I recently worked on improving a VB6 application, and as part of the task, I decided to “clean up” the way procedures used line labels. More »
If you’re a VB.NET developer who’s also programmed in the various Visual Basic flavours which preceded it, you would have noticed that the new standard for custom program settings storage is XML files. We recently did some work on porting an “older” application to the VB.NET platform. More »
Quite some time ago, I documented how manifest files can be used to make VB6 applications look like they were designed for Windows XP. Having recently worked on a project which liberally used third-party ActiveX controls, I experienced one major pitfall of this approach. More »
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. More »
I recently got an email from one of our readers who found our Spellchecking from Visual Basic article useful but wanted to know if there was a way to ensure that Microsoft Word was installed before attempting to invoke the spellchecking function. The short answer is “yes, there is”. More »
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. More »
Here’s a quick way to run a spellcheck on any data stream from within your VB6 application: Function SpellCheck(Stream As String) As String On Error Resume Next Dim W As Object Set W = CreateObject(”Word. More »
One of the first problems a VB6 developer encounters when migrating to VB.NET is that the way forms are loaded has changed completely. More »
If you’re a software developer, string concatenation is something you do regularly, irrespective of the programming language you use. More »
Displaying “mailto” links in web pages is much less widespread than it used to be in the good old days, largely thanks to the proliferation of web scraping spam harvesters. The email obfuscator uses a simple trick to effectively camouflage an email address which may be embedded in a web page. More »
It doesn’t happen all that often but when it does, it’s worth the wait. You see, I’m one of those insubordinate software developers who has for many years insisted that Hungarian notation is crap because not even Hungarians find it useful. More »
For experienced VB.NET developers this isn’t really anything new but having spent most of my time in the last five years writing web applications in PHP, I have to admit that I’m a bit of a late starter in this area. More »
Even though Windows XP supports skinnable interfaces, Visual Basic 6 applications will not automatically inherit the new look and feel. This is not surprising, considering VB6 has been around long before Windows XP came out. What is surprising though, is that your VB. More »
When putting together dynamic web applications in an ASP environment, developers use ADO recordsets for the overwhelming majority of their database interfacing. More »
For quite some time now, the more vigilant Windows IIS administrators have typically been configuring their hosts to have the “filesystem object” removed, due to an inherent security flaw which permits a malicious user to gain access to the servers directories and files. More »
Hungarian notation is a naming convention in computer programming, in which the name of an object indicates its type and intended use. More »