It’s true. I’m postponing the development of VBounce. I have not been able to put the amount of time and work into this project as I would like to. I’ve been working on VBounce for over a year, and I know exactly how it will help me in the future. That is the only purpose of releasing VBounce — to make OOP in VB6 easier for developers. I know that most people are using .NET and have abandoned their VB6 projects, but after working in industry for six months and seeing how terribly some VB applications are designed, I realized how important VBounce could be to the very few remaining VB6 developers. For the time being VBounce will remain an imcomplete project in a directory on my hard drive.
I am launching a website early next year, Lehmier.com. Eventually I’ll create a project page for VBounce and resume development.
I have recently considered some lesser-used data structures and have decided they should be included in the VBounce package. Whether or not they will appear in the initial release this December is still a dice roll. I would much rather spend my time on the current line-up and begin implementing these classes early next year. I’d also like to mention that I may end up discovering other structures that I’d rather implement, but at this point I’m set on sticking with the following data structures:
- Deque - a doubly-ended queue
- Priority Queue - a queue that organizes elements based on a user-specified priority
- Multimap - a multi-key map
- Matrix - a two-dimensional list utilizing both array and linked concepts.
I’m sure there are at least a few more data structures that should be included in VBounce. At this point during the implementation phase there is very little time to go back and do research. In the meantime I will continue to consider other ideas as I work tediously to complete my beta release.
VBounce is a collection of object-oriented array-based data structures built specifically for Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0. Packaged neatly into a single self-registering ActiveX Control, VBounce makes writing object-oriented code in a generally event-driven environment convenient and effective.
Visual Basic 6.0 contains the functionality for developers to write object-oriented code with its introduction of class modules. However, it is not exactly intuitive for beginners and even intermediate developers to begin writing classes and implementing objects into their projects. VBounce allows developers to write object-oriented code that will assist them in developing cleaner, more organized software applications.
Visual Basic 6.0 has two general methods for organizing collections of data in structures. Firstly, there is the general Array, but its length must be fixed as a constant integer and cannot be altered during runtime. Although there are ways of getting around this, it often too tricky to attempt. Overall the use of an Array can be quite tedious for the VB developer, and its handful of inconveniences make it a structure to avoid. Secondly, Visual Basic 6.0 contains a Collection object for storing data. The Collection object does a good job at handling data, but its functionality is incredibly limited. Collection contains only four public routines: Add, Count, Item and Remove.
VBounce is targeted at supplying Visual Basic developers with all of the standard data structures they would typically use in an object-oriented language such as Java or C++. Currently VBounce contains complete implementations for the following data structures:
- List - an unsorted structure using both array and linked concepts
- Set - a sorted container containing only unique items
- Map - a single key-value pair collection
- Queue - a FIFO structure
- Stack - a LIFO structure
VBounce has been in research and development for nearly ten months, and has finally entered the implementation phase. It is currently planned for release as beta software in December 2008 under the MIT License.
VBounce was conceptualized and created by Elmer Fudd.
