Technical notes

Support for Microsoft Visual Basic is deprecated. This means that no further development nor bug fixes will be provided for this component. In addition, whilst analyses of small/medium sized Visual Basic will usually proceed without issue, larger applications may fail due to analyzer memory limitations. Please see the note here about 32bit/64bit compatibility.

Referencing through UNC path

A DLL Project with a local path is not matched when referenced through UNC path. When VB project “A” references a DLL “B” through a UNC path and the VB project “B” corresponding to the referenced DLL “B” has a local path using a drive letter, the VB analyzer does not match DLL “B” with project “B” and therefore does not create links between “A” and “B”.

Integers

The VB analyzer’s Inference Engine does not take integers into account. When an integer participates in the construction of a string ( strC1 = “Inference.clsVB” + CStr( i ) ), the Inference Engine does not find the true value. In the previous example, it finds only “Inference.clsVB” and not “Inference.clsVB1”," Inference.clsVB2".

Unresolved OCX Method Calls

Calls to the methods listed below are not detected by the VB Analyzer. These methods are dynamically added to OCA files the first time Visual Basic is launched. These methods only exist for graphical components contained in OCXs.

Miscellaneous issues

• The VB analyzer searches for server object names in all literal strings and embedded SQL in Visual Basic, taking into account normalized. While this technique searches for and finds all real schema/database object references, it may also find incorrect references. For example, literal strings, such as user messages or menu options, may contain the names of database or schema objects and in such cases, incorrect references may be found. The VB analyzer will NOT search for, NOR find the names of stored procedures, tables or views that are constructed dynamically by concatenating parts of their names.
• The VB analyzer does not scan binary files, as a result, it will NOT detect references hidden in these files.
• If you declare a generic object variable (such as an object) and assign an object to it by using the Set statement, the VB analyzer will NOT detect references to a method of this object.
• Collections and arrays are not supported during resolution via these object types. In other words, these objects can be seen in the Graphical View, but when a call is made via a collection or an array, the elements located on the right of the call are not found: MyClass.MyMethod() is fully supported, but in MyArrayOfClass( n ).MyMethod() no link will be detected to MyClass nor to MyMethod. A link will, however, be detected to MyArrayOfClass. This limitation only applies for collections or variant/object arrays. For arrays whose type is already known when the array is declared, the link to the method will be detected.
• Control groups are supported as follows: only the group is displayed by CAST - each element in the group cannot be seen.
• Win32 calls from the VB code are represented by imported functions.
• Binary files are not analyzed.

Inference Engine limitations

Because of a limitation in the Inference Engine for the VB analyzer, the link between “sub1” and the method “Method” (in the example below) will not be created where a parameter of a parametrized method (“MsgBox” in this case) calls a dynamic function (i.e. a link retrieved by the Inference Engine). For example: Sub Sub1()Dim var as ObjectSet o = CreateObject( “A.B”)MsgBox o.Method()End Sub

Links from VB objects to COM objects

Links to COM methods implemented in an OCX library or C++ DLL are not created while analyzing VB source code having references to these methods. these links can, however, be created manually using a Reference Pattern.

Syntax

When the line continuation character, i.e. the underscore ( _ ), is used after a period ( . ), the VB analyzer gives a syntax error during analysis of such code. Example:

frmToursPerdusManqueConducteur.flexDonnees. _
                                        TextMatrix(ii, 7) = vf_NbTPJour
---------------------------------------

As a consequence, the object containing this code is not analyzed. To avoid the error, either remove the line continuation character and write the code on one line, or separate the line at a different location, not after a period. The use of the line continuation character after other characters than the period does not cause a syntax error.

VB Standard APIs

Standard VB APIs (VBA, VB, VBRUN) delivered with the various versions of Visual Basic are too big to be analyzed during each analysis. Consequently these APIs have been pre-parsed and the underlying classes are packaged with the analyzer. The VB APIs are then loaded depending on the version and redeployed on demand during the analysis. 

This has the following consequences:

• VB standard objects are not stored in the Analysis Service.
• Even if references to standard VB objects are resolved by the analyzer, corresponding links are not traced and consequently not stored.
• For the CreateObject method and CreateInstance method, the analyzer will create a link between the caller of these methods and the COM CoClass of the first parameter of these methods.