You can use Dynamic HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to change the color of text on the fly. This functionality can be useful for highlighting a portion of text.

Setting the SelectionMode property of the MSFlexGrid to flexSelectionByRow forces all columns in a row to be selected rather than a single cell. It also allows selection of multiple rows

Often it is desirable to set a background color for an entire layer or DIV region, much like setting the background color for a whole table. Setting a layer background

When designing a Web page that contains CSS layers (DIV sections) and embedded objects (Java applets, plugins, or ActiveX controls), keep in mind that embedded objects do not obey zIndex

Using only a few Windows API calls, you can change the standard VB5 toolbar into an Office 97 look-alike. I’ve implemented two display styles for the toolbar. The first allows

The VB Picture control can hold several different formats of pictures: BMP, DIB, ICO, CUR, WMF, and others under VB5. Additionally, you can use graphics methods to “draw” on the

To minimize the number of controls on my forms, I use a text box as a floating input control that I either overlay onto a grid or swap with a

You’ll find the IsArray() function helpful when you use Variant arrays that you can set or unset through your code and need to test often. However, once you declare the

In the April 1997 issue of VBPJ, you published a tip called “Consider the Taskbar When Centering Forms.” You can center forms more easily with the SystemParametersInfo API call: Private

Most people probably type in URLs using the minimum number of characters. If you don’t use a trailing slash on directory names, the Web server goes to extra effort, which

I’m always looking for sample code, and the setup1.vbp file is an excellent source of reusable code. It comes with VB and is part of the VB setup kit. The

If you’re assigning the values of columns you return from RDO queries into string variables, you’ll get an “Invalid use of Null” error if one of the columns has a

I sometimes want an MDI parent window to be repainted. For example, if a modal dialog is displayed over the MDI form and you click on OK, the dialog is

Placing a message box in an error trap can provide useful debugging information, but it doesn’t allow you to return to the subroutine or function to poke around and further

If you use a resource file in your application, you can see the RES file appear in the project window under “Related Documents.” This is the only type of file

Tired of making a change to a Web page and the change doesn’t show up when you view the page in your Web browser? Holding down the Shift key as

Web page “graceful degradation” means making new capabilities invisible to older browsers that don’t support them. Many authors hide VBScript or JavaScript code inside an HTML comment so that older

You can define JavaScript functions anywhere in an HTML file, however, the best place to define them is in the HTML header (between the and tags). If a JavaScript function

A thrown exception is considered caught, when its corresponding handler has been entered (or, in case such a handler cannot be found, when unexpected() function has been invoked). Sometimes you

Some browsers do not display a table cell’s background color unless the cell contains some HTML content. It is often handy to use table cell background colors to “paint” a

Most implementations of STL (Standard Template Library) use pointers as the underlying representation of iterators. However, an iterator doesn’t have to be a pointer, and there’s a good reason for

Since namespaces are relatively new in C++, some compilers do not support this feature yet. To workaround this lack of support, you can use struct holding static member functions: struct

When launching a data file with the ShellExecute() function, Windows tries to find the associated application and open the data file with this application. But what happens if no association

Although VB’s SSTab control behaves as if each tab page is a container, it actually uses a single container for all tab pages. This can cause unexpected behavior if you

Sorry, you can’t change the Appearance property of a text box at run time?but you can make it look like you have! If set to none, a 3-D picture box

Conventional wisdom suggests that to delete an array element, you must move up all the subsequent elements to close the “gap” left by the deleted item. However, if the sequence

A nice feature of programs like Netscape’s newsreader is the ability to display the entire title of an article even though only part of it fits in the list box

One of the most common gotchas for beginning Java programmers involves comparing Objects, especially Strings, with the == operator. Every Object in Java has a unique location in the Java

When you begin all Swing-based applications, you must set the look and feel and add a WindowListener so that when a user clicks on the exit box, the program exits.

JToggleButtons work well when you want buttons that stay down or up inside the JToolBar. You can also make them behave like Radio buttons (only one button down at a