September 22, 2001

Getting a pixel color

The Point method returns the color value of a given pixel, but is rather slow because it has to convert its argument from twips (or whatever ScaleMode is currently active) to pixels, and also because its argument are treated as Single quantities, and must therefore converted. When you have to

Count distinct characters in a string

When you need to count how many occurrences of a given character are in a string, you might be tempted to go along the “traditional” Visual Basic way: ‘ count spaces For i = 1 To Len(text) If Mid$(text, i, 1) = ” ” Then count = count + 1

Animated form icons

You can add a professional touch to your apps by showing an animated icon when the main form is minimized. To achieve this effect, prepare an array of Image controls, each one containing the icons that make up the animation, then add a Timer control, with the Enabled property set

Counting characters in a file

Ever needed to count how many characters of a given type are in a file? For instance, how many alphabetical characters, or digits, or spaces? You might read each line of the file using Line Input, but you will probably to load the whole file in memory using one single

Setting a pixel color

The PSet method is much slower than it should actually be, and in most cases you will find it convenient to substitute it with direct calls to the SetPixel API functions. This function is about twelve times faster than the VB’s method, at least when you can set the form’s