Introduction
Have you ever wanted to display real popup ‘Windows’ windows from your AlphaBASIC applications, or access data held within Oracle or SQLServer databases? Or have you ever wished you could harness some of the power of Windows when running an AlphaBASIC program? Well you can. A-Shell for Windows and integrated development with Microsoft Visual Basic using the A-Shell ActiveX SDK is the answer.
This document is the accompanying documentation to the A-Shell ActiveX SDK, and is intended to be read by AlphaBASIC software developers who are keen to exploit the power of the Windows development environment in enhancing their software running under A-Shell for Windows. All code samples are given in Microsoft Visual Basic (version 6.0) and a basic working knowledge of Visual Basic is assumed.
The Visual Basic programming environment and paradigm are very different to that with which most AlphaBASIC programmers will be familiar. As well as a working knowledge of Visual Basic from a syntactic or language point of view, it is assumed that the reader will be familiar with the idea of event-driven programming, and have a basic understanding of the concepts of object-oriented programming. If not, then there are many excellent introductory books on the subject.
COM-based, and specifically interface-based programming, around which the A-Shell ActiveX SDK is based could be considered an ‘advanced’ Visual Basic subject, so there is also a fairly lengthy ‘refresher’ section to this chapter reviewing COM from a Visual Basic point of view, and from the perspective of an AlphaBASIC programmer making use of the A-Shell ActiveX SDK.
