Managing Large-Scale Development with Visual Basic

Presented by: Richard Knudson

Richard Knudson founded the Information Management Group in January of 1986, with the purpose of helping corporate clients better utilize the rapidly expanding power of desktop computers. Specializing in corporate-wide and workgroup database applications, IMG provides consulting, training and development services to its customers. IMG has been offering public and private classes in Microsoft Visual Basic and Microsoft Access for the last two years, and has successfully trained thousands of developers. Richard is a principal author of the IMG Visual Basic and Access training suites. He is the president of the Chicago Access Users Group, and is interested in the ongoing evolution of Visual Basic, Access, and related technologies such as OLE and Visual Basic for Applications. Given his ongoing involvement in supervising project teams, he is especially interested in the issues of standards and group development tools in these platforms.

Introduction

Since its release, Microsoft Visual Basic® has become recognized as the leading Microsoft Windows® application development environment. Increasingly, it is being used as the front-end for large-scale corporate database and client-server applications. Certain aspects of the client-server development environment, as well as the Visual Basic programming platform itself, necessitate departures from traditional methods of large-scale project management. This presentation reviews some fundamental practices your development team can employ to take complete advantage of the highly productive Visual Basic environment. Think of the presentation as a roadmap for approaching a Visual Basic project from somebody with experience in the area (and the tire tracks to prove it!). Nothing we'll cover will guarantee large-scale project success — however, these are issues that, if not properly addressed, will dramatically increase the odds of project failure! We'll categorize them according to the following scheme:

Project Infrastructure

In this section we'll discuss what we feel is a "bare minimum" foundation that must be in place before beginning work.

An Applications Development Approach

In this section we'll be less dogmatic: here we'll describe a modified version of the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) team development approach. This works for us.

Optimization Tips & Tricks

Here we'll catalog a few of our favorite tricks to help you squeeze better performance out of your Visual Basic applications.

Best Practices: Using the Tools

In this section we'll show you some of the tools we use to implement these practices. Everybody seems to agree that things like version control and automated testing should be done, but we think less than everybody actually does them. Here we'll show you how we actually do them!