Forms - Page 2

Apart from the different kind of combo boxes you can obtain by manipulating the Style property, another feature is made available by Windows when dealing with combo box controls, the so-called extended user interface. With standard combo box controls, the list portion stays invisible until the ...

The DoEvent statement should be used only to give other portions of your program to be reactive to the end user's actions. Instead, many VB developers use it to force a repaint of a form or some of its controls. This means adding a lot of overhead to your code, which you can avoid by using the ...

By changing the WS_CHILD style bit of a window, you can make it appear as if it is disabled, even if the form is fully active and functional. These are the statements you need: Private Declare Function SetWindowLong Lib "user32" Alias "SetWindowLongA" (ByVal hwnd As Long, ByVal nIndex ...

You can retrieve the parent directory from a path by identifying the first and last backslash. The start position for the first backslash should be 3 in order for it to handle UNC paths. By ...

draw a raised/bump/etched/sunken border at given coordinates

Copying and pasting text and images programmatically isn't difficult at all, using the methods of the Clipboard object. However, implementing a generic Edit menu that copies and pastes the highlighted contents of whatever control is the selected control is often cumberson. For example, ...

In some cases you might want to activate a form given its name, but VB doesn't let you do it directly. However, it is easy to create a function that does it by iterating over all the forms in the current project: ' retrieve a reference to a form given its name ' if there are multiple ...

A simple way to add some pizazz to your forms is by minimizing them and then closing them, instead of making them disapper istantaneously. Just try this code: Private Sub Form_Unload(Cancel As Integer) Me.WindowState = vbMinimized End Sub

You can put VB's registry functions to good use by creating a few reusable routines that save, reload, and delete size and state of a form in your program. ' Save form settings Function SaveFormSettings(ByVal AppName As String, frm As Object) SaveSetting AppName, frm.Name, ...

Split a menu with one or more vertical lines Return True if successful HWND is the handle of the parent window ITEMSINSECTION is the max number of items in each section created by the vertical lines MENUPOS is a list of arguments that point to the menu item to be split the first argument ...

It is possible to use the PaintPicture Method of the PictureBox or Form by entering different dimensions for source height/width and destination dimensions.

By sending appropriate messages to a multi-line TextBox control you can read and modify its formatting rectangle - that is, the inner portion of the control where the user can type. Modifying the size and position of this area can be useful, for example, to leave a left margin where you can add ...

Return the size and position of the drop-down list rectangle of a ComboBox control.

Setting a multiline TextBox's SelStart property doesn't ensure that the insertion point (the caret) is visible. You can achieve this by sending the control an appropriate message: Private Declare Function SendMessage Lib "user32" Alias "SendMessageA" (ByVal hwnd As Long, ByVal wMsg As ...

By default, multiline TextBox controls insert a tab stop position every 8 characters; in other words, if you press the Ctrl+Tab key while the focus is inside a multiline TextBox control, the caret advances to position 8,16,24, etc. (If the TextBox is the only control on the form that can ...

Return the specified line in a multiline TextBox control.

Get the line/column coordinates of a given character (both are zero-based). If charIndex is negative, it returns the coordinates of the caret

Return an array with all the lines in the control. If the second optional argument is True, the hard CR-LFs are preserved (hard CR-LFs are those inserted by the user, soft CRLFs are those inserted automatically to wrap long lines)

Scroll the contents of the control. Positive values scroll left and up, negative values scroll right and down. IMPORTANT: you can only scroll TextBox control to which the corresponding scrollbar (horizontal or vertical) is associated

You can easily add animation when showing or hiding a window using the AnimateWindow API. There are three types of animation: roll, slide, and alpha-blended fade. The declaration of API is like ...