Professional Visual Basic 5.0 Business Objects

Rockford Lhotka's Professional Visual Basic 5.0 Business Objects shows off the capabilities of Visual Basic (VB) 5.0 for developing "business objects" that model real-world entities used in everyday corporations. The author first explores traditional VB "two-tiered" client-server systems, where applications on the client server talk to database servers directly. The author then explores today's three-tiered systems, where business objects--encompassing business rules--work on the server. By separating "business objects" from the user interface code, developers can create more flexible and scalable systems, which is one of the book's main goals.

After modeling a group of objects for a hypothetical video rental store, the author shows how to use these VB classes in a variety of ways, such as in VB 5 forms and even within Microsoft Office (in an Excel spreadsheet). He shows how to deploy the business objects in a traditional two-tiered setting in VB with a database. He then demonstrates how to distribute these objects onto the server (using the Distributed Component Object Model [DCOM] capabilities of VB 5) and, finally, into a three-tiered setting using Microsoft Transaction Server. A final chapter even shows how business objects can be used on the Internet using Active Server Pages (ASPs).

Professional Visual Basic 5.0 Business Objects is a great guide to the new object-oriented capabilities of Visual Basic 5 and other Microsoft products. This text makes a good case for a company to invest in a library of business objects that can be reused across projects and in a variety of architectures. With its outlook on hands-on programming, this book can serve as a capable guide to the future of development in Visual Basic.