Visual Basic

Minutiae

As you can probably guess from its title, this chapter is going to cover a rather broad range of information about Visual Basic. Think of this chapter as a Visual Basic programmer's smorgasbord. You'll learn about such topics as the advantages and disadvantages of compiling to p-code and native code.

You'll get some hints on how to optimize your applications beyond just writing excellent code. And you'll also receive up-to-the-minute information on such scintillating subjects as types and type libraries. So let's begin!

Stuff About the Compiler

In this section, we'll examine applications compiled to native code. We won't deal much with p-code (packed code) at all, aside from a brief introduction and some comparisons with native code.

As you probably know, Visual Basic 6 applications, just like their Visual Basic 5 counterparts, can now be "properly" compiled, unlike Visual Basic version 4 and lower, which produced p-code executables. In other words, as well as producing p-code executables, Visual Basic 6 can produce a native code binary. Which compile option you choose is up to you. I suspect that most corporate developers will want to know more about this compiler process than they ever wanted to know about p-code.