November 11, 2000

MTS black box or white box perspective

Object and component technology has brought us a way of composing new functionality of existing parts. MTS and COM+ has extended this to include transaction handling. But can we, with the later in mind, always treat components as black boxes?In this article Ingo pinpoints two cases where a white box

Get the local IP address using the Internet Transfer Control

The easiest way to retrieve the IP address assigned to the local machine during an Internet session is by means of the LocalIP property of the Internet Transfer Control: MsgBox “IP address= ” & Winsock1.LocalIp Note that getting the same information through API calls requires a lot more code.

Checking if a Floppy Drive is ready using FileSystemObject library

The Microsoft Scripting Runtime Library offers a FileSystemObject and a Drive object that allow you to check if a Floppy drive is ready. Before writing the code you have to add this library to your project using the References dialog window. If the library isn’t contained in the list, you

Control the mouse speed under Windows 98 / 2000

Under Windows 98 and 2000 you can control the speed of the mouse. The mouse speed determines how far the pointer will move based on the distance the mouse moves. The pvParam parameter must point to an integer that receives a value which ranges between 1 (slowest) and 20 (fastest).

Swap the mouse buttons’ behavior and meaning

You can programmatically swap the meaning of the left and right mouse buttons, to account for your left-handed users. All you need is a call to the SystemParameterInfo API function Private Declare Function SystemParametersInfo Lib “user32” Alias _ “SystemParametersInfoA” (ByVal uAction As Long, ByVal uParam As Long, _ ByRef lpvParam

Cascade all the child windows of a window

The Windows API provides an handy function that lets you cascade all the child windows of another window with one single call. The effect of this function is similar to the Cascade Windows command in most MDI apps, except the parent window doesn’t have to be an MDI window.This is