Meeting Reuse Requirements Effectively
Visual Basic offers a rich selection of methods to achieve effective reusability. As with many things that involve a choice, you can choose either correctly or incorrectly. In a large computer application, an incorrect choice can mean weeks or months of extra effort. Mistakes will also inevitably occur because of the wide range of options available. For example, you can be sure that many Visual Basic programmers will be eager to create custom controls simply because they now can thanks to Visual Basic 5 and 6. A particular problem to watch for is the "gold-plating" syndrome, which occurs when a programmer spends too much time adding unnecessary features. Although such features work, they serve only as superfluous gloss on the application-and worse yet, the time spent fiddling with them can jeopardize your schedule.
The following sections provide an overview of the different methods you can use to achieve effective reuse.