Getting Started

If this is your first time using Toolsack Baseline 1.0 - Welcome! We hope you'll enjoy using our product as much as we liked making it.

This is an introduction to using the components in this product. If you are already comfortable using COM objects you may not need this guide, most of the objects are self-explanatory. If you have trouble getting started or can't follow this guide write to use at support@toolsack.com with a question and we will try to help.

Using Toolsack Baseline 1.0

There are 30 objects in Toolsack Baseline 1.0. You can use any of the components with Active Server Pages, Windows Scripting Host (.vbs and .js script files), VBA, RAD programming tools like Visual Basic and Delphi and all other COM compliant containers such as C++, DotNet, PERL etc.

If you are using a text editor it can be difficult to find out about all the objects and how to use them. There are extensive help documentation, samples and articles on toolsack.com, but an easier way is to use Visual Basic, VBA or some other programming environment that allow you to view the object and its details. This is especially true if you are using the objects for the first time.

This guide will use the VBA environment in Microsoft Word 2000 as an initial host to use the components. If you don't have Word you can use any VBA application like Excel, Corel Draw or Visual Basic. If you don't have those you can read the following sections and skip through to the parts about WSH and ASP.

Exploring with Word VBA

Create a new document and open the VBA environment by choosing the "Tools" menu, then "Macro", then "Visual Basic Editor".

The first thing to do is create a reference to the Toolsack Baseline type library. This will load all the object details into the programming environment. To do this choose "References" from the "Tools" menu. Check the box next to "Toolsack Baseline 1.0".

You can use the Class Browser to look at all the objects. To do this choose "Object Browser" from the "View" menu. This will list all the available objects, to show just the objects in Toolsack Baseline, choose ToolsackBaseline in the top left drop down box (it should say <All Libraries> by default). You should see something like below:

In the Column called Classes is a list of all the classes in the "ToolsackBaseline" library. When you choose a class, all the methods and properties of that object are shown in the next column. When you choose a method or property details of the method are shown below.

For example the DoubleList class is shown above. The "Add" method is shown and below you can see that it takes a double as the first parameter and the second parameter is optional - it has a default of -1.

Click here to move on to part 2