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During
the VIP Boat Trip at VBITS'99 on Monday March 1, the editors
of Visual Basic Programmer's Journal surprised all of us by
awarding to the CCRP the VBPJ Editor's Choice Merit Award. In
attendance were CCRP members Earl Damron, Randy Birch,
Jonathan DeVries, Ramon Guerrero, Karl Peterson and Brad
Martinez. Everyone at the CCRP appreciates the honor, and
thanks VBPJ for the award.
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| EDITOR'S
NOTE |
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Readers'
and Editors' Top Picks
Welcome to VBPJ's 1999
Buyers Guide & Product Directory. Each year, we look
forward to putting this issue together for you. It represents
the wealth of tools and components available to you as you
build solutions for your business. And it represents the one
issue each year in which we're able to focus entirely on
things you can buy, not build. VBPJ articles show you
how to do it yourself. By doing so, you learn by doing—and
know exactly what goes into a project. But it doesn't always
make sense to do something yourself, even when you know how.
You might need to meet a particular deadline (gasp!), or you
might have limited resources available (double gasp!).
Whatever the circumstances, the breadth of helpful products
available to you—a VB programmer—is amazing.
Each month, VBPJ brings you a hand-picked selection
of the best new products. But with this issue, you did the
hand-picking. This winter, we e-mailed a select sample of VBPJ
subscribers and asked them to take a special, Web-based
survey. Based on their responses—and there were
plenty—we've got a pretty good idea of what you think about
this important question: “What products do you consider the
best?” We asked this question of products in the categories
you see reflected in this issue. In each case, we also
provided the opportunity to write in a response in case we'd
overlooked your favorite products.
The product receiving the most votes in any category
receives the coveted VBPJ 1999 Readers Choice Award;
the product receiving the second-most votes receives the
nearly-as-coveted VBPJ 1999 Readers Choice Merit Award.
For these award winners, we've included reviews in this issue
to help you decide whether these products can help you be more
productive or address a particular need—and so you can see
if you agree with the votes from your fellow readers.
We've also included hundreds of listings to help you find
products. Based on popular demand, we've restored the product
descriptions to our listings. Mind you, due to space
constrictions, these listings can't be comprehensive. Once
you've perused this issue, though, don't forget to visit our
detailed product guide, available on The Development Exchange
(www.devx.com).
It includes details on thousands of products, along with, in
many cases, product reviews, downloadable demos, and more.
This issue includes four special awards as well: the
Editors Choice Awards. We grant these awards to products
released during the past 12 months that show particular
promise or some notable technical innovation. This year, we
selected four products. Here's why:
- Visio Enterprise 5.0. We've heard about modeling over
and over again this year. Why modeling? As apps become
more complex, including distributed and n-tier projects, a
solid architecture and plan are essential. Many companies
produce solid tools to help you model apps, but one has
attempted to make it extraordinarily simple, yet powerful
as well. Visio Enterprise is a new version of the popular
Visio product; it sports several new features including
AutoDiscovery technology. Despite a few flaws, Visio
Enterprise gets our nod for its attempt to bring powerful
modeling to the masses.
- AnswerWorks 3.0 from WexTech Systems. WexTech,
well-known for its Doc-To-Help product, brings a new twist
to the competitive Windows help-authoring field. Let's
face it—none of us like writing user documentation or
help files. And lucky for us, several high-quality tools
are available to help. But AnswerWorks adds an additional
twist: It gives you the ability to allow users to search
for help using a natural language. Check out the review
for details.
- Microsoft SQL Server 7.0. Other strong database products
have been released this year, but Microsoft's SQL Server 7
represents an overhaul of the previous engine and a leap
forward in scalability and ease of use. New engines scale
from the desktop to the enterprise. Although not without
flaws, SQL Server 7's technology and integration with
Visual Basic and Visual Studio earn it our vote.
- Our Editors Choice Merit Award goes to a noncommercial
product: the Common Controls Replacement Project (CCRP).
This nonprofit project aims to make freely distributable
controls that improve VB's intrinsic controls, as well as
completely new controls. Read the details in our expert
review.
Our congratulations to the winners, but especially to you.
