A Brief Preview of the Visual Basic 5.0 Development Environment

Microsoft's Web site (http://www.microsoft.com/vbasic) offers a freebeta version of Visual Basic 5.0 Control Creation Edition (VB5CCE) fordownloading. The file I downloaded was about 7MB, and it expanded to take about20MB of hard disk storage. You must download the documentation and Help filesseparately.

The development environment of VB5CCE offers several significant changes toearlier versions of VB. Screen A shows VB5CCE's main development environment.Let's take a quick look at the main changes, starting at the top of Screen A.

The VB5CCE toolbar looks a lot like the VB 4.0 toolbar, but it containssome subtle differences. First, notice the small arrows next to the New Projectand New Form icons at the left end of the toolbar. Clicking each arrow displaysa drop-down box that lets you select different options. For example, the arrownext to the New Project icon lets you select a new ActiveX project, a newStandard EXE project, or a new CTLGROUP project. You can configure the VB5CCEtoolbar, and you can attach other toolbars. For instance, on the far right ofthe toolbar in Screen A, you can see the Debugging toolbar.

On the left side of Screen A, you can see the VB5CCE toolbox, which looks different from the old toolbox because it doesn't display its icons in separateboxes. Despite the change in appearance, the toolbox's functionality remainsunchanged.

The interactive design window (displaying the NT Magazine - Test NetworkSystems Control dialog box in Screen A) works the same as the design window inearlier versions of VB. However, VB5CCE adds one important capability: You canuse the design window to manipulate UserControl objects and build ActiveXcontrols.

The code-editing window (displaying the Form_Load subroutine in Screen A)contains some of the most obvious changes. Instead of restricting the editor'sview to a single subroutine or function, the new editor displays all thesubroutines and functions found in a given file. A solid line separates eachsubroutine and function.

The new editor (not shown in Screen A) is intelligent--it automaticallydisplays pop-up menus. For example, if you begin typing UserControl., when youreach the dot, the new VB5CCE editor displays a pop-up list that contains allthe valid properties and methods for the UserControl object. Below thecode-editing window is VB5CCE's debugging window.

VB5CCE's Project Group window has changed significantly. The new window cancontain multiple projects. One project can contain an ActiveX control andanother project can contain a Standard EXE routine that you can use to test theActiveX control. For instance, in Screen A's Project Group window, you can seean ActiveX project (NetworkSystems) and a Standard EXE project(TestNetworkSystems) contained in the same project group (Network System Group).Below the Project Group window you can see the Properties window, which isessentially unchanged from earlier versions of VB.

Below the Properties window is the new Form Layout window that displays asmall representation of the form in the design window. This view is handybecause working with a large number of windows can obscure much of thedevelopment environment. I found that using a large monitor (17 inches orlarger) and high screen resolution (1024*768) provides ample desktop workspace.

Although the new native code compiler in VB5CCE can create ActiveX controlsand Win32 .exes, these modules can't run as standalone programs. ExecutingVB5CCE applications requires the VB5CCE runtime dynamic link library (DLL),msvbvm50.dll. On the plus side, this requirement means that the resulting .ocxand .exe files are generally quite small. On the negative side, you must havelarge runtime files present to run your ActiveX controls and .exe applications.

One word of warning to readers interested in trying out the VB5CCE betaversion: The VB5CCE beta replaced my existing comctl32.ocx and comdlg32.ocxfiles with new versions that were incompatible with applications on mysystem--including VB 4.0 projects that used the older versions. You will want toback up these files before you install the VB5CCE beta.