Guest Whitepapers
- Microsoft Basic Logical Expression Evaluation
- This document was written by Dan Barclay, and is also somewhat
affectionately known as The History of Truth in Microsoft Basic.
It describes how logical expression evaluation has always worked in Microsoft
Basic, as this is a perennial question when folks come to the language from
others. The primary purpose of the article is to describe expression evaluation from a
language standpoint. That is, what the programmer should have in mind when writing the logical expression.
- Language Stability
- A whitepaper written by a longtime (1993-2001) Visual Basic MVP, Dan
Barclay, on the concept of Language Stability. The purpose here is
to describe what the term means to the author and to other owners of valuable code
assets, and how disasters such as VB.NET might have been avoided. While open discussion
of the subject is new, the concept is as old (and as important) as programming itself.
- Unofficial Documentation for VarPtr, StrPtr, and ObjPtr
- This primer on using variable pointers in Visual Basic was written by Matthew Curland,
one of the lead developers on Microsoft's Visual Basic team. I thought it was very well
done, and with Matt's permission I've reprinted it here for your benefit.
Microsoft Authored Material
- Microsoft Responds to Visual Fred
- The marketeers within Microsoft were simply aghast at the original
list of incompatibilities I compiled when Visual Fred initially went into
public beta. They responded with this document, which I've left in its
original Word format so as not to interfere with their message at all. I think
it fairly well speaks for itself regarding the destruction done. It's also
available
zipped, if you'd rather.
- Hardcore Visual Basic, by Bruce McKinney
- In April 2000, MSDN quit distributing this classic text, and subsequently
they've authorized me to repost it here for posterity. I've probably never
admired a technical writer as much as I do Bruce. This is a book that every
Classic VB developer ought to have and read. You might also be interested in
his take on the current
direction of (what Microsoft insists on calling) Visual Basic.
- Notes for Developing DLLs for use with VB5/6
- This file was originally distributed with VB5, but apparently disappeared
from the distribution CDs in VB6. Regardless, it isn't installed by default,
and Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS) got tired of customer frustration
in not being able to find it so they (long ago) asked me to post it here. I'd
forgotten it was here myself, until the site was redesigned, as it never used
to be advertised. Good background information, even for folks who don't write
DLLs in Visual C++.
