Calvin Hsia's WebLog

You can use an array of PictureBox controls to display multiple photographs or other images. The sample below subclasses the PictureBox control and puts an array of them on a form. You need to change the PixPath to point to a directory with your digital...

Here’s an interesting bug report. The code below shows two readonly textboxes on a form, both containing floating point values. The first is left-aligned. When you hit tab from the first textbox, the value changes from 4.011 to 4.000 If you change...

I was helping a friend fix a problem that occurred in a VB.Net application. Upon inspection, an XML file was somehow invalid. The last few bytes were wrong. We found the code that modifies the file. It takes the original file, replaces a string...

I was asked why Tooltips appear in Task Manager . I happened to be out of the country when the question was asked, so I had to wait til I got back to the office to investigate. Sure enough, tooltips show up in Task Manager, under the Applications...

Here’s some C++ code to host the CLR. It’s an alternative to using COM Interop (s ee A Visual Basic COM object is simple to create, call and debug from Excel ), or using a User Control (see Create a .Net UserControl that calls a web service that acts...

I received a question from a customer: I am trying to find a way to display a grid of files (specifically DBF files) and show them in the order they were created with the dates and file sizes. I just took the sample code from Add a slider...

Try running the code below. It creates a form and adds all the various types of baseclass controls to it. Then it adds a grid and adds a column for each control type. For each control it adds tooltips and custom mouse pointers. Move your mouse over...

In my last post, What's that funny character? , I asked about a particular character. In fact, another mystery character can occur. Embarassingly, SET CARRY ON was set on my machine when I ran the code, and I didn’t add it to the sample. It’s off normally...

Run this code: CREATE CURSOR foo ( line c( 100 )) LIST STRUCTURE TO t.txt APPEND FROM t.txt sdf GO RECNO ()- 1 FOR i = 1 TO LEN ( TRIM ( line )) ?i, SUBSTR ( line ,i, 1 ), ASC ( SUBSTR ( line ,i, 1 )) ENDFOR ...

You may have heard a radio show on National Public Radio called Car Talk hosted by Tom and Ray Magliozzi, aka Click and Clack. It’s a call in show, where audience members call in with their car problems, and Click and Clack offer advice in a humorous...

One of our customers writes software for drag racers (see Fox helps drag racer win Microsoft Start Something Amazing Award ). His software helps the drag racer keep track of opponent statistics as well as how a car performs from race to race. He...

It takes a lot of work to create the blog posts and code samples that I put in my blog, and I was curious about getting more detailed statistics about the posts. I already aggregate some statistics for Microsoft Bloggers (see What is a Microsoft...

I was running really low on disk space on one of my machines, so I ran my Treemap utility on it (see What is taking up the space on your hard disk? TreeMap it! ). Then it occurred to me that I can improve the utility by adding a slider control to show...

My prior post ( Create a .Net UserControl that calls a web service that acts as an ActiveX control to use in Excel, VB6, Foxpro ) shows how to create a .Net control that you can use in VFP or VB6 that takes advantage of the .Net framework. Here...

Here’s how you can use Visual Studio to create a .Net User Control that will act as an ActiveX control that can be used in Excel (or other Office application), VB6 or Foxpro. This will bring the power of the entire.Net Framework to your program. This...

For some reason, my SmartPhone was giving me a message that memory was full. I hadn’t done anything to it to cause this: no new software installation or configuration, so I investigated a little further. A few of my applications didn’t work either...

Sometimes a web application might want to put arbitrary strings into a URL, and make it a valid URL. The VBScript and JScript escape and unescape functions do just that. This sample shows how to use VBScript to escape and unescape a string. The...

Sometimes you run a program and you don’t want it to show any dialogs or User Interface at all. For example, if a dialog normally occurs in a program, you would rather not have the application show a MessageBox with the error because that could hang the...

Here’s an interesting one. You can use hotkey’s to type in certain strings for quick data entry. I do this for my Photo collection (see Sharing Digital Pictures of your friend's ) Run the code below. It creates a form with an editbox databound to...

Sometimes you might want to embed a file inside an exe. For example, if you add a file into a project and don’t mark it as Excluded, the file will be physically inserted inside the target EXE or APP. Visual Class Libraries (VCX files), Forms (SCX files...

If you run the code below, you’ll get an error message. The grid height is being set to 19, which is too small for a vertical scrollbar. Dismiss the message and try to close the form. If you hit Ctrl-F4 or click on the close box, the close box gets dim...

I like experimenting with code. I typically have no idea what my experiment will be called or what kind of project it will eventually become. In Visual FoxPro, you can start writing code or creating components such as tables, forms, reports, etc. without...

A customer asked 1) Is it better to set it to 0 (Auto) or some "larger" number, such as -16 (1024kb). I haven't found any information in the help files as to where the tradeoff lies between these, but presumably the default for MTDLLs of 128kb is deliberately...

I’ve had several requests that require customizing the Blog Crawler. The entire source code of the Blog Crawler is available , so it can be modified to crawl blogs other than http://blogs.msdn.com Currently, it saves the entire HTML retrieved...

The EventHandler function allows you to connect some code to an object’s event interface. For example, Word allows you to run code when the user changes the Selected text in a document . An ADODB Recordset will fire events, such as WillMove and MoveComplete...