Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide

Code Samples and Programming Style

This guide contains numerous code samples that you can use to experiment with the concepts covered. Unless otherwise noted, the code is compatible with VBA 6.0 as it is implemented in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0, Microsoft Access 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000, Microsoft FrontPage 2000, Microsoft Outlook 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft Word 2000, and other applications that host VBA 6.0. Additional code samples are written in VBScript, JScript, HTML, and DHTML.

This guide uses the following conventions in VBA sample code:

• Keywords appear with an initial letter capitalized; concatenated words may contain other capital letters. Variables appear in mixed case, constants in uppercase.

  Dim objDatabase As Object
     Const PROP_NOT_FOUND_ERROR = 3270
  
     Set objDatabase = CurrentDb
  

• In full procedures, all variables are declared locally or are listed with an initialization procedure that declares public variables. All code has been tested with the VBA Option Explicit statement to ensure that there are no undeclared variables.
  
  
• An apostrophe (') introduces a comment:

  ' This is a comment.
  Dim intNew As Integer  ' This is also a comment.
  

• Control-flow blocks and statements in Sub, Function, and Property procedures are indented:

  Sub MyCode ()
     Dim intX As Integer
     Dim intP As Integer
     Dim intQ As Integer
  
     If intX > 0 Then
        intP = intQ
     End If
  End Sub
  

• Naming conventions are used to make it easier to identify objects and variables in the code samples. For more information about the naming conventions used in this book, see Chapter 3, "Writing Solid Code."

This guide also uses the following conventions in HTML script samples:

• VBScript is case insensitive; therefore, capitalization of keywords, intrinsic functions, language elements, and variable names is not required.
  
  
• The HTML and DHTML naming conventions use a lowercase or lowercase and uppercase concatenated style for object, variable, method, event, function, and property names. For example, the name of the document object is lowercase, whereas the name of the srcElement property is a concatenated lowercase and uppercase combination.
  
  
• Most script examples are written in VBScript. Some examples are written in JScript. Note that JScript is case sensitive.

  Note   JScript is the Microsoft implementation of the ECMA-262 language specification.