VB & VBA in a Nutshell: The Language

Appendix D. What's New in VB6?

At first sight, Visual Basic 6 may not appear to be the revolution of the VB language and development environment that Versions 4 and 5 were. However, when you get under the surface of VB6, you will find some very powerful enhancements and new language features that make the upgrade worthwhile from the viewpoint of productivity and of your ability to create ever more powerful applications that take advantage of new technologies.

Version 6 uses the same development environment as Version 5 and consolidates the major advances made in Versions 4 and 5. This means that you can consolidate your knowledge of and expertise with programming in the new object style of VB without having too much new stuff to learn.

In keeping with the rest of the book, this section details the new language features. Of course there are lots of other new features in VB6 that aren't specifically concerned with the language (like the ability to add new controls to a form at runtime) that are outside the scope of this book.

A final note: VB6 is every bit as stable and well-behaved as VB5—something that's always a worry when it comes time to upgrade. While writing this book, I've used all the prerelease and release candidate versions of VB6, and enjoyed every minute. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the new VB6 documentation, which—like MSDN—has been moved to a very underdeveloped HTML Help environment.

The major changes in the VB and VBA languages are as follows.