Research Bin

Visual Basic 6.0 was released in 1998, it gained huge popularity and became one of the best products of the time. However within the next few years, rather than an updated version, Microsoft announced a new product, .NET which was a totally new environment where there is no backward compatibility with previous VB applications. .NET hit the market in 2002 with VB.NET replacing VB 6.0  Introducing a new language is a significant risk, both from technical and marketting points of view. But Microsoft risked a new system without continuing their proven success at the time. Why?

Microsoft Visual Basic has come a long way since 1991 when it was officially declared. Since its introduction, it revolutionized the world of software development. By the way credit to the 'Visual' concept goes to some one else(find out it here ). It made software development so easy that soon it became one of the most popular programming languages of all time.

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Cabinet files(a.k.a. Diamond files) are the Microsoft Windows Archives. These archives can store multiple files/folders into a single file with or without involving data compression. Since every Windows system is natively compatible with cab files, Windows provide enough facilities to create, extract, or rebuild cab files without requiring additional software.

When it comes to distributing a collection of files, a software, or a setup. One of the best choices is to make the distro in the form of a Self-extracting Archive( why? ). If you chose to go with this solution, you will have to use some tool to create the SFX. Ofcourse, that's no big deal; There are plenty of software which allow you to produce self-extracting archives. Winzip, WinRAR, 7zip, etc may be the obvious choice. But, have you ever noticed that the Windows Operating System holds a built-in utility for this? Strange enough, but it's true.

I'm sure most of you have dealt with data compression. The concept is shrinking the space consumption of files and folders. WinRar , 7zip , Winzip , KGB archiver are some famous utilities for this purpose. Keep in mind that its not the software, but it is the compression algorithm that does all the magic(Software are just different different implementations of data compression algorithms) Now, let's say you run a bunch of files weighing 200MB through one of these compression software and came up with a single compressed file with 150MB. Clearly we have a saving of 50megabytes here. This compressed file is literally a pack of data. If you plan for a distribution, this is the obvious choice. However...