SpyWorks 6.2 Professional ( Subscription Edition )

Have you ever wanted to be able to write a control panel applet in VB? To create an exportable function library? To write an NT service? Would you like to know how to write your own advanced subclasser in VB (or at least have the source code to a commercial quality subclasser/hook control for your own peace of mind). How about accessing the Winsock API on a low level, or having use of a process and memory browser for Windows NT (with source code)? All this, and more, is part of the new SpyWorks package. The ultimate "you CAN do it in VB" low-level programming toolkit. Are you hitting a wall in Visual Basic?

SpyWorks Philosophy
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One of the great advantages of Visual Basic over any other Windows development language is that it is extremely "safe" to use. In theory, it is impossible for a Visual Basic programmer to crash the system or to cause a General Protection Fault, Exception or other system error from within Visual Basic. This makes programming extremely efficient - you can quickly experiment and modify your code, examining intermediate values in the immediate window as needed. This differs markedly from other development systems where bugs frequently cause memory corruption, use of invalid pointers, and other errors that require sophisticated debuggers and many reboot/restart cycles.

Visual Basic protects you from your mistakes, but there is a price to pay for this safety. Visual Basic only implements a subset of the features that are available under Windows. As a result, there are many tasks that are difficult or impossible to do with Visual Basic directly. There are currently two methods for extending Visual Basic. You can directly access Windows API functions from VB, or you can write Dynamic Link Libraries or VB custom controls using C or C++ and traditional Windows programming techniques.

SpyWorks provides a third approach to extending Visual Basic. It consists of a number of tools and programs to support extending the capabilities of Visual Basic from within the VB environment. No C or C++ language or other tools are required.

There is a price to pay for the power provided by the SpyWorks components. SpyWorks is one of the few products you will ever buy that proudly and clearly claims to make it much easier to crash your program. This tradeoff is common in the programming world: with power and flexibility comes a reduction in the level of protection provided by the environment. SpyWorks, by intercepting the Windows message stream and improving access to the Windows API makes it very easy to crash not only the application that uses it, but other applications as well.

Desaware introduces two radical new technologies with SpyWorks:

Dynamic Export TechnologyTM
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Visual Basic 5.0 makes it possible to obtain the address of a function for use with API callbacks, but it does not allow you to publicly export the function for use by other applications. Exporting functions is a requirement for many Windows extensions including control panel applets, ISAPI filters and more.

Desaware’s new Dynamic Export Technology makes it easy to export functions from your VB5 ActiveX DLLs. Simply add an export class to your DLL that implements a special interface that we’ve defined. Our extension DLL does the rest. What’s more, our exporting technology does not modify your compiled file in any way! This eliminates any possibility of corrupting your DLL or of you forgetting a step during the creation process. How is this possible? Sorry, that would be telling. But you’ll be amazed by how easy it is to add this new capability to your Visual Basic components.

ActiveX Extension Library
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Even as Visual Basic 5.0 extends the capabilities of Visual Basic, it also opened new gaps - gaps that SpyWorks is designed to fi