional in-depth help on a variety of programming topics. Books Online also has a good search engine that helps you find what you are looking for (see Figure A.4).
FIG. A.4
VB Books Online is a useful database of programming help and sample code.
As you might expect, Microsoft is a great source of additional information on Visual Basic. There are two really good sources of information available from Microsoft. One is free, and the other is available at a reasonable price.
The free resource is, of course, Microsoft's Visual Basic Web site. You can access this site at http://www.microsoft.com/vbasic. This site, shown in Figure A.5, provides some great information, including the following:
FIG. A.5
Microsoft's Visual Basic Web site provides samples, Visual Basic technical articles,
and access to MSDN information.
The other source available from Microsoft is the Microsoft Developer's Network (MSDN). This product is a subscription to a set of CDs. These CDs come about once per quarter and provide you with the latest information on bugs, Microsoft reports about Visual Basic topics, papers from technical conferences, and a bunch of other information. In addition to the CDs, Microsoft sends out the MSDN newsletter to its subscribers. The newsletter also provides timely information about Visual Basic and other Microsoft developer products.
The first source of additional information are books that cover advanced topics such as OLE automation and client/server programming. Other books delve deeply into building multimedia applications, the Windows API, and programming with objects.
Some additional books available from Macmillan include the following:
You will also find some good books published by Que on related topics such as the following:
In addition to books, there are a number of magazines that are dedicated to Visual Basic. These magazines provide descriptions of programming techniques, reviews of custom controls, and informative columns by noted authors. Table A.2 lists several of these magazines along with their publishers and contact numbers.
| Magazine | Publisher | Phone |
| Visual Basic Programmer's Journal | Fawcette Technical Publications | (800) 848-5523 |
| VB Tech Journal | Oakley Publishing Co. | (800) 234-0386 |
| Inside Visual Basic | The Cobb Group | (800) 223-8720 |
| Access/Visual Basic Advisor | Advisor Publications, Inc. | (619) 483-6400 |
Finally, your best source of the most up-to-date information is the Web. There are a number of Web sites out there that are devoted exclusively to Visual Basic, as well as sites that include Visual Basic among their topics.
Using Web Sites The first site is Que's Visual Basic Resource Center. This site, shown in Figure A.6, contains information relating to the following:
The Visual Basic Resource center can be found at http://www.mcp.com/que/vb4/.
Another great site is the WINDX site maintained by the publishers of Visual Basic Programmer's Journal. This site contains, among other things, the latest news about Visual Basic products and source code for the articles from the VBPJ. The WINDX site can be found at http://www.windx.com (see Figure A.7).
One final site to mention is Carl and Gary's Visual Basic Homepage. This is one of the oldest and best known Web sites devoted to Visual Basic. As with other sites, this one contains the latest news about VB, reviews of third-party controls, technical papers about in-depth VB topics, and links to other Web sites. Visit Carl & Gary's, shown in Figure A.8, at http://www.apexwsc.com/vb/.
FIG. A.6
Que's Visual Basic Resource Center.
FIG. A.7
Visual Basic Programmer's Journal maintains the Windows Development Exchange (WINDX)
site.
FIG. A.8
Carl & Gary's is one of the best known Visual Basic Web sites.
Using Other Online Resources In addition to the Web sites mentioned earlier, there are newsgroups on the Web that are devoted to Visual Basic. There are also two major forums on CompuServe that are devoted to Visual Basic--MSBASIC and VBPJFORUM. The following is a partial list of Visual Basic newsgroups:
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