Description:
This guide shows how to extend Visual Basic (VB) with code that handles some advanced programming problems, including algorithms that you can use every day to write faster and more flexible VB applications. After an introductory discussion of profiling algorithms and some techniques to emulate pointers in VB, the author shows how to emulate a variety of data structures, such as linked lists, stacks and queues, and arrays, along with their implementations in VB. Besides these basic container types, the author also proceeds farther afield into a demonstration of trees in VB, including balanced trees. (Though you won't need these data structures for most programs, it's interesting to see how they can be written in VB.) More applicable to real-world problems are the sections on sorting, searching, and hashing in VB. (These algorithms can extend the range of the types of problems VB can solve.) This book closes with some network algorithms and some discussion of object-oriented techniques for VB, including some "patterns" or reusable designs for software. With the accompanying CD-ROM, you can use all the author's algorithms or write your own based on the techniques explored here. --Richard Dragan
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