When creating programs that use Remote Method Invocation (RMI), you’ll need to obtain a reference to a remote object. Although the name of the specific object will usually be pre-defined

Hexadecimal and octal literals are indicated by special prefixes. A hexadecimal literal is indicated by the ‘0x’ prefix: int n =0x1000; // decimal value of n is 4096 An octal

Suppose you have a table that contains transactions for different products and clients. Each day you need to summarize this information. If you need to know the sales figures for

Since the Visual InterDev Scripting Object Model wraps all its script objects inside a huge HTML Form, you can count the number of form elements using the form’s length property.

A template can take ordinary types such as int and long as parameters: template class Array // type int used a parameter {/*

A template can take as an argument the address of an object with external linkage. A string literal cannot be used as a template argument since it has internal linkage.

Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) drivers sometimes perform conversions on Structured Query Language (SQL) statements that you execute before sending them to the database. It can be helpful for debugging purposes

JavaScript has a powerful mechanism to create and execute code on the fly using the eval() statement. This statement takes a string as a parameter. This string is then run

SQL Server 7 has taken great strides in improving its security model. Groups have been done away with and replaced by roles. The practical difference lies in the fact that

VB stores symbolic and literal constants internally using the simplest data type possible; this means that most common numeric constants-such as zero or one-are stored as Integers. If you use

Don’t use an empty For…Next loop to add pauses to your programs; instead, use the Sleep API function, that releases the CPU and lets other apps in the system effectively

In VB applications compiled as native code, GoSubs are 5-6 times slower than calls to regular Subs or Functions; conversely, in p-code they are considerably faster. This is one of

OK, this is a silly suggestion, but I personally know a lot of developers that complain about Visual Basic’s bugs that were fixed in more recent Service Packs. This is

Use the And operator instead of Mod when the divisor is a number in the form 2^N. For instance, there are two methods to extract the least significant byte in

‘ ShellSort an array of any type” ShellSort behaves pretty well with arrays of any size, even’ if the array is already “nearly-sorted”, even though in’ particular cases BubbleSort or

If your application uses objects from external components, either third-party or your own libraries, a good rule of thumb is to include the complete servername.classname string in the Dim statement,

The StartLogging and LogEvent methods of the App object only work in compiled applications. This behavior is by design and shouldn’t be considered a bug, even though it isn’t documented

You can’t reliably test an auto-instancing object variable using the Is Nothing test, because as soon as you reference the variable Visual Basic silently creates an object of the given

‘ Returns the name of the current project’ The first time it’s called it clears the error code’Function ProjectName() As String Static result As String If Len(result) = 0 Then

‘ Return the string of code the is selected in the code window’ that is currently active. ‘ This function can only be used inside an add-in.Function GetSelectedText(VBInstance As VBIDE.VBE)

‘ Test whether a font name and size is supported’ Returns True if the font is supported, False otherwise” If the font is supported but the size is not, it

‘ Returns the integer equal or higher than its argumentFunction Ceiling(Number As Double) As Long Ceiling = -Int(-Number)End Function

Private Declare Function GetSystemMetrics Lib “user32” (ByVal nIndex As Long) _ As Long’ Returns True if a Network is found (read-only)Function IsNetworkInstalled() As Boolean Const SM_NETWORK = 63 IsNetworkInstalled =

Use “” instead of “/” when performing divisions between Integers. The “/” operator returns a Single value, therefore the seemingly efficient line C% = A% / B% actually requires three

Every now and then someone asks me “How can I modify the default description that is associated to an add-in I have written and that appears in the Add-In Manager?

Don’t fill your code with unnecessary DoEvents statements, especially within time-critical loops. If you can’t avoid that, at least you can reduce the overhead by invoking DoEvents only every N

‘ Binary search in an array of any type’ Returns the index of the matching item, or -1 if the search fails” The arrays *must* be sorted, in ascending or

‘ The number of 1’s in a binary number” This routine is based on the following property ‘ of binary numbers: n And (n-1) always clears the’ least significant “1”

Private Declare Function GetShortPathName Lib “kernel32” Alias _ “GetShortPathNameA” (ByVal lpszLongPath As String, _ ByVal lpszShortPath As String, ByVal cchBuffer As Long) As Long’ Convert a long filename into the