VB.NET inifile class

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.

Read more >>

Pitfalls of third-party controls

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.

Read more >>

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.

Read more >>

Checking for Office applications in Visual Basic

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”. The actual VB6 code required isn’t all that much but you’ll have to call the Windows API to do it. Put the following code into a module and name it something meaningful:

Read more >>

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.