December 4, 1999

Change the blink rate of the caret

You can retrieve and change the blink rate of the flashing caret inside TextBox controls through a couple of simple API functions: Private Declare Function SetCaretBlinkTime Lib “user32” (ByVal wMSeconds

Display the dialog to configure a port

The ConfigurePort API function lets you programmatically bring up the system dialog box for configuring a COM or LPT port. The function returns a non-zero value if successful (that is,

Friend Procedures are faster than Public ones

It might surprise you to learn that Friend procedures are sensibly faster than Public ones. You can prove this yourself by creating an ActiveX EXE project with one Private class

Selecting an entire row in a ListView

The ListView control that comes with VB6 lets you select an entire row by setting its FullRowSelect property to True. If you are working with VB5 or you’re using VB6

Implement Write-Once Read-Many Properties

Creating a read-only property or a write-only property isn’t difficult, as you probably know: just omit the Property Let (or Set, if dealing with objects) or the Property Get procedure,