Subclassing and Hooking with Visual Basic

Who This Book Is For

This book is for the VB developer who wants a better understanding of subclassing and hooking, as well as knowledge of how to incorporate these techniques into his projects. You need not be an advanced VB developer to learn how to effectively use subclassing and hooking. The beginning of this book lays a solid foundation that will bring the beginning or intermediate developer up to speed.

In understanding subclassing and hooking, you must delve deep into the internals of the Windows operating system. This deeper understanding of Windows enables you not only to gain an understanding of subclassing and hooking, but also to learn more about the messaging system, which is the heart of the Windows operating system. In the process, you’ll become a better programmer whether or not you commonly use subclassing and hooking in your applications.

You will need to utilize many of the Win32 application programming interface (API) functions to write subclassing and hooking applications. Therefore, a good knowledge of the Win32 API functions and how they are used within VB is necessary. You can find definitions for most of these API functions, constants, and structures using the API Text Viewer, which ships with Visual Studio 6. However, several API functions, constants, and structure definitions are missing from this viewer. You can find this missing information by searching through both the C++ Windows.h and WinUser.h header files. Additionally, I have provided definitions ...