VB Caretaker is a small but extremely powerful utility designed to insert code into your Visual Basic projects. Its primary function is to insert error checking into your projects, and it has been designed to allow you to do this with minimum fuss and maximum flexibility.

Using VB Caretaker you can:

• Insert error handling into a project and save it to a new location. This way you can always work on a version with no error handling, but compile and distribute versions with error handling. (VB Caretaker will even compile the project for you!)

• Insert line numbers to aid debugging.

• Gather information on the status and value of variables.

VB Caretaker gives you limitless flexibility for inserting code into your routines. For example, at Mammoth Software we also use VB Caretaker to insert basic profiling into our projects.

VB Caretaker has a built in editor that allows you to directly edit the VB script you wish to insert. You can add two types of code:

• Code at the start of a routine, for example to declare variables or add On Error Goto statements.
• Code at the end of a routine, to act when an error occurs, or to finishing timing a routine.

You can also add forms, modules and classes to the project, allowing you to add database connectivity, pre-written global error handling modules, pre-designed forms to give your project that standard look and much more.

Aside from using VB Caretaker to insert error-handling routines, you could use it to insert:
• Company specific information or forms (e.g. an About box)
• Inserting profiling code (Download)
• Copyright declarations
• Or simply use it for project backup.

At Mammoth Software, we produce bespoke software for clients and had found that the ability to insert error checking at the last minute was invaluable. We wrote a version of VB Caretaker several years ago, but made the decision to refine it and make it available to the wider VB community in 2001. The program was polished and a comprehensive help file was added to make this one of the most indispensable products available to VB programmers.

We now use VB Caretaker in the following ways:

About Box
All of our software ships with the Mammoth Software About Box. Instead of redesigning it each time, we simply keep it in one location on the central server and use VB Caretaker to insert it into the project at an early date. The routine is saved as About Box, and can be run as soon as possible.

Error Checking
We like to work on raw code, and we find that during development, the VB interpreter errors are more useful to us. Because of this, we insert the error checking into the code before it is distributed. We save each new distribution in a folder with the version number and this allows us to keep locate any error that may occur. For example, if an error is reported in version 0.7.81 at line 3245 we can simply find the folder with version 0.7.81 and locate line 3245 to check the error. This has greatly decreased the time spent in the product-testing phase of development.
Inserting error checking in this way also allows us to keep a uniform error report form for all our software.

Project Profiling
During the product-testing phase we also like to see which routines get used heavily and how long they take to execute. To do this we insert a simple piece of code that records the time taken to complete the routine, and whether it finished. This information is stored in a database and we simple retrieve it from our clients at regular intervals to look at their usage patterns. For example, we once got a complaint about a program being too slow. Our internal testing showed the particular routine to be extremely quick, but when we examined usage patterns we saw that the users were using an alternative, slow route that we hadn’t expected. By tweaking the program slightly, we moved the users to the faster route thereby increasing their perception of speed for minimal programming effort.

Download the project profiling routine here

The unregistered version of VB Caretaker does not contain any nag screens and is not time limited in any way.  We ask only that if you find this tool useful that you register it.  Registration brings the following benefits:

• Rollback
• Multiple Code Styles
• 'Inserted by VB Caretaker' not put in each procedure
• Variable Dump
• Ignore Tags

You can register your copy of VB Caretaker here.