Chapter 19 - Implementing Project Groups to Support the Development and Debugging Process

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The concept of a project group enables you to work with multiple projects open at the same time. In versions of VB before versions 5 and 6, you could only accomplish this by using multiple instances of Visual Basic, making it difficult to work with the projects as one complete system. Working with multiple design-time projects at once was actually impossible in versions 3 and below, because these versions did not enable you to have more than one instance of VB running at a time!

As many of the systems built with Visual Basic 6 are component based, using multiple ActiveX projects, it is very important to be able to work with all the components in one development environment. This chapter covers the following topics:

• What exactly project groups are, and how you can use them.
• How to use project groups in component-based development.
• How to debug multiple-project applications using project groups.

NOTE - Other ActiveX Control Debugging Techniques Not Discussed Here: Because this chapter deals with project groups, it does not discuss other techniques available in VB6 for debugging ActiveX controls. For more discussion of ActiveX control debugging, see the section titled "Testing and Debugging an ActiveX Control" in Chapter 13, "Creating ActiveX Controls."

Contents

1. Understanding Project Groups
   Creating Project Groups
   Building Multiple Projects

2. Using Project Groups to Debug an ActiveX DLL
   Setting Up a Sample Group
   Debugging Features in Project Groups

3. Using Project Groups to Debug an ActiveX Control