Adding Value to Your Applications

Part IV

Techniques for Adding Value

Chapter 18

Adding Value to Your Applications

Parts I, II, and III of this book discussed how to prepare applications for upgrading, introduced the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET upgrade technologies, and looked at how to fix problems in your upgraded application. The final four chapters of this book depart from the subject of upgrading and instead look at how you can continue developing your application in Visual Basic .NET and how you can add value by incorporating new features of Visual Basic .NET into your application.

In this chapter, we ll demonstrate a number of new features that you may want to add to your upgraded applications. You ll see how to load objects dynamically from other DLLs, create rich graphics that were out of the reach of Visual Basic 6 programming, access the registry with less effort than ever before, and work with the powerful new Microsoft .NET file classes.

Note that the features we discuss in this chapter are all optional additions to your projects. We introduce some new ways of doing familiar things, plus some techniques that were not possible in Visual Basic 6. This chapter does not provide an exhaustive list of new capabilities in Visual Basic .NET; instead, it simply describes some cool features you can add to upgraded projects.

Throughout this chapter we ll refer to the sample application Dynamic App.sln, located on the companion CD.