Chapter 8 -- Visual Basic Programmer s Guide To Successful Dating

Chapter 8

How Does Y2K Affect Visual Basic?

STEVE OVERALL

Steve has played a major part over the past couple of years in The Mandelbrot Set's drive to raise awareness of the Year 2000 issue for Visual Basic developers. He has had articles published on the subject in both the Visual Basic Programmers Journal and, in Europe, the Microsoft Developer Network Journal. He lives in leafy Surrey with the mysterious "M," his record collection, and his plants. He fully intends to be in no fit state to be aware of any problems when the clocks strike midnight on December 31, 1999.

Hands up—how many of you have heard of the "Millennium Bug" or "Year 2000 Problem" or whatever else it has been called over the last few years? If any of you didn't raise your hands, you are either not open to suggestion or you are new to this planet. Welcome! We call it Earth.

Much has been written about this subject over the past few years. While there is a great wealth of information, most of it is aimed at the COBOL community, and what isn't tends to be very generic—limited to management guides and theoretical discussions. What I want to do in this chapter is simply look at the issue from a practical perspective, focusing on its particular relevance to Visual Basic. I will look at how Visual Basic stores and manipulates date information and, equally important, what its weaknesses are.

For me the issue is not so much what happens when the clocks strike midnight on a certain night in December 1999, but that many developers still do not fully understand how our language deals with this simple piece of data!