Matthew Curland is a long-time member of Microsoft's Visual Studio development team. Visual Basic's IntelliSense feature is his most visible contribution. A frequent and popular speaker at VBITS, he also contributes black-belt articles to the leading VB journal, VBPJ, and is the co-author of Object Programming with Visual Basic 4 (Microsoft Press). 0201707128AB04062001

• Foreword. Preface. 1. Building Blocks. Phantom Pointers. Living Pointers. VBoost Objects. 2. Leveraging Arrays. Array Descriptors. Reading Array Variables. Writing to Array Variables. Array Options: Beyond Fixed or Variable Size. Miscellaneous Tips for Using Arrays. 3. IUnknown: An Unknown Quantity. VB and IUnknown. Declaring IUnknown and Calling Its Functions. 4. Binding Functions to Objects. When are objects bound to? Name Binding at Runtime. VTable-Binding Custom Control Interfaces. 5. Object Design Constructs. Abstraction with Implements. Pluggability of Calling Code. Implements and Implementation Reuse. Aggregation. 6. Circular References. Intermediate Object Solutions. Weak References and Collections. Transferring Object Ownership. Hierarchical Object Models. 7. External Object Creation. Object Creation with Class Factories. Loading DLL Objects Directly. Custom Loading Custom Controls. Custom Class Objects. 8. Lightweight COM Objects. Lightweight Basics. Termination Code on Structures. LastIID Lightweight. ArrayOwner Lightweight. Where's the Interface? To Err or Not to Err. Returning Errors from Lightweights. Aggregating Lightweight Objects. Coding the QueryInterface Function. 9. Large Systems of Objects. Using a Fixed-Size Memory Manager. Scribble Sample. 10. VB Objects and the Running Object Table. Registering VB Objects with The ROT. ROTHook Implementation Details. 11. Calling Function Pointers. Sample: Calling DllRegisterServer. Sample: QuickSort, Once and for All. Function Pointers in VB for Alpha. Stack Allocation. Generating Your Own In-Line Assembly. Pointers to Class Functions. Using CDECL Functions. 12. Overriding Functions. Cooperative Redirection. Interface Wrapping. Thinner Interface Wrapping. Wrapping Issues. 13. Threads in VB. Thread Local Storage. Can You Avoid the Marshaling Overhead? To Thread or Not to Thread. Creating Threads in a Client EXE. Coordinated Gate-Crashing in STA Apartments. Creating Worker Threads in DLLs. 14. Strings in VB. UNICODE Conversions. String Allocation. Strings as Numbers. 15. Type Libraries and VB. VB-Generated Type Libraries. VB-Friendly Custom Type Libraries. Binary Compatibility. Post-Build Type Library Modifications. 16. Controlling Windows. Subclassing. Custom Window Creation. Windowless Controls. Appendix: VBoost Reference. Assignment and Arithmetic Functions. Memory Allocation Objects. Aggregation Functions. Index. 0201707128T04062001