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codesmart_2007_vb6.exe Updated: Dec 12, 2007 |
Keen to see CodeSMART 2007 for VB6 in action? Well, you have reached the right place. We have prepared for you a few sections illustrating several CodeSMART 2007 for VB6 key features.
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CodeSMART 2007 for VB6 is exceptionally well integrated within the Visual Basic 5.0 and 6.0 IDEs. All the features it adds to Visual Basic are accessible through the main menu (1) and four toolbars (2) it registers with the environment. CodeSMART tools are hosted or display their results within dedicated tool windows (3, and 4) that can be moved or docked. Code view enhancements are displayed directly in the Visual Basic standard code editor window (5). There are many more proofs of the excellent integration CodeSMART has with Visual Basic, like the MDI tabs it adds to the IDE, the tabs added to the Immediate window (which is thus converted into a central reporting place while it does not loose its initial functionality) - these on the visual part, because there is a hidden part too, where everything is magically inserted into Visual Basic's processing chain.
CodeSMART can change the Visual Basic standard multiple document interface (MDI) into a modern "Tabbed MDI" one similar to VS.NET and other modern environments. Advantages include quick navigation between open files, being able to see at a glance what's currently open in the IDE, what was modified (an asterisk is added to dirty files tab caption) and so on.
The VB6 code editor doesn't have tools to help navigate inside a method body. When you work with fairly simple
methods browsing their code inside the code window is usually enough to grasp a general idea about the code logic. But trying
to understand and navigate inside complex methods, with hundreds of code lines, nested conditional blocks and
loops, can be a very tedious job.
The CodeSMART Code Flow Explorer can ease navigation inside complex methods - it can parse the code offering
instant access to the internal structure and logical code blocks.
This is a tool dedicated to ease user interfaces development inside the Visual Basic IDE. You will be able see all the controls hosted on the current designer, including containment (parent) information. Controls can be sorted alphabetically or by following their tab order. Additionally, designer components are displayed in a Project Explorer-like hierarchy in order to offer quick access to several basic operations (open, SCC etc).
The CodeSMART Library Explorer represents a convenient way to quickly store and retrieve various code or designer templates. It can be seen as a Visual Basic repository in which you can store and organize different code items and designer scraps, group them in logical folders and share them within a team.
The CodeSMART Find and Replace adds powerful search and replace capabilities to the Visual Basic environment and can be used to perform operations at different scopes (even on entire project groups) with various settings and obtain browsable result lists.
The results list can be refreshed, cleared, printed, exported and the pane view can be customized through grouping, sorting and column reordering. Additionally, a History combo box can be used in order to track the last performed search and/or replacement operations separately for each set of results.
The CodeSMART Code View Assistant brings a rich set of visual enhancements to the standard Visual Basic code editor window. With the CodeSMART Code View Assistant enabled, the Visual Basic code window dramatically changes with critical information provided on many control statements, branch lines to visually identify code nesting and assisted navigation between control statement opening and closing parts.
Branch Lines are drawn to emphasize control statement branches, that is lines drawn between the opening and closing parts of each control statement; very useful in visualizing code nesting.
End-of-Line Details represent descriptive comments at the end of certain control statement closing parts; can be used to identify a long branch.
Hotspots are visual markers for control statement and procedure main parts; can be used to navigate (with mouse clicks) between the opening and closing parts of the control statement/procedure, and to emphasize a certain branch line.
Current Line Highlighting, as the name implies, assists the developer by highlighting the active code line with a grayed background.
Right Hand Separator Line represents a vertical separator line that can be drawn at a specified column on the right side of the code window, in order to visually help the developer in respecting a certain maximum line length standard.
The CodeSMART Code Analyzer is a valuable tool that can be used to examine Visual Basic projects and search for
dead or slow code, as well as for potentially problematic code. It can be seen as a control quality
tool for Visual Basic programmers who want to refine the code they write by making it smaller, faster and less prone to
errors.
The Code Analyzer covers three major problem categories:
The CodeSMART Designer Analyzer is an extremely valuable tool that can be used to examine Visual Basic components for
identifying designers and controls that can lead to an inconsistent or incorrect user interface. It can be seen as both
a user interface quality control tool and a user interface standard enforcement tool with all the advantages that
result from these.
The Designer Analyzer covers three major problem areas:
What can be more embarrassing than delivering an application and realizing you have spelling errors in its user interface? Let's face it, we all felt bad because of this at least once in our lives. We did it too - so we decided it's the time to have a Spelling Checker component in CodeSMART. Here it is what this tool can analyze for you:
The String Review tool does somehow share part of its goals with the spelling checker. Its purpose is to help you produce a correct user interface as for the text it displays, but while the spelling checker focuses on individual words correctness, the Strings Review was designed to ease the phase of logical word combination (phrasing) analysis and correction.
Many organizations employ code documentation standards - and it is recommended even for single developers to adhere to such one. Enforcing a code documentation standard can be done by requiring descriptive comments for modules and procedures, and also by requiring code commenting to be done inside routines as well.
Many times during the process of writing code you have probably used identical or similar code blocks or written
the same long instruction sequence over and over. In such cases, an auto-text feature like the one found in many
professional text editors could save you a lot of time and allow you to concentrate on the program logic. Typing a few letters
or hitting a special keyboard combination is much more productive than writing from scratch the same pieces of code again and
again. Simply put, this is the reason the CodeSMART AutoText system was built for.
Here are a few samples showing how the CodeSMART AutoText tool can dramatically improve coding speed:
orn 
On Error Resume Next - or - mb MsgBox("|") - or - if If | Then
End If
The "|" character stands for the cursor position.
