Applications Interface Programming Using Multiple Languages: A Windows® Programmer's Guide

2.6. Interface Between Visual Basic and Other Win32 Applications

In this section, we will give a quick review of the interface between Visual Basic and other Win32 applications. Most of these applications are Microsoft Office applications, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Windows Explorer. Some other applications included are WordPad, NotePad, Calculator, and MS-DOS Prompt Window.

Generally, there are two methods to launch another Win32 application from within Visual Basic:

• Use the Visual Basic Shell command. This method can create a new process and return its process ID to Visual Basic. When using this method to create a new process, Visual Basic releases control to the newly created process, and all subsequent ...