Chapter 10 -- Starting with Bases Loaded

Chapter 10

Building Base Code

PHIL RIDLEY

Phil has been working with Visual Basic since version 3, mainly within the finance and insurance areas. His main area of expertise is creating large, reusable business objects, using base code wherever possible. When not working seven days a week, Phil can be found watching football or playing the occasional round of golf.

Do engineers reinvent the wheel every time they need to build a new piece of machinery? Of course not. So why do we, as developers, almost always do the equivalent when building new applications? C++ developers have been using MFC for years. J++ developers have AFC. So why don't we have our own equivalents? At The Mandelbrot Set (International) Limited (TMS), we've been using our own application template for a number of years for all new projects (see Appendix for more details).

In this chapter, we'll look at some of the reasons for using base code and some of the techniques that can be applied to creating your own base code. Finally we'll look at how Microsoft Visual Basic templates can be used to provide frameworks for common forms, classes, and modules.