realolman

My character recognizes ( and appreciates ) B.S. when he sees it. You stated your opinion without any phone numbers, email addresses or nuthin'. I appreciate that too... thanks :)

and you wonder why you're not an admin. ;) I don't see how you can type being so ham handed.

My daughter is going to college this fall and I want to get her a notebook computer. The last 4-5 computers we have bought have been Dell. For reasons that I am not even quite sure of, I don't think I want another Dell. Anyone have any suggestions of what brand to get? If you think Dell's the best, I'd like to hear that too. Thanks

After I have created some graphics on a form, I would like to print them on an entire sheet of paper. Could someone show me how to do that, please? thank you

The word refurbushed seems to get thrown around a lot. A guy from Dell, talking about their laptops, told me it means they got it back. What does it mean?

here's a fairly cheap one here's another This one is real cheap It is actually kinda unbelievable; Although I think it's closer to how things ought to be I had no luck with it in .NET, but pretty good inVB6

You can read pages from the book on the site. All I can say about what I have read is EXACTLY! I am going to blatantly steal some lines from the book : The human mind is exquisitely tailored to make sense of the world. Give it the slightest clue and off it goes. If I were placed in the cockpit of a modern jet airliner my inability to perform smoothly would neither surprise nor bother me. This ain't no airliner.

That's exactly what it was for. I didn't think an example like that demonstrated much usefulness in inheritance. You'd think they could do better... they ARE Microsoft You are very kind in your explanation. Thank you. In the old days, you would write to a file, using commas for delimiters and then when you read it, it would be up to you to keep everything sorted out, by inputting it in a similar manner as you wrote it, and assigning things to appropriate variables. Is that sort of what you do now? I guess you could have written every thing in one big string before, and then InString'ed, Left, Right, and MidString'ed it it and took it back apart, but I don't see why you would want to do that. I guess I don't see why you would want to StreamRead and Write it now in one big string.

I suppose I'm beating a dead horse, but what I'm trying to communicate here is what in my mind should be... while trying to learn what is. Is there any reason this stuff couldn't be included with vb.net? It used to be included with basic and vb6. Would it make .NET too large and unwieldy? Is USB outdated already too? Weren't there other languages for business? I really feel that I am trying to not argue here. I truly would like to understand. It seems to me it would be relatively small potatoes for MS to include stuff like this. It's very difficult to buy a tape recorder ( Geeze, am I old ) with a microphone jack. On the other hand Mp3 and CD players don't have microphone jacks either. Individual creativity is being phased out. Should no one be able to program a computer unless he works full time at it... for a large company? Should we have to buy a program to do everything? Or better yet subscribe to a program?

I think you're bangin' on me a bit hard there Denaes. I have 6 books. Have I read every line, no. Have I been giving it a shot ,yes. I follow along with a demonstration of inheritance that takes about 36 lines of code so that when you check a check box, it changes color instead of appearing checked. I'm sorry, that's not very inspiring. I remember when I read my first book on the BASIC language, I literally jumped up out of bed and stood on the bed reading the book; the implications made my blood boil. I never have been able to realize those implications, I think to a large degree, because Bill Gates keeps pulling the rug out. I feel like I have to start all over (again) and that makes me angry. The stuff I am talking about is very cool. I do some similar things at work with programmable controllers and what not. It amazes me how close much of what you gotta pay Rockwell thousands of dollars for their software is to VB. It is so close... and yet so far. I'm going to show my ignorance again : :confused: How can you use the stream reader thing that you posted to read and write discrete pieces of information? Suppose I have five seperate pieces of data, some numerical and some strings, and I want to be able to perform some mathematical operation on the numbers and keep them straight from the strings. How to I keep them seperated so that I know which is which? It seems that much of this stuff is for entire files, in which case couldn't you just use windows explorer. (They don't have an ignorant emoticon) Can you communicate with a USB port with VB.NET?

