Visual Basic 6.0 Business Objects

by Rockford Lhotka

Book Overview

This book is aimed at experienced application developers, who have developed applications in Windows using Visual Basic. It will also appeal to intermediate-level programmers because it presents components and techniques that can easily be integrated into their applications.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 186100107X
• ISBN13: 9781861001078
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Wrox Press
• Length: 735 Pages
• Weight: 3.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.1" x 7.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Rocky hits the mark

What a great book!The title should actually be, "I Can't Believe I Was Able To Program Anything Without Using Class Modules". This book is really about back-end programming. It's about writing a DLL that abstracts what you want to do from the nuts and bolts work of actually doing it. And the best thing about it is that the components you write are COM compliant so they can be used with basically any language; specifically I've used them with ASP and ColdFusion.Imagine writing an ASP page like this to update someone's salary: objStaff.beginedit objStaff.load 10 objStaff.Salary = 60000 objStaff.applyedit set objStaff = nothing %><p>Notice that there's no database code, no business logic, no MTS stuff, no nothing. All of these things get encapsulated in a DLL so that the front-end programmers don't have to worry about them. They just create an object, do stuff, and kill it. If that StaffMember was a non-manager, the DLL could be written to raise an error if the salary was over a certain threshold, or whatever. It's up to you, the back-end programmer, and it's not possible to bypass the business's rules by forgetting to include the logic in the GUI. Also, this is great if you are selling your app to a customer, because your code is compiled and can't be "stolen" or modified.<p>The book got a little bit confusing to me at times in chapters 4 and 5, but I hadn't touched VB in about two years since an intro college class, so that may have been to blame. Also, it was more like "Where are we going with this?" rather than "What's going on?". However, if you struggle through to chapter 6 or so, you will have an "A-ha" moment and then it will all make sense. Believe me!<p>I now feel like a VB 6 Expert from reading this book. It goes deeply into Debugging as an added bonus, and I don't really know how I got along without the "Immediate" window for so long. Also, VB components are so much faster and more reliable than writing (and re-writing) your business rules in ASP code. Your web apps will stop sucking and start being fast and reliable.<p>I whole-heartedly recommend this book, and I can't wait for the VB.net update.

Wanna be good?

Great is not enough! Wrox did it again. If you want to do n-tier architecture, don't go further except if you want to get the Professional Visual Basic 6 Distributed Objects from the same author.You can get into a more *real-life* programming examples with this book and ALL exemples are very well explained. It gets you in every twist there is to do good OOP with Visual Basic 6.For beginner's to intermediate programmers, you might have some difficulties BUT it's written well enought where you can follow anyway. For experienced programmers, you will probably learn new twists.A must.

REQUIRED!

This is the most important Visual Basic book on 3-tier application development. It is a tutorial on 3-tier development, as such it stands with Petzolds original "Programming Windows" in its clarity of presentation. There are loose ends, particularly error handling, concurrency, and reporting, which are not really addressed, but he does touch on these problems on his web site ... He also doesn't present the complete picture until halfway through the second book; "VB6 Distributed Objects", which is a necessary companion to this book. These 2 books are "must haves", cornerstones upon which current VB application programming is based.

Don't leave home without it!

Another fantastic Wrox book! I have already used Rocky's design principles in a 4 tier Web application and they are already reaping the dividends (literally!). Rocky doesn't just copy out examples from the MSDN - he actually explains in great detail HOW to design a working application outlining the pitfalls on the way. Rocky guides the reader through the basic principles all the way to a full blown 3/4 tier working development using different front ends, while explaining the limitations and power of Microsoft's DNA paradigm. You will learn and understand the principles faster by actually going through the examples and using the VB debugger rather than leaving it for bedtime reading. It takes a little longer to develop an app using components but the rewards come in the reduced maintenance costs, multiple front ends without re-code and the scalability of your solutions. No more maintenance budget gobbling code monsters!!Not really for the beginner programmer though - too much melon twisting!Thanks Rocky!

A must have for any serious VB developer

If you don't have this or the previous book relating specifically to VB5 - get it now ! The author almost manages to clearly explain implementation of the layer model and why you want to in the first place straight off. I must confess, that I got a little lost about two thirds of the way through the book, but soon recovered by actually trying to create my own objects and then referring back to the book. The problems that he explains the solutions to are not always apparent at the time ; I can't really blame the author for that though - far better a solution given to a problem you are not yet aware of, than none at all. Overall this is the most valuable book on VB and indeed object technology in the real world I have ever read. My own companies applications are now heavily based around these techniques - modified and improved somewhat to increase flexibility but in reality we only needed to change his concepts by about 5 or 10%. Well, you have to have something to do as a programmer...