Subclassing and Hooking with Visual Basic

By Stephen Teilhet

Book Overview

Subclassing & Hooking with Visual Basic offers developers a unique way to customize Windows behavior. Windows is a message-based system. Every action you request creates one or more messages to carry out the action. These messages are passed between objects and carry with them information that gives the recipient more detail on how to interpret and act upon the message. With Subclassing and the Windows hooking mechanism ("hooks"), you can manipulate, modify, or even discard messages bound for other objects within the operating system, in the process changing the way the system behaves. What kinds of results can you achieve using the power of subclassing and hooking? Here are just a few of the possibilities: Determine when a window is being activated or deactivated and respond to this change. Display descriptions of menu items as the mouse moves across them. Disallow a user to move or resize a window. Determine where the mouse cursor is and respond accordingly. Determine when the display resolution has been changed. Monitor the system for a low system resource condition. Modify or disallow keystrokes sent to a window or a control. Create an automated testing application. Determine when an application is idle. Along with this power comes responsibility; Windows is very unforgiving if subclassing and hooking are used incorrectly. Subclassing & Hooking with Visual Basic demonstrates the various techniques for intercepting messages bound for one or more windows or controls: the intercepted message can be left in its original state or modified; afterwards, the message can be sent to its original destination or discarded. For both VB 6 and VB.NET developers, Subclassing & Hooking with Visual Basic opens up a wealth of possibilities that ordinarily would be completely unavailable, or at least not easy to implement.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596001185
• ISBN13: 9780596001186
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 704 Pages
• Weight: 2.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Lot's of info in this book

This book is a very comprehensive explanation of what you can do from Visual Basic with regards to subclassing and hooking. My only complaints are that it's a little wordy and redundant in points and that it doesn't venture into areas that cannot be handled with VB alone.

A very good book for learning subclassing and hooking

What can I say, this is a great book.Disadvantage is that hooking & subclassing degrades system performance.

All of the basic techniques are revealed and a lot more

In Subclassing & Hooking With Visual Basic, computer expert Stephen Teilhet explains that Windows is essentially a messaging system and that every user action creates one or more messages to carry out a communication. In addition to generating the message for the mouse button click, the action produces a wide array of other messages, including messages to repaint the button in its depressed state, determine the state of the mouse cursor, and others. Subclassing and the Windows hooking mechanisms are very powerful techniques that operate on messages within the Windows messaging system and Teilhet succinctly explains and illustrates the power that subclassing and hooking give developers in controlling or manipulating messages to achieve a desired result. All of the basic techniques are revealed and a lot more besides. Subclassing & Hooking With Visual Basic is especially recommended for VB and VB.NET developers, but will also prove invaluable for C/C++, Managed C++, C#, and Delphi users.

Finally...

a great book about subclassing and the actions you can achieve using vb and not c++. Helped me built customized apps for certain strict environments in no-time. Good work!