Classic VB Corner


Monitoring System Power Status

With the use of portable devices on the rise, you may find a need to monitor how much life is in the system your application finds itself running on.

Listening to ThunderMain

Windows provides an ongoing stream of general system notifications that you can fairly easily hook into.

No Such Thing as a Windowless VB App

All Classic VB apps have at least one top-level window. Normally out of reach, you can put them to good use if you know how to get to them.

Inside Alternative Data Streams

NTFS offers an almost unknown way to obscure streams of data behind the most innocent looking files. Find out how to do this with VB6.

Microsoft's VB6 Support Strategy?

After years neglecting the VB6 community, Microsoft seems to be missing something. Us!

Finding an Associated Executable

After using a given API for a decade or more, you tend to just take it for granted that it works. Karl Peterson shows how he worked around a challenge when it didn't.

Finding the Right Tool For the Job

Tired of wondering which version of dumpbin or link is executing? Would you like to copy that tool you use all the time to another machine, but can't seem to find it? Here's a little utility that can help.

Thoughtful UI Tweaks Can Make All the Difference

The difference between a successful program and a complete flop may come down to how you treat your users. Here's one simple way to avoid needlessly annoying your users.

Persisting Environment Variables

Creating and persisting new environment variables can be surprisingly tricky in Classic VB. Here's how to avoid a common trap.

Reacting to the Mousewheel

ClassicVB was created in a pre-Mousewheel era, hard as that may be to conceive. Here’s how you can watch for, and react to, the user spinning that now-ubiquitous device.

Hooking the Mouse

Subclass multiple controls with a single class module to add the missing MouseEnter and MouseLeave events.

Subclassing the XP Way

Windows XP offers a much-improved method to subclass windows. Is it the right call for you to make?

The Only Add-In Always Used

There's only one add-in that I have auto-loaded every time I fire up the Classic VB IDE. After disappearing from the market, it's back now, and it's free!

Using a Standard Terminal Font

Need to recreate that olde-timey Terminal look? There's a stock object built into every version of Windows that'll serve that need.

Determining Process Times

Here's the least complicated method for determining how long a given process has been running or how much CPU time it's actually consumed. This technique is used here to establish how long Windows has been running.

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