Dan Appleman's Developing COM/ActiveX Components With Visual Basic 6

The author begins with a tour of ActiveX and COM, along with some common myths about the technology. His introduction to COM technology is good, but Appleman also explains the pros and cons of COM objects used as in-process dynamic-link libraries (DLLs), standalone EXEs, and remote processes.

When it comes to Visual Basic, the author gives plenty of expert knowledge on class and project options. He covers how to design objects in Visual Basic up close and includes some hard-to-find material on collections and multithreading programming techniques. Appleman also provides an interesting example, a live stock-quote server.

A good deal of the book concentrates on writing ActiveX controls in Visual Basic. Although some developers use the Active Template Library (ATL) and Visual C++ for high performance, it's clear that Visual Basic can do a fine job of creating reusable controls. The author presents a soup-to-nuts tour of ActiveX control development, with due consideration of such topics as properties, events, property pages, and even security and signing. Final sections on ActiveX Documents and the new Visual Basic 6 WebClasses (for ASP development) show off Internet development. In all, this book offers much useful material on expert-mode topics geared to the more seasoned Visual Basic developer. --Richard Dragan

Product Description
Developing COM Components with Visual Basic 6 is a focused tutorial for learning component development. It teaches the reader the programming concepts and the technical steps needed to create ActiveX components. Dan Appleman is the author that Visual Basic programmer's recommend to their friends and colleagues. He consistently delivers on his promise to break through the confusion and hype surrounding Visual Basic and ActiveX. Appleman goes beyond the basics to show readers common pitfalls and practical solutions for key problems.

I bought this book to help take me beyond what is available in the Microsoft VB documentation, but it does not do so in any useful way. Having already splashed out the money on the book, I would prefer if advertising was kept in one section, rather than having it throughout the book (loads of code segments, no matter how trivial, are prefaced with a Desaware copyright notice, and we are continually told of their software products).

This book has lots of body but not enough meat.


Second review and this is still a bad book   October 21, 2002
Darrell Nungester (Floyds Knobs, Indiana United States)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

About a year ago, I wrote a review about this book. Everyone was saying that this was a great book, so when I gave this book only 1 star, I took alot of heat from people who think that "Dan's the Man!!". I decided to review this book again. This is my second review and my result is still the same. Dan may be the guru of Visual Basic but he cannot communicate those thoughts into written words. Don't get me wrong, Dan knows how to talk and this book is full of talk, but talk is not teaching nor will talk help you master the advanced subjects such as COM. In this book, Dan starts to tell you about subject, then he goes off on a tangent. Sooner or later, he might return to the subject. The cartoons in the book have a striking resemblance to "Bevis and Butthead". That is a scary thought! Bevis and Butthead becoming software developers and then writing a book about it. The cheap sales pitches for software that his company sells should have been put into an appendix. This book is a very large book (800+ pages) but if you cut out the cartoons and all of the talk, this book would be 1/2 of it's size. I recommend Peter Vogel's book "Visual Basic Object and Component Handbook" instead. Dan is a very smart man but that does not mean he is a great author.


Good book for someone who only likes to read   September 20, 2002
Christine Perry (Beaver Dam, Wisconsin)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful

I buy most programming books with the expectation that there will be some step by step modules geared toward developing some type of application. I found nothing of the sort in this book. I found a lot of code to demonstrate what the author was saying. I felt the whole book - was geared toward the history and explanation of what various programming components were all about. I am an accomplished ASP Web/Database Developer and was interested in learning how to write activex components. I thank the author for wasting my money!


Geeks get it, newbies don't. Get over it.   August 30, 2002
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

This guy REALLY wants reader to understand EVERYTHING about object orientated language and how to implement it in VB. I bought this book for [money] at a garage sale (well, lots of geeks in my region), and it turned out to be the best VB book ever. Being a C++/VB programmer, I am amazed by what I can do with VB. If you have knowledge of Object Orientated Language, and have 2+ years of experience on VB, this book will bring you to the next level. Otherwise, you will be like other angry reviewers, tearing your hair and grinding your teeth.


Excellent, But Not a Light Read   May 10, 2002
0 out of 2 found this review helpful

One of the major advances in the history of VB was the introduction, a couple revs ago, of creating the objects formerly known as COM, ActiveX components. This opened up a whole world of new applications, and knocked a chip off C++ programmers' shoulders. But even wrapped safely beneath VB's development tools, COM is still a complex subject with plenty of traps for the unwary.

But Dan Appleman, dean of Win32 and COM programming, has come to the rescue with this book. Perplexed, indeed. Through clear writing, carefully reasoned descriptions spiced with humor that occasionally has attitude, and thoroughness, the author almost makes clear a complex subject. It still took me a couple of reads to grasp it all, but the work was well worth it. As other reviewers have observed, reading this book through once, or lightly, can leave you more confused than before. Put some work into it, though, and you'll be richly rewarded.

The 28 chapters spread throughout cover every aspect of ActiveX components, from their COM underpinnings to practical ways to build and use them in your projects. Particularly interesting were the chapters ActiveX Myths, IIS Applications, Advanced Techniques, and Multithreading.

The CD-ROM alone is worth the price of admission. It has a bit of promotional stuff for the author's company, Desaware, Inc., but otherwise is full of good information. The help file has a half-hour video presentation was delivered at the 1998 Orlando VBITS about the life of a programmer and, of course, the sample code from the book.

Even though the reader is never in doubt what the author does for a living, besides writing books, the Guide to the Perplexed is one the true must-have books for every professional VB 6 programmer, whether or not you use ActiveX components in your applications.