This book covers the programming techniques that you can use to support network resources from within a Visual Basic (VB) application. Why do you need this book? Well, in its basic form, VB includes few ways of integrating with a networked environment. If you want to find out what else is on the network, link applications, or delve deep into the low-level network calls, then you will need to look to ways outside the standard VB environment.

In this book I have tried to cover all the main techniques that a developer faced with a network challenge will need to understand. If you are writing a simple application to take advantage of Windows network resources, then these functions are covered; if you want to work with Novell NetWare or NetBIOS networks, these are also covered.

I have also set aside several chapters to cover the various advanced communications methods available on a network generically termed interprocess communications. For example, if you want to write a groupware product and allow one user to alert all the other users of an appointment, you could use a variety of features: I cover Network DDE, mailslots, named pipes, and basic NetBIOS.

Figure I.1: Visual Basic makes it very easy to create custom email applications.

One of the main uses of VB is as a rapid development tool for front-ends. This is particularly relevant with electronic mail applications that might need to "hide" an unfriendly mainframe text-based mail system with a VB application. I have covered...