Nothing is hard if you know how to do it. I did not know that the IDE was building the exe every time you ran it. How in the world is a person supposed to anticipate everything MS might have decided to change? Denaes posted the "I/O (saving to/from files) was a damn simple thing in VB6" line, not me. My point was that with new versions things should get easier for someone with experience with the product to do... perhaps they did, but they also got considerably different in many ways... which makes it hard. I am, as Denaes points out "painfully ignorant"; and yes, it is painful. It's not that I have any great pining love for VB6, or I wouldn't be here. It's only a matter of time untill VB6 won't run on anyone's computer. I knew how to read and write to a file, sequentially and random access in VB6 and GWBASIC. You obviously know how to do it, both then and now. I only know how to do it then... and that way no longer works. And that goes for a whole bunch of other stuff as well. I am a simple guy. I have no interest in databases or networks. What I would like to do is use my computer to figure out how many gallons of heating oil I have in my tanks, and collect when and how long my furnace runs, the chimney and the outside temperature and the temperature of the boiler. Stuff like that. I have a I/O board I bought in the eighties that runs on BASIC and would collect things like that. If I could get at memory locations like I could with GWBASIC under MSDOS, I could make my own board. It seems to me that there should be a programming languange that would be easy to use to do stuff like that. As Yosiminte Sam would say, "And that programming language oughta be you (VB)". But nobody uses serial ports any more... do they Microsoft? ( The SAX stuff doesn't work ) To me, MS has thrown out what should have been expanded upon, and changed things seemingly to me, arbitrarily. I am sure you knowledgable people know why it needed changed, but I don't. I don't mean that sarcastically, and I really don't want an explanation... I think they could have kept the old stuff, along with the new. I know I could buy something that would do what the seller wants me to do with it... I have a thing here that - strangely enough hooks up to the serial port - and works fine... if all you want to do is look at a graph of the input voltages. You can't collect any data and use it in variables in a program. I want to use my computer for everyday real world purposes. I don't want to buy something... I want to write something ... like I used to be able to do, only with the newest versions of the language.

I guess you told me. Fact is I got the book Object Oriented Programming for Visual Basic.NET on your recommendation about a year ago. I read it completely through. I don't understand it. Maybe I am that dumb. Denaes: I/O (saving to/from files) was a damn simple thing in VB6. In VB.net it was more involved. Why should that have given you trouble? Why would it not get easier in every version? The fact that things do not get easier, but more complicated is what I am talking about... I started this thread by asking how I get my crummy little app on other machines. In VB6 it take 2 keystrokes to make it an .EXE, and I figured it out myself. It couldn't be much simpler. It should be easier in NET. It's a new version. I shouldn't even have had to come here to ask. When I tried to figure it out in Help, I got a convoluted runaround, and nothing useful. I don't understand why you would not have noticed that, when you used it. This is one of the help subjects I found when I could not figure out to do it. Deployment Via Distributable Media The deployment tools in Visual Studio .NET can be used to create Windows Installer (.msi) files that can be distributed and installed on other computers. The resulting installer files can be distributed on traditional media such as floppy disks or CD-ROM, or they can be placed on a networked drive for installation across a network. To deploy an application, you first create a Setup project and set deployment project properties that determine where and how the installer will be built. For deployment via traditional media, you would then copy the .msi file from the build location to a floppy disk or other media. To deploy to a network location, you would create a Web Setup project and add the project output group for the application to the Web Setup project in the File System Editor. After building the installer, you would copy it to the server computer, where it could then be downloaded over the network. Do you really think that this is pertinent, good quality help? Someone who knows how to do it will not be reading help, Someone who does not know how to do it will not get anything out of this. And this seems to be the rule, rather than the exception. I think it should be MUCH better I chased the help links around in circles and never did get anything out of it. Rot13 explained it pretty well. Seems to me Microsoft should contact Rot13 for help on their help.

Deneas: "In our class it screwed up half the class " What class are you talking about? That seems to be exactly the kind of stuff I mean Yeah, there are lots of books and help topics, but they do a poor job of conveying useful information. I know I'm not that stupid. ( yeah, there's an easy shot wise guys, let 'er rip ) Volume is not quality. If that's the best they can do, it's pretty pathetic. This stuff takes way more screwing around than it should. That's the bottom line. I think a programming language should empower you to use your computer to do things you want... not spending inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out a bunch of obscure crap.

I don't think vbrun was nearly as large or difficult to identify as this stuff seems to be. Go back and read the posts and follow all the links. There seems to be a good deal of confusion, for such a common task. What would I have MS do? I have some books for earlier versions of Basic and VB that were to the point and I was actually able to understand. It's how I learned the little I know. I would have MS write some of those for VB.NET. I would have MS not change the language arbitrarily. At the simplest level, what is the necessity to change Text1.text to TextBox1.text? Why can't I "print" if I want to? Why was it necessary to get rid of that? Why do vertical scroll bars have to use negative values? Why so obscure how to change the appearence of Scroll Bars? You gotta buy a 3rd party support?!? Where's the serial comms? I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I don't think it should be necessary to go through the stuff I see in this thread just to be able to use my trivial little program on another machine. I think MS is smarter ( or certainly should be ) than that.

Maybe it's just me, but doesn't anyone else think this is an awful lot of screwing around? Why does this have to be so obscure and complicated? This is truly the best MS could do?!?