Hardcore Visual Basic
by Bruce McKinney · first published 1995
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4recommended by
5HN commenters
2010–2025first – last mentioned
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> No multi-threading That isn’t quite correct, because you can take the address of a VB6 procedure and pass it to win32 CreateThread. See the related chapter in Hardcore Visual Basic for example. And of course you can use win32 mutexes and such. Thanks to the win32 interoperability, there aren’t a lot of limits of what you can do in VB6.
on “Is XYplorer really written in VB6?” ↗…Basic and then VBA when all the office apps standardized on it instead of each having their own flavor. VB was great like you said until you needed to do something difficult. I remember Bruce McKinny’s Hardcore Visual Basic book being my best friend for a little while. It thought me I could do the hard stuff in C, make a DLL and drop that into my VB project. Bruce had a saying, VB makes 95% of the job easy and the other…
on “The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic” ↗…So for every method in your child class you have to write some boilerplate to make a call to the parent. As a side note, there was a really awesome book I read back when VB6 was still new. It's called Hardcore Visual Basic, and it is about how to do things that were said to be impossible in VB. Using the undocumented VarPtr functions, calling Windows API, etc. It is out of print (obviously), but available online at http://vb.mvps.org/hardweb/…
on “Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?” ↗I was going to make a reference to "Hardcore Visual Basic" but you beat me to it. Fantastic book, it's hard to find a tech book that is that useful and fun at the same time. My first job started out with mostly Visual Basic 6. One of the modules written in…
on “The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic” ↗…could run stuff asynchronously using a hidden window. Basically you could use the full win32 API and use VB procedures as callbacks (e.g. as window procedures for your own window subclass). The book “Hardcore Visual Basic” explained how to do it: https://classicvb.net/hardweb/hardbook.htm
on “RAD Basic – Compatible with Visual Basic 6 projects” ↗Haha, your story about hitting a wall with BASIC only to go somewhere else reminds me of how I decided to learn C: I had "mastered" QBASIC and was learning Visual Basic, so my dad bought me a book called "Hardcore Visual Basic". That book discussed extensively how to get Visual Basic to interact with the native Windows API for fun and profit. Pretty much every chapter began with "this is so much easier in C, but here's how…
on “Buttery Smooth Emacs” ↗