Subclassing and Hooking with Visual Basic

Tools to Aid Us in Our Efforts

Along with using these advanced techniques, effectively implementing subclassing and hooking in our development work requires that we employ debugging tools beyond the capabilities of the VB debugger.

While developing the projects for this book, I used several software utilities as well as other professional applications that I built. Although you can successfully build applications that subclass various windows or that hook into certain message streams without these utilities, I do not suggest doing so. These utilities give you, the developer, a valuable insight into what is happening inside the system while running your projects in the VB integrated development environment (IDE) and especially at runtime. You will be able to see things operate in a way that is unavailable to you by just using the Visual Basic or Visual C++ development environments.

I would go as far as saying that some of these utilities are necessary to understand how subclassing and hooks work. Otherwise, you will only be blindly plugging code into an application, not fully understanding why you are doing it and what is happening behind the scenes. When the application locks up, debugging it will be frustrating and possibly futile. What I am stressing here is that we, as programmers, must aspire to have an understanding of what we are doing. Without this understanding we cannot hope to reach the more advanced areas of our discipline. Having an understanding of how subclassing ...