To call a subroutine, you can use the Call statement or simply the name of the subroutine: Call MyRoutine(firstParameter) ‘Or MyRoutine firstParameter Notice you don’t include the parentheses in the

When talking to the user or subject-matter expert about an application’s requirements, write the requirements in the form of scenarios. A scenario both defines the requirement and provides a list

When you refer to an object in VB5, you get a drop-down list of that object’s properties and methods. But, did you know that the statements and functions of the

Older versions of VB required a unique name for your error-handler labels in order to use On Error GoTo . You had to concatenate the module name and routine name

I use constants for things like control-array index numbers, but it’s a hassle to keep scrolling to the top of the module to remember the constant names. If you name

When developing code that maps to database fields, you often need to look back at the tables to determine the correct database fields. With VB5, you can now do this

If you extend a few AWT classes, you will eventually want to add images to enhance their appearance. Icons for buttons and your own logo in the corner of frames

In Visual Basic, the standard combo box lets you store an Index to its data. For instance, a user would see in the list an employee name but not an

Question: How do I make the contents of one DIV (divA) equal to the contents of another DIV (divB) in Netscape? I know that in Microsoft Internet Explorer the code

Question: I would like to put my entire alternative no frames content in the NOFRAMES element instead of just a link to it. The advantage to this would be a

Question: How can I get data from a Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) server and display it in a Web page? On a Visual Basic form, I can use a text

To prevent a component from getting the focus when the Tab or shift-Tab keyboard focus traversal is used, override the isFocusTraversable method. It is often desirable to toggle a TextField

Question: How do I interrogate tables randomly and print out their structures, components, sizes, and indexes? This ability would be useful in allowing me to check how I have created

Question: I’m leaving Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 and Turbo Pascal 7.0 because they don’t work correctly with Windows 95 (for example, division by 0). I heard that Delphi is

Question: The VS_VERSIONINFO structure can be used to obtain file version data about files with extended version data. This structure is not included in Delphi 4.0, nor is it included

Here’s another simple but useful add-in you can add to your arsenal. Follow the directions given in the previous tip “Add Remarks to Your Procedures,” with only minor differences. Use

VB5 introduced support for enumerations, which are related sets of constants. Although you can declare a property as an enumerated type, VB lets you assign any long integer value to

When copying the contents of one array into another, use the System.arraycopy method instead of an iterative loop. For example, consider the following arrays: int[] first = {1, 2, 3};

Question: I am working on system that is built from many pieces, but they all use certain common settings. I developed a simple ActiveX DLL that reads those settings from

Question: I am trying to set up a small intranet and was wondering if there is a way to determine the client’s workstation name (for example, Computer Name in Control

Operator dynamic_cast fails when it cannot convert its argument to the desired type. Usually, such a failure results from an attempt to cast an object to a non-related class. But

Standard exception classes are derived from std::exception (defined in the header). They all implement the member function what(), which returns a const char * with a description of the exception:

STL containers overload the assignment operator, thereby allowing you to easily assign containers of the same type to one another: #include #includeusing namespace std;void main() { vector vi; vi.push_back(1); vi.push_back(2);

When serializing a Hashtable in Java, make sure that the keys used to store objects are either primitives, or the key class’ hashCode() method overrides the superclass Object’s hashCode() method.

Many Visual InterDev 6 developers have destroyed their Visual InterDev 6 environments by installing Internet Explorer 5 beta. Microsoft mentions potential problems in the IE5 beta’s release notes but too

Even if your Web site is rock-solid with no broken links on it anywhere, chances are someone is going to see a 404 File not Found error page someday, if

The Perl sort function is useful for alphabetically sorting lists. However, you can’t use it on a list of lists, because once a list starts listing other lists, they cease

The serialization mechanism in Java provides the means for persisting objects beyond a single run of a Java program. To serialize an object, make sure that the declaring class implements

You can do a lot of cool things using Microsoft’s Remote Data Services (RDS). For example, have you ever wanted to display a field from a database table read-only in

Virtual inheritance is used to avoid multiple copies of a base class in a multiple-inherited object. However, there are cases where multiple copies of a base are needed in a