Chapter One

What's New in Visual Basic 6?

When you launch Visual Basic 6, you are greeted by the New Project dialog box, shown in Figure 1-1. As you can see, in addition to a "Standard EXE" application, Visual Basic lets you create a wide variety of component types, including Microsoft ActiveX dynamic link libraries (DLLs), ActiveX controls, and ActiveX documents for deployment on intranets or the Internet.

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Figure 1-1. The Visual Basic 6 New Project dialog box.

In this chapter, I list many of the major new features and improvements found in Visual Basic 6, as well as some of the little enhancements that make Visual Basic a powerful and easy-to-use tool. Many of these new features are demonstrated throughout this book. Although I cover a lot of territory in this chapter and in the rest of this book, there may be a particular topic for which you require more detailed information. In this case, I recommend that you consult the Visual Basic documentation, Visual Basic's Books Online, and Microsoft's Web site (http://microsoft.com).