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Hardcore Visual Basic 5.0 (2nd Edition)
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Hardcore Visual Basic 5.0 - Second Edition (1997)(Microsoft Press).iso
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ICONWO~1
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README.TXT
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IconWorks
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This directory contains a copy of IconWorks, modified slightly so that
it runs in 32-bit mode. Despite minor enhancements, IconWorks is
basically a Visual Basic 1.0 program. It has no enhancements to take
advantage of later features. It's not my program, and I take no
responsibility for any of its problems. I provide it only as a bonus
challenge. This version is unchanged from the VB4 version I provided
with the first edition of the book.
Here are some ideas for bringing IconWorks up to speed:
1. The program uses TrackPopupMenu API calls for popup menus instead
of using Visual Basic's menu features. You'll find other cases
where IconWorks uses difficult API calls rather than simple
features added for Visual Basic versions 2 and 3.
2. The code doesn't use object-oriented techniques or other new
features of Visual Basic versions 4 or 5.
3. The user interface works, but it is a little outdated. IconWorks
could use a facelift with a toolbar, status bar, tree view, and
other new interface features.
4. IconWorks is OK for standard icons, but it doesn't do other
images. It wouldn't take much to make it handle other picture
types, such as:
- cursors (including hot spots)
- bitmaps of any size
- specialized bitmaps such as toolbar buttons
5. The drawing tools provided are nice, but you could easily give it
more tools such as a spray can, a bezier curve tool, a text tool,
an irregular clip tool, and others. Look at Paint and ImagEdit
for ideas.
6. What Windows needs is a good icon editor that knows about small
icons, huge icons, icons of random sizes, and dual image icon
files. Creating icons of different sizes should be easy using
techniques shown in Hardcore Visual Basic, but writing dual-image
icons to files is a difficult API problem. The Picture object
doesn't support multiple images, so you'll have to bypass it and
write the icons to disk using the API.
Have fun!