Question: Would it be practical to use an XML document, or more accurately documents, as a database, and if so, how would you recommend doing this? I would use XML, JavaScript, Internet Explorer 5, and HTML to accomplish this. There would be about 30 entities and 2000 individual records. I
The Format Painter button in Microsoft FrontPage 2000 is really handy for copying a style from one area of text and applying it to another. The only problem is that it can be tedious to keep picking up styles and painting elsewhere. It turns out that you don’t have to
When using VB to create a new ActiveX control with a Caption or Text property, you can set the corresponding Procedure ID to cause the Property Browser to update the property value with each keystroke, just as the Label and Text controls do. However, it
Some developers suggest putting DoEvents in loops to keep your application responsive. This is never a good idea. If the loop is short, you don
Sometimes you have to move information from a flat file (mainframe or ASCII text file) to a database. Usually, this flat file is a set of records, and the delimiter between records is a carriage return/linefeed pair. Records might be different sizes and can contain Null characters. This code is
I read a great advanced tip on how to create a GUID in “Generate Unique String IDs” [“101 Tech Tips for VB Developers,” Supplement to VBPJ, August 1999]. However, you can use only one API call instead of four. The OLE32.dll contains a function called WinCoCreateGUID that does all the
If you do a lot of floating-point division operations in VB, you can optimize these operations by multiplying by the reciprocal value. For example, instead of performing this calculation: X/Y Do this: X * (1 / Y) You can see how this works in VB by adding this code to
You might have wished you could right-click on a VB file and open it in Notepad, or copy a snippet of code for another app you