devxlogo

We are an award-winning tech entrepreneurship website where trusted experts can provide value globally.

Since 1998, DevX has helped people start businesses, build websites, and provide enterprise technology to people globally. Interviewing the likes of Microsoft’s co-founder, Steve Ballmer, the publication brings comprehensive, reliable, and accessible insights to the Internet.

devxlogo

Trusted for 26 years

Over 30K Articles

1M+ Readers

Expert-reviewed

10K+ Tech Terms

As seen in:

microsoft logo
business_insider_logo
wired_logo
berkley
arstechnica_logo
hackernoon

The Latest

Counting Bits

It seems that the only way to count the number of 1’s or 0’s in a binary value is creating a loop that iterates on all the 16 or 32

InstrLast – Find the last occurrence of a substring

‘ returns the last occurrence of a substring’ The syntax is similar to InStrFunction InstrLast(ByVal Start As Long, Source As String, search As String, _ Optional CompareMethod As VbCompareMethod =

Never use the End statement

There are a lot of risks involved in using End in VB programs: your databases might not be correctly closed, your objects are not correctly terminated, etc. You should always

Correctly set scrollbars’ width and height

You should always modify a vertical scrollbar’s width and a horizontal scrollbar’s height to conform to the display resolution. You can learn the suggested size (in pixels) using the GetSystemMetrics

Always run a component using Full-Compile

When testing a component in the IDE, always perform a full compilation. This ensures that VB checks the syntax of all the code in the component, which in turn guarantees

DirExists – Check that a directory exists

‘ Return True if a directory exists’ (the directory name can also include a trailing backslash)Function DirExists(DirName As String) As Boolean On Error GoTo ErrorHandler ‘ test the directory attribute

FileExists – Check that a file exists

‘ Return True if a file existsFunction FileExists(FileName As String) As Boolean On Error GoTo ErrorHandler ‘ get the attributes and ensure that it isn’t a directory FileExists = (GetAttr(FileName)

PrintRotatedText – Display a rotated message

Const LF_FACESIZE = 32Private Type LOGFONT lfHeight As Long lfWidth As Long lfEscapement As Long lfOrientation As Long lfWeight As Long lfItalic As Byte lfUnderline As Byte lfStrikeOut As Byte

Access Help More Easily

Several developers have complained that in order to use Visual Studio 6.0’s online help, they must keep the MSDN Library CD in their CD-ROM drive, or copy all 680 MB

Redirect Based on Time of Day Using JavaScript

Redirecting based on the time of day is fairly easy to do. One thing to remember, however, is that because client-side JavaScript runs in the user’s browser, the time your

Maximize VB’s MDI Memory

If you use the VB development environment in MDI mode (the default) and you like your code windows maximized, you might have noticed that, unlike VB5, VB6 doesn’t remember this

Class Module(.cls) vs. Module(.bas)

Question: For the same global function, what’s the difference between placing it in a global module and in a class module?Are there any performance issues involved? If so, which way

Rounding function

Question: Is there a way to round numbers to the nearest multiple of n, where n could be any number? For example, if n = 5, it would round 8

String Manipulation

Question: I have a VB app which formats a large text file and then prints it using MS Word. I need to include what amounts to a thick underscore in

ActiveX EXE vs. DLL

Question: I have an ActiveX dll into which I can pass an existing ImageList containing a set of images. This works fine and means that I only have to maintain

DataObject Object

Question: In an event, I declared a dataobjectvariable and instantiated it this way : Dim do_1 as dataobject Set do_1= New dataobject But when I run the program I get

Customizing Serialization

If a class contains non-serializable variables, and you need to preserve the state of those variables, you will have to customize the default serialization behavior of the class. You can

Watch out for the NotSerializableException

The Serializable interface is a marker interface–in other words, it contains no methods. Its purpose is to categorize the classes that may be serialized using Java’s serialization API. Only the

Enable or Disable Triggers on SQL Server 7.0

You can enable and disable triggers on tables for SQL Server 7.0. This means you don’t need to drop triggers and recreate them if some process (which requires that triggers

Validate a Drop-Down List on a Form

The easiest way to make ensure that a user picks a value from a dropdown list is to add a value to the top of the list that isn’t really

Accessing a C++ Object in C Code

C code, which of course is unaware of object semantics, can access the data members of a C++ object directly, but certain requirements must be met. There are some guarantees

Threading Piped Streams

Piped streams are typically used in separate threads. One thread writes output to a PipedOutputStream. The other thread reads the same data from a PipedInputStream. The two streams are connected