Visual Basic

How Does Y2K Affect Visual Basic?

Hands up-how many of you have heard of the "Millennium Bug" or "Year 2000 Problem" or whatever else it has been called over the last few years? If any of you didn't raise your hands, you are either not open to suggestion or you are new to this planet. Welcome! We call it Earth.

Much has been written about this subject over the past few years. While there is a great wealth of information, most of it is aimed at the COBOL community, and what isn't tends to be very generic-limited to management guides and theoretical discussions. What I want to do in this chapter is simply look at the issue from a practical perspective, focusing on its particular relevance to Visual Basic. I will look at how Visual Basic stores and manipulates date information and, equally important, what its weaknesses are.

For me the issue is not so much what happens when the clocks strike midnight on a certain night in December 1999, but that many developers still do not fully understand how our language deals with this simple piece of data!