Subclassing & Hooking with Visual Basic offers developers a unique way to customize Windows behavior. Windows is a message-based system. Every action you request creates one or more messages to carry out the action. These messages are passed between objects and carry with them information that gives the recipient more detail on how to interpret and act upon the message. With Subclassing and the Windows hooking mechanism ("hooks"), you can manipulate, modify, or even discard messages bound for other objects within the operating system, in the process changing the way the system behaves.

This book is geared towards the Visual Basic developer who wants a better understanding of subclassing and hooking as well as how to incorporate these techniques into their projects. You need not be an advanced Visual Basic developer to learn how to effectively use subclassing and hooking. Although, many of the Win32 API function will need to be utilized in order to write subclassing and hooking applications and, therefore, a good knowledge of the Win32 API functions and how they are used within Visual Basic is necessary.

In understanding subclassing and hooks, you must delve deep into the internals of the Window’s operating system. This deeper understanding of Windows allows you not only to gain an understanding of subclassing and hooking, but also to learn more about the messaging system, which is the heart of the Windows operating system. The beginning of this book lays a solid foundation that will bring the beginning or intermediate developer up to speed on these topics.

If you’re going to reengineer your entire organization around ad hoc, short-term projects, you’d better have people who know how to run projects well. And when, according to Standish Group, only 28 percent of IT projects meet “basic” standards of success, we’ve clearly got a long way to go.

Smart big companies are building project management offices (often, leveraging resources they first organized for Y2K). Smart people are learning project management on their own, without being asked. Smart people in a hurry are doing it with Project Management JumpStart.

Why is everyone so excited about OOP? The chief problem with computer programs is complexity. Large programs are probably the most complicated entities ever created by humans. Because of this complexity, programs are prone to error, and software errors can be expensive and even life threatening (in air-traffic control, for example). Object-Oriented Programming offers a new and powerful way to cope with this complexity. Its goal is clearer, more reliable, more easily maintained programs.

Of the Object-Oriented Programming languages, C++ is by far the most widely used. (Java, a recent addition to the field of OO languages, lacks certain features, such as pointers, that make it less powerful and versatile than C++.)

This book teaches Object-Oriented Programming with the C++ programming language, using either Microsoft or Borland compilers. It is suitable for professional programmers, students, and kitchen-table enthusiasts.

Management of the Object-Oriented Development Process consists of a series of high-level discussions on technical and managerial issues related to object-oriented development. This book introduces object-oriented development techniques, including modeling languages, programming languages, reusable patterns and software development processes. It discusses the ongoing trends of object-oriented development, including emerging e-business development frameworks, executable UML and requirements engineering. There is also a focus managerial issues such as project management and software evaluation, and how to manage the paradigm shift from structured to object-oriented development.

This process offers systems developers, project managers, information systems students and researchers technical skills as well as strategic insights on how to manage software projects, deploy object-oriented software development processes, understand the current trends and make the transition from structured to object-oriented techniques.

Master the principles of object-oriented programming as it is used with the most recent version of ActionScripting. This book is designed to provide readers with an understanding of object-oriented programming, ActionScript 2.0, and the interaction of the two. Section 1 begins with an introduction to ActionScript 2.0 and the specifics of building classes in AS2. Other topics of discussion include adding properties and methods to classes, inheritance, interfaces, inter-object communications, the details and implications of object-oriented design as a process, and working with and building components. Section 2 investigates the server side of applications. In the new Rich Internet Application paradigm, Flash MX 2004 is used as the user interface to an Internet based Client-Server application, and we will frequently need to interact with other server based technologies. Chapters discuss the importance of the server model; specific methods to interact with different server side technologies, including WebServices, XML files, and even simple text files; and the specific ramifications of working with the Flash Communications Server. Section 3 ties all of the concepts presented in the first two sections together by building a single cohesive application. Step-by-step procedures for conceptualizing and building the application are provided along with detailed coverage of how to debug and optimize the application.