MsgHookX is an ActiveX DLL that allows VB6 developers to perform safe and efficient intra-applicaton subclassing. (In this context, intra-application sublclassing means that you can intercept any message that Windows sends to a window or a control in the current application, as opposed to a window created by another application, a much more difficult task.) I wrote this DLL many years ago, when VB5 was released, and mentioned it in several books and magazine articles. I made the DLL available on the vb2themax site, but I omitted to upload the DLL in this new, .NET-only site.

Well, given the many mails I continue to receive from readers, it seems that VB6 is still alive and in good shape, and many VB6 developers continune to happily subclass their controls. For this reason I decided to make the DLL available again on this site. Here's a summary of what it does:

• safe subclassing: can be used within the IDE and in break mode without any risk of system crashes.
• it provides the BeforeMessage and AfterMessage events for easy event-driven programming model
• it additionally can notify incoming messages through the IMsgHookEvents secondary interface, for better performance and easier debugging (in some cases, events are inhibited in the IDE)
• highest flexibility: you can decide to call the original window procedure yourself from within the BeforeMessage event/method and/or cancel the default processing for the message. You can also browse and modify the value that will be returned to the operating system.
• the DLL's type library includes the definition of over 300 symbolic constants that define the most common Windows messages, so you don't have to use the API Viewer to include them in your applications.

Have fun with it, but - please, please! - turn to VB.NET as soon as you can, if you haven't yet.

I was so excited to announce the new version of the dotnet2themax site that I forgot to introduce myself, as is customary in any weblog. On the other hand, if you have attended dotnet2themax.com in the past, odds are that you already know me, perhaps because you've read one of my books or one of my articles on programming magazines. But I will summarize my professional life here, if only to provide links to other places where you can find more interesting material.

I live and work in Bari, Italy, but I often travel to speak at conferences such as VSLive!, WinDev (US), DevWeek (UK), TechDays (Switzerland), and a few others.

I am one of the two Italian MSDN Regional Directors and in the last two years I have served as the chairman for Windows Professional Conference, the largest Italian conference for developers, and routinely speak at DevDays and other Microsoft events in Italy since 1998. I have been giving classes for Wintellect in the US until mid-2004, when I decided not to spend abroad 5 or 6 months of each year.

In 2002 I founded Code Architects, a software company that focuses on .NET and Microsoft technologies, together with Giuseppe Dimauro (the other MSDN Regional Director for Italy). Code Architects provides training and consulting services for many Italial government agencies and large companies, including Microsoft. Code Architects markets a line of programming tools that I authored (or co-authored), including CodeBox, Form Maximizer, and the award-winning VB Maximizer. The Code Architects Team include some of the most skilled .NET experts in Italy. If you can read Italian, you might find a lot of interesting stuff in our Team Blog.

I wrote about 80 articles for Visual Studio Magazine (formerly Visual Basic Programmer's Journal), with which I collaborate since 1996, and also wrote a couple of articles for MSDN Magazine and for developer's sites such as DevX. For example, you can go here to read nearly 300 tips and short articles I wrote for DevX, mostly on VB6.

I don't write only for US magazines, though. I wrote my first article back in 1983, then I wrote dozens of columns for Computer Programming, the leading Italian magazine for developers. In 1995 I founded Visual Basic and .NET Journal (formerly Visual Basic Journal), the only Italian magazine entirely devoted to .NET Framework programming.

English

Italian

While I still am the editor-in-chief of my own magazine, in recent years I decided to write fewer articles to focus on my books and my own vb2themax.com Web site, which I founded in 1999 and that a few years ago was expanded into dotnet2themax.com to match the new C# and VB.NET contents. This site is now sponsored by Code Architects, together with the Italian web sites dotnet2themax.it and ugisharepoint.it.

Microsoft Press published my first book in 1999. Since then Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6 has sold around 150,000 copies all over the world, including translations to Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Spanish, and continues to sell more than many VB.NET books. In 2002 I wrote Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, which the next year was upgraded into Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003, a 1400-page textbook that cover virtually everything you need to know about VB.NET and the .NET Framework. It has been one of the VB.NET bestseller and as of today it nearly alwways appears in Amazon's Top Ten list for Visual Basic and .NET books. I also co-authored Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET (with Jeffrey Richter) and the newer Practical Coding Guidelines and Best Practices for Visual Basic .NET and C# Developers (with Giuseppe Dimauro), a collection of over 700 rules and tips for writing robust and efficient .NET applications.

While Visual Basic is still my pet language, I write a lot of C# code as well. I am especially interested in programming techniques, algorithms, optimization, .NET internals, client-side (Windows Forms) and ADO.NET programming. I love to write addins, macros, code generators, and other tools that can make programming a more pleasant (and faster) experience, and I'll use this blog to share my findings with you all.

What else? I love music - a bit of everything, but especially jazz and fusion - and in my previous life I was even tempted to become a professional musician, until I realized that programming can be as much fun. I played my alto sax with many local combos and orchestras, but I probably reached by peak - on the fun side, at least - with Don Box's Band on the Runtime. If you are among the few millions who never listened to the Band, you can grab a video here or here. You can find some lyrics here and here.

If you're reading these lines you already know that we have completely renovated the .NET-2-The-Max site. We have a new layout, new material, and new blogs. We have less contents, too. Yes, we've decided to drop some sections from our site. Let me explain why.

When we launched the original vb2themax.com site in 1999 it was hard to find quality-level material on developers' sites. Most sites solicited tips and code samples from visitors and published it, in most cases without editing it for accuracy. Thus, we took the opposite route and decided to publish just our own material and only the best contributions from our readers. This approach and the fact that we have published new material each and every week for three years made our site very popular among VBers. (SQL Server Magazine put vb2themax in the top ten developers' site, together with first-class sites such as MSDN Online and DevX.)

More recently we lauched dotnet2themax.com. We dropped all VB6 contents to focus on .NET exclusively. The new site offered tons of links to external articles - that were categorized and searchanble, and enabled readers to filter both the index and individual articles' contents to see the material related only to VB.NET or C#. In spite of these new features, the site was basically similar to the original vb2themax and was conceived as a single-stop-shop from where developers could start their explorations.

Today, however, finding great contents on the Web is easier than ever. Most magazines are available online and for free, many Microsoft developers reveal all the .NET secrets in their blogs, and you can always use Google to discover programming gems hidden in a site or a blog you never heard before. There's no more need for a site like what dotnet2themax used to be. No need for topic categories and an internal search engine, for example. And above all, no need to update the web site on a regular basis, as if it were an online magazine.

In the new dotnet2themax.com site, Marco Bellinaso and I - and whoever will join us later - will be telling our discoveries in the .NET fields we are more familiar with, such as VB.NET and C# languages, programming techniques, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, Sharepoint, and optimization techniques. We will write our blog as frequently as possible, publish code samples and articles, upload our tools, and anything we think can be useful or interesting for you developers out there.

Happy reading!

Francesco