Overview of New Features

The Microsoft Windows CE Toolkit for Visual Basic 6.0 is the current version of the toolkit. This latest version offers several product enhancements, including the addition of the Platform Manager, a tool that enables you to customize how you run and debug applications on specific devices.

Other enhancements to the toolkit include the ability to use the Dim variable As type statement to provide access to the IntelliSense® Auto List Members feature. This IntelliSense feature displays a list of valid member variables or functions for a selected class or structure. Selecting a member from the list automatically inserts it into your code. The Dim variable As type statement has been added for convenience purposes only. It does not provide true early binding because all variables in Windows CE for Visual Basic default to the Variant data type.

Additionally, the debugger has a new feature that enables you to pause the mouse pointer over variables in order to evaluate them. For more information about the debugger, see Using the Debugger.

Moreover, the toolkit now supports third-party forms packages. Standard toolkit forms are stored in the file Pvbform2.dll, which also contains the core object model. The code for the forms package is isolated from other code in the run time to make the toolkit more modular.

Finally, the language has been expanded to include the following changes:

• The On Error Goto 0 statement turns off error handling.
• The CreateObjectWithEvents function creates an object that can handle events.
• The Declare statement declares a function in an external .dll file.
• The LoadResString function loads a string from a resource file.
• The WaitForEvents and EndWaitForEvents methods stop and resume application execution to enable events to fire.
• ActiveX controls contain enumerated constants.

To accommodate these changes, the run time for the toolkit has been modified. As a result of this modification, all run-time files have been renamed, thus enabling applications created with the previous version of the toolkit to co-exist with applications created with the current version.

The following table shows the run-time files supported in each version of the toolkit.

Additionally, the toolkit no longer uses the .pvb file extension. The compiler now generates a file with a .vb extension, which enables the .pvb file extension to remain associated with Pvb.exe. As another recent improvement, the compiler detects common errors at compile time. This facilitates the correction of errors before, rather than during, run time. Error descriptions appear in the run-time error dialog box.