Visual Basic 6 Black Book
(Publisher: The Coriolis Group)
Author(s): Steven Holzner
ISBN: 1576102831
Publication Date: 08/01/98

Using Bookmarks

It’s been a long night and it’s nearly dawn, but you’re still programming because the deadline’s in a few hours. Now you’ve lost your place in the dozen separate code files that make up the project. There are 10 separate windows open in the IDE and you’re switching back and forth between them. Isn’t there a better way to mark a location and jump back to it when you need to?

There certainly is—you can use a bookmark. You mark a line of code by toggling a bookmark on or off at that location, and when you’re ready you can jump back to that bookmark.

Setting Bookmarks

You set a bookmark at a particular line of code by clicking that line of code and selecting the Toggle Bookmark item in the Bookmarks submenu of the Edit menu, as shown in Figure 2.40. Selecting this same item again would remove the bookmark.

Figure 2.40  Using bookmarks in the Visual Basic IDE.

Jumping To A Bookmark

Now that you’ve set a bookmark and moved away from it while editing your code, how do you get back to it? You jump back to a bookmark with the two items in the Bookmarks submenu marked Next Bookmark and Previous Bookmark. (It would be convenient if Visual Basic allowed you to name bookmarks and select from a list of them where to jump to; perhaps that will appear in some future version of Visual Basic.)

Using The Object Browser

One of the best ways of getting an overview of your project is to use the Object Browser. The Object Browser is very useful to get overviews, especially in larger projects. If your version of Visual Basic includes the Visual Basic Object Browser, you open it by selecting the Object Browser item in the View menu or by clicking its icon in the toolbar. The Object Browser opens, as shown in Figure 2.41.

Figure 2.41  The Visual Basic Object Browser provides an overview of the objects in a project.

You can scan through all the objects in the project by moving up and down in the Classes list. When you find the type of object you want to examine, select it; its properties and methods appear in the Members pane, as also shown in Figure 2.41.

If you want to learn more about a property or method, just select it with the mouse; you’ll see an explanation of the property or method and the list of parameters for methods.