As a VB developer, you have a vast array of off-the-shelf
tools to help you get your job done faster.
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Jeff Hadfield
Editor in
Chief
How
do we choose the products we review in this issue? We don't.
You do.
What products
should we review in the future? What did you think of this
issue? Tell me:
ednote@fawcette.com.
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| Product
Review |
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| Common
Controls Replacement Project (CCRP) |
| Free
enhanced replacements for Microsoft's Common Controls. |
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Have
you ever tried to use one of Visual Basic's common
controls, only to discover that it could almost—but
not quite—do what you wanted? The VB and C++
programmers who make up the Common Controls
Replacement Project (CCRP) have. This group of
talented Windows developers aims to provide smaller,
faster, and—most important—free replacements to
Microsoft's common controls and common dialogs. The
CCRP controls provide roughly the same functionality
as Microsoft's versions, with a ton of extra features.
For example, Microsoft's ProgressBar allows an
application to display its progress graphically by
filling a rectangle with bars or with a solid color.
The CCRP version of the ProgressBar does this as well,
but it can also fill itself with a picture. It can
automatically display a caption indicating progress
textually, as in "16 of 20 files copied" or
"70% complete."
Prime-Time Controls
Other controls available in the project include
Animation, BrowseDialog, Extended FileDialogs,
High-Performance Timer Objects, HotKey, and Pager
controls. I particularly like how the Animation
control allows a program to easily display standard
system animations such as the copy file, delete file,
or empty wastebasket animations. For instance, to
display the move file animation, the program simply
sets the control's OpenStandardAVIResource property to
161 and enables it.
In addition to these prime-time controls, the CCRP
also has beta versions of several controls. You can
download the DragList, IP Address, Date/Time Picker,
and FolderTreeview controls and test them now. The
Extended FileDialogs DLL, ListView, MonthCal, Slider,
Splitter, Status Bar, Tab, and ToolBar controls are
also in the works, but they're not ready for beta. The
Splitter control is one Microsoft should have provided
long ago.
Reduced Size
The CCRP controls not only provide extra features, but
they can also reduce a program's size. If a program
uses a single Microsoft common control, it must
include all the controls in the OCX, paying a total
price of about 1 MB of disk space. On the other hand,
if the program needs a single CCRP control, it can
include only that control and save the space. The
savings can be substantial, but you need to exercise
some caution. If you build a VB6 program using a CCRP
control written in VB5, the deployment package must
include both the VB5 and VB6 runtime libraries,
eliminating any space savings.
In addition to its controls, the CCRP Web site
includes a Cool Tools section that deserves special
mention. This section contains a half dozen tools to
simplify VB programming chores. For example, the
CoolTabs Visual Tabstop Designer lets you graphically
specify locations for tabs in a listbox or textbox.
The RegSvr Context Menu tool adds register and
unregister commands to the context menu that appear
when you right-click on an OCX or DLL file in Windows
Explorer. You can use the Registration Utility tool to
provide a simple, interactive interface to register
and unregister DLL, OCX, and TLB files.
No Source Code
The CCRP controls provide a lot of useful features,
but they have a few shortcomings. For example, the
CCRP controls don't come with source code. That means
if they don't provide the features you need, you're
stuck. You can't modify the controls and you can't fix
them if you find a bug (I found a couple). The CCRP
team doesn't include the code to prevent people from
creating dozens of different versions of the controls.
This is an admirable goal, and the control authors say
the code isn't really a secret. If you contact them,
they'll tell you generally how the controls work. This
isn't a perfect solution, but I can't think of a
better answer to this sticky problem.
The CCRP controls are impressive. They provide a lot
of features omitted by Microsoft's custom controls,
and their price (free) is unbeatable. Perhaps most
important, these controls can inspire us all. They
clearly demonstrate that you can build sophisticated
controls using Visual Basic and not some "more
powerful" language such as C++.
Rod Stephens is the author of several Visual Basic
books, including Ready-to-Run Visual Basic
Algorithms and Custom Controls Library.
Reach Rod at RodStephens@vb-helper.com,
or learn more about his books and download example
programs at www.vb-helper.com.
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