Programming on Purpose

Visual Basic - Programming on Purpose

Programming on Purpose Managing Windows Modal or Modeless? Toward a General Modality Class Extending the CFormAttributes Class Dealing with Complexity The Art of the State Modeling a GUI with an FSM The End of the Elegance Implementing FSMs Data-Driven Code After the Dust Has Settled

This tutorial is about detailed design. To illustrate the kinds of things you need to think about when designing an application, we'll be looking at the design and construction of a window-management scheme, perhaps the most fundamental part of any Windows program. You'll be reading a lot about the graphical user interface (GUI), but you won't be seeing anything about button sizes, mouse-pointer psychology, or the choice of fonts and colors?the approach in this tutorial is from a different angle, addressing the kinds of problems that will sink a GUI no matter how nice the screens look. You'll be seeing the choices Visual Basic offers for designing window-management schemes, some of the obstacles Visual Basic puts in your way, and how you can use some of the more advanced features of Visual Basic to get what you want. In all of this, you'll be focusing on two particular areas: how to use classes to build value-added forms, and how to manage complexity with finite state machines.

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