Better screen cursor management in VB

One of the more subtle aspects of traditional VB application development is controlling the screen cursor when you’re performing some lengthy operation which might involve multiple functions or subroutines. The polite thing to do is obviously set the screen cursor to an hourglass just before you commence a processing task which is likely to take more than second or so. The polite thing is to also switch it back to an arrow, once you’re finished.

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API Guide

Sooner or later, every VB programmer needs to be able to plugin to the native Windows framework to perform some task which isn’t possible with their development platform. The KPD-Team from Belgium, offers a nicely documented and searchable database of over 900 useful functions which make up the API-Guide:

So, if (like us) you’re still occasionally having to support applications which haven’t been migrated to the .NET Framework, you’ll find the API-Guide an indispensable starting point to programmatically accessing the Windows user interface, network communications, numeric algorithms, data access, cryptography and more.

JavaScript with XHTML

Having recently ported some HTML pages to XHTML, we were a little surprised that our favourite validator continued to warn us that our very simple one-line javascript code was no longer correct:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
copthis();
</script>

Apparently, the trick is to enclose the actual javascript code with a “CDATA” section like this:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
copthis();
//]]>
</script>

The reason is apparently that under the XHTML standard, the javascript code is considered as “PCDATA” and therefore treated by the validator in the same manner as the rest of the markup code. See this article from About.com for more.

Programmers excuses

Recently, I stumbled on this amusing list of things developers have said, when their software doesn’t quite work as intended:

1. I thought I fixed that.
2. Why do you want to do it that way?
3. Where were you when the program blew up?
4. Did you check for a virus?
5. Somebody must have changed my code.
6. It works, but it hasn’t been tested.
7. You must have the wrong version.
8. It worked yesterday.
9. It’s never done that before.
10. That’s weird.

I’m personally guilty of (1), (6) and (7) on the odd occasion with my own code. Looking at someone else’s code, I’ve often been heard to mutter (10) on a regular basis.

What about you?

Document your PHP projects with PHPXRef

PHPXref is a handy developer tool, written by Gareth Watts, which cross-references the source code in PHP projects and creates readable HTML documentation which can be viewed with any web browser. The main features of PHPXref are:

• No web server required to view output.
• Cross-references PHP classes, functions, variables, constants and require/include usage.
• Javascript search and instant lookup of classes, functions, constants and tables.
• Pretty output of PHP source files.

PHPXref requires Perl V5.6 or later to run and is available in Linux and Windows flavours. The Windows edition even includes the required Perl libraries, so installation is a cinch.