Nearly all applications need to open or save data files. Use the common file dialog APIs to easily avoid another unneeded dependency and sidestep some system bugs as a bonus. (Part 2 of 2)
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 12/22/2010
Why tempt fate by making your application dependent upon an easily replaced component? Karl Peterson shows how you can begin reducing external dependencies in your VB apps.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 12/14/2010
Windows 7 hides a number of locale-inappropriate fonts by default, and allows users to toggle this property as well. Here's how to honor that setting.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 10/14/2010
Console applications are alive and well in Administrator Land. Here’s how your console application can leave instructions for the command processor upon your exit.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 08/26/2010
Administrators get no respect, either, in this world of Least Privileged Users. Here's how you can set aside those precautions, and still get at the information your users need.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 07/27/2010
As Microsoft shuts down its newsgroup server, the community resource lives on. You just need to know where to look for it.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 07/16/2010
We all tend to obsess on optimizations at times, often needlessly. Here's how to figure out if all your extra work is paying off.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 05/18/2010
Windows provides numerous ways to tell an application how to size and position itself on startup. Here's how you can honor those requests.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 05/04/2010
Karl Peterson returns with another batch of tricks designed to improve the IDE.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 04/12/2010
There are countless tricks folks have learned to use within the classic Visual Basic IDE over the years. Here are a few of mine.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 04/06/2010
64-bit versions of Windows present perils for Win32 apps, and opportunities too. For example, it's incredibly easy to double your address space.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 03/22/2010
Still using Instr to search within binary arrays? Stop that! Use InstrB instead.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 03/16/2010
Ever felt the VB IDE dialogs were poorly designed? Here's a way for you to tweak them a bit more to your liking.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 03/02/2010
There's another one coming, and this one's still flying pretty far below the radar. Classic VB apps are only vulnerable to the extent they interact with others.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 02/16/2010
Classic VB provides no simple method to create nested directory folders, but it certainly provides the tools to make such a method.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 02/04/2010