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April 20, 1999

Passing Public class variables by reference

Under VB4 Public variables in form and class modules were implemented in the same manner as variables in BAS modules, that is, as direct references to memory locations. This allowed

Create stand-alone type libraries

Many VB programmers assume that Visual Basic 5.0 is not capable of creating stand-alone Type Libraries, because the documentation states that when an ActiveX component or control is created, the

Change caret size and blink rate

You can alter the size of the caret (this is the name of the cursor within text boxes, not to be confused with the mouse cursor), for instance to ease

ComputerName – The name of the local computer

Private Declare Function GetComputerName Lib “kernel32” Alias _ “GetComputerNameA” (ByVal lpBuffer As String, nSize As Long) As Long’ Returns the name of the computer.Function ComputerName() As String Dim buffer As

IsWindowsNT – Check Windows platform

Private Declare Function GetVersion Lib “kernel32” () As Long’ Returns True is executed under Windows NT,’ False if executed under Windows 95/98Function IsWindowsNT() As Boolean IsWindowsNT = (GetVersion() And &H80000000)

WindowsVersion – The version number of the operating system

Private Type OSVERSIONINFO dwOSVersionInfoSize As Long dwMajorVersion As Long dwMinorVersion As Long dwBuildNumber As Long dwPlatformId As Long szCSDVersion As String * 128End TypePrivate Declare Function GetVersionEx Lib “kernel32” Alias

Enhanced For-Next loops

At times you may need to execute the same block of statements for different values of a variable, but you can’t use a straight For Next loop because the sequence

Fixed-length strings allocate and deallocate faster

Fixed-length strings are generally slower than conventional strings, because all VB string functions and operators only recognize conventional strings, thus all fixed-length strings must be transparently converted to and from