Replies

I’m guessing that you’ll probably need to find a component written by a third party that you can use in VB that will expose objects to manipulate what you’re trying to do. I know there’s components that allow you to read serial ports, so I’d suspect there might be something out there to do what you want.

As a member of a team, you are having difficulty reading his code. Shouldn’t the team decide on coding conventions? Shouldn’t you all be on the same playing field? It’s not good to have rouge programmers doin’ their own thing, and others having trouble figuring out what they are doing. What if he leaves, and you get stuck supporting his code? Good code is code that another developer/programmer can look at and easily determine what it’s doing. Using arcane ancient syntax (% and &) that’s long been abandoned for more descriptive syntax isn’t good code.

In your examples of his code, I believe the %, $, and & are unnecessary and should be removed for clarity. They only serve to confuse.

All I’m saying is as a group, you should decide on coding standards so issues like the one you brought to the lounge don’t come up.

Take care,

You and your fellow programmers need to get this guy into a room and him

Seriously, you should get together as a group and decide on programming standards. Variable naming conventions, programming styles, use of comments, …

http://www.devx.com/upload/free/features/v…ul98/bc0798.pdf

http://www.devx.com/upload/free/features/v…pr98/bc0498.pdf

http://www.devx.com/free/newsletters/ent/ented013101.asp

I guess it depends on the needs of the users. O2K SP1 is as stable as O97 SP2 IMO. O2K has better exporting to web than 97. Word & Excel can export as a web page, and pull the same document back in which is nice. I don’t remember that feature in 97. Front Page 2000 does a much better job of not messing with changes you make to the HTML. Since I’m a font junkie, I like how O2K shows what the fonts look like in the drop down menus.

IMHO, I think you should try to stick to the look and feel of the Microsoft Windows Apps.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen a couple of Apps that look like they were from another planet. The terminology on the menus and some of the icons didn’t even come close to what the users of the app used in their day to day work. This resulted in a steep learning curve for the users. Of course, it would have helped if the users had a say in the app, but it was inflicted on them. Life in a corp. Scott Adams must have volumes of material for Dilbert. He probably doesn’t need to make any of it up.

Microsoft has a book that discusses the UI design for Windows apps. I haven’t read it, but I hear it’s pretty good.

Above all, I say KEEP IT SIMPLE. Get the users involved early in the process and let them have a say in the UI along with your experience and guidance.

Way back in 2000, I attended a session on UI design by Peter Vogel. He pretty much said, “give the users what they want.” If they want purple buttons with black lettering, then give it to them. They need to live with it, not you. He made some interesting points.

Oh well, I’ve babbled on enough.

I was speaking in terms of storage. Floppies have become useless in that respect. I haven’t removed the floppy drive from my system or anything like that. The only time I can think I might need a floppy is the situations you describe.

We gave up on McAfee at my work because of that very problem. It seems to behave in Win NT & Win 2000 machines, but not Win 98 machines. We’ve since switched to Sophos which seems stay out of the way. I’m thinking about getting PC-cillen for home use.

I understand your problem. How many times have we gotten an error or a warning in a program when it turns out to be something other than the line of code that spouts the error or warning?

Wait a minute! This is Outlook 98, right? If I’m correct, Outlook 98 uses VBScript not VBA/VB. That means that the FileCopy statement doesn’t exist since it’s a VBA/VB statement not a VBScript statement. You’ll probably need to use the FileSystemObject’s copyfile method.

You won’t be able to use VB’s SHELL statement in my previous post. I still think using “start” in the shell command string will work better than just “excel.exe”.

Two things that I can think of.

1) Shouldn’t the shell command string look like “start tabsproddatabaseedgarsecurityTEST.xls ”

Shell is essentially running something from the DOS prompt. If you can get it to run from the DOS prompt, it usually works in Shell. I’ve had problems with putting excel.exe since my system requires the full path to excel.exe. If you use the START command followed by a filename. It will launch the application that is associated with the extension of the filename.

2)I don’t think you need to use the WScript.Shell object. Shouldn’t VB’s SHELL command do the same thing saving you from creating an object?

I can barely remember the last time I used a floppy. Ever since I got a zip drive and a CD burner, floppies have become pretty useless.

I agree with Charlotte. I read some advice from Paul Lomax(author of the VB & VBA In A Nutshell) to stay way from using Subs and try to use more and more functions. Have the functions return true or false. It’s easier to control the flow.

http://vb.oreilly.com/news/vb_tips_1098.html

You might check out this thread.

http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/showflat.p…ew=&sb=&o=&vc=1

strAnswer = InputBox(“Please enter a figure”, “Enter a Figure”)
If strAnswer = ” ” _
Then
Exit Sub
End If

…or sumthin’ like that…

The inputbox returns an empty string if the user presses cancel.

You probably want use IsNumeric to check if the answer is a number. I’m assuming when you say “figure” you mean a number.

Since it’s software that’s coming on a new PC, I’d say get Office XP.

[rant]
I can’t say I’m thrilled with MS’s business decisions on OXP.

The requirements to quailfy for the upgrade are very narrow.

The price of the upgrade and full versions are higher than ever.

They’re essentially holding corporations hostage with their policy of “You must upgrade by XXX date or you’ll need to buy the full version after that date.” Where have they been for the last few months? Don’t they know the economy is weak? Corporations can’t afford that.

Just once I’d like to see MS fix all known bugs in a version of Office before they pile on a ton of flashy new features. Do you build a second story on a house when the foundation is crumbling?

We’ve heard some of the horror stories about the Product Activation Wizard. As OXP gets more and more users, do you think MS won’t have any problems with the PAW?
[/rant]

Why does it make more sense to begin learning C# instead of VB.NET? I’d think the jump from VB to VB.NET will be less difficult than VB to C#. I thought I had heard that the next version of Office will get the .NET treatment, but now I’m not sure. I’ve heard something about VSA(Visual Studio for Applications), which makes me think that Office won’t exactly get the .NET treatment. Can anyone clear this up?