and, Start Developing is no surprise. Some activities are complicated no matter how hard you try to simplify
them. Programming is one of them.
Start Developing for Visual Basic comprises four main components. The first is its application wizard, which guides you through those first unsteady steps of constructing an application. A series of dialog boxes prompt you for the characteristics of your application: Will it use a single- or multiple-document interface? What kind of database support (if any) will it require? Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)? Jet? Would you like it to have a toolbar? The result is a functioning skeleton of a program to which you can begin attaching the flesh and muscle of application code.
The second component is a collection of "assistants," which are VB add-ins that eliminate much of the drudge work involved with producing quality code. For example, the error-handling assistant automatically inserts error-exit code into selected (or all, if you wish) procedures and functions in your application.
Another assistant collects project statistics. For example, it ide
ntifies procedures and functions lacking in error-handling code. (Shame on you. You should have used the other assistant to put it there.) It also reports the average number of lines in a module, the average number of lines in a routine, and so on.
OFX modules are the third, and perhaps most important, component of Start Developing. These modules include a large collection of library routines that cover areas as fundamental as string manipulation (e.g., scanning a string of tokens separated by a delimiter; indenting, left-justifying, right-justifying, or centering lines; and more) to areas as specific as reading and writing the INI files or the registry.
Start Developing even provides a set of routines that offers a unified interface for dealing with INI files and/or registry entries. There are also numerous routines for conquering ODBC either directly or through remote data objects (RDOs), as well as VB/SQL and Jet.
Given that the OFX modules represent a treasure trove of routines to draw from, i
t would be nice if you could simply dip into that trove at will. It's not that simple, but the documentation describes a roundabout way of "stealing" the routines. You just create a dummy application using Start Developing's application wizard. The dummy application includes all the routines you want, so you can copy out whatever ones that you need. You have to be careful, however, because many of the routines are interdependent. Fortunately, the manual gathers related modules together, so you don't ever have to worry about interdependencies.
Finally, there's Office Book, a kind of miniapplication that you can, in turn, embed in your application. It's an ODBC-based contact manager implemented as an OLE server. In truth, this seems a little out of place with the rest of the product, but if you need a contact manager anywhere in your product, here it is.
The benefits from this package come not only from its software. Although it covers only six pages, the manual's "Ten Laws for Visual Basic Development"
is a must-read for all VB programmers. (A note to Moss Micro: Do the VB programming community a favor and put these laws up on your Web page.)
I noticed that you can also find some of the features provided by Start Developing's assistants -- automatic error-code writing, function-header templates, and source code statistics -- in MicroHelp's Code Complete Code Analyst and AutoCoder (see the July 1996 Codetalk). But this overlap detracts from neither product. VB programmers can probably use more of this stuff, not less.
Where to Find
Moss Micro
Phone: (714) 260-0300
Fax: (714) 260-0325
Internet:
http://www.mossmicro.com
You Can Start Developing Now