The CodeSMART SmartComplete subsystem displays an Intellisense-like window with Visual Basic keywords, statements and global functions that are missing from the Visual Basic Intellisense list, plus custom (user-defined) items.
Here are two examples on how SmartComplete works:
Example 1 
Private
Example 2 
WithEvents
The CodeSMART Code Builders represent a set of tools that allow you to quickly create property procedures, sub or function procedures and even collections classes. Also, a very useful feature is the one that switches an assignment operator's parts - especially when writing database applications and having to initialize local fields from a lot of database fields at initialization, then reverse the operation at unloading. Moreover, CodeSMART can help to quickly format regular or SQL strings.
CodeSMART extends the standard Clipboard with 10 additional copy-and-paste persistent buffers. These buffers can be filled with any piece of Visual Basic code and their contents can be pasted into any Visual Basic code window by using a simple shortcut key system.
Configuring/reconfiguring tab order on a form or user control by managing each control's TabIndex property value can be a very tedious task. CodeSMART has a Tab Order Designer which can help you automate this process. You can either set the order manually by simply sorting a list, or you can even let the tool automatically establish the tab order (it does this in a standard right-to-left, top-to-bottom sequence).
The CodeSMART Hotkey Designer allows you to automatically manage hotkeys in your application user interface. The tool provides a hotkey generation mechanism along with the possibility to preserve (lock) some already defined hotkeys.
When you design a form, besides modifying control positions and sizes, the most often updated properties are Name and
(whichever applies, if one) Text or Caption. Plus you may want at some time to rename a certain control based on
its Caption/Text property, for example rename a label with the caption "Surname" to "lblSurname" - or vice versa (that is,
perform a property-to-property value generation).
The CodeSMART Change Name and Text Properties tool can ease manual property setting and automate property-to-property
value generation.
In the process of building user interfaces, a developer usually ends up setting a subset of properties for certain controls over and over. CodeSMART can do for you this tedious task at control creation time or whenever a new designer component is added, by applying default values to their properties in conjunction with the UI Standard Properties Manager settings.
With the Bulk Controls Renamer CodeSMART can help you set appropriate control names on entire designers according to standards defined in the Naming Standards Manager. Names are established through a "property-to-property value generation" mechanism, from Text or Caption properties.
Use the UI Standard Properties Manager to configure (on a per-control type basis) property-value pairs which can be applied at control creation time and, moreover, which can be checked against by the Designer Analyzer. Here you may define rules like command button size, designer default font, ListView default style, etc.
As projects become more and more complex, preserving a standard code formatting results in major benefits like improved code readability and accessibility. With CodeSMART you can address such recommendations by using specialized tools for code reformatting, sorting and commenting.
The CodeSMART Code Formatter can be used to reshape Visual Basic code based on your standards (either specific to a single programmer or used for an entire programming team). By using the CodeSMART Code Formatter you can:
Occasionally you may need to rearrange the code in a more logical and intelligible manner. CodeSMART offers you the possibility to arrange code elements based on their scope, type and signature.
The CodeSMART commenting tools ease adding different types of comments and headers to Visual Basic code files and (in certain cases) their automatic removal.
Type of comments used by the commenting tools:
You can use the Comment Templates Manager in order to customize the comment templates:
An error handling scheme is a general error handling template designed for a specific component or procedure. This template completely describes an error handling configuration: the error handler header and footer, if line numbers should be inserted or not and other options that configure the automatic insertion/removal process. These templates can be assigned to different types of Visual Basic components (Classes, Forms, Modules etc.) or to procedures (members) that match a certain pattern.
CodeSMART comes with a set of predefined error handling schemes that can be modified in order to reflect your project's error handling needs. Schemes can be created, modified, assigned and removed through the Error Handling Scheme Manager.
CodeSMART can help you automatically add or remove tracing instructions which can be extremely valuable in debugging tasks.
This is achieved by adding a dedicated module to your project (source code included) and a reference to a special tool
(AxVisualLogger) where the information can be logged.
Inserting tracing instructions:
Because Visual Basic doesn't offer built-in support for handling exceptions, you can use the MExceptionHandler module (provided by CodeSMART with full source code) which implements code for filtering any unhandled exceptions that may occur during a program's execution. This way your program can communicate unexpected events to a higher execution context that is eventually able to recover. Also, handling exceptions ensure that a termination code containing clean-up tasks is executed even if an exception or some other error occurs.
These features offer you the possibility to automate two very useful mechanisms, that is saving and backup copies creation. You can configure CodeSMART to save modified components from your open projects at specific time intervals using the AutoSave feature. In addition to that, CodeSMART can create backup copies every time you save a component through its own AutoBackup system.
This feature can provide statistical information at a custom scope (component, project, project group).
There are times during the coding process when you need to insert similar pieces of code in every procedure, function or property of a code module. Using the CodeSMART Custom Code inserter/remover subsystem you will be able to insert and afterwards remove special code chunks at various scopes and positions, like immediately after the first procedure line, immediately before the procedure last line or at a specific line number inside each procedure body.
As developer, there are times when you want to identify all the changes that were made to a file from the moment it was last saved. The CodeSMART Show File Differences tool will help you in this task by comparing the component currently active in the Visual Basic code window with its corresponding file on disk. The output it produces shows a detailed list of changes.
The CodeSMART Task List can help you in planning projects, tracking development progress and thus following deadlines
and delivery terms.
There are three task types managed by CodeSMART:
Last updated: June 20, 2007
Copyright 2007 AxTools :: CodeSMART for VB6, C#, C++, VB.NET
Navigate, analyze and refine code :: Generate and write code with efficiency
Establish, check and enforce coding standards :: Analyze designers and enforce UI standards.
