Nerseus

Is there anything happening before you show your splash screen? For instance, are you creating a connection to your database or anything else? Assuming the first thing your app does is show your splash screen, it should come up in under a second when you run your app outside the IDE. If you're showing a "main" form first and you're having that main form show the splash screen, check what the "main" form is doing. If you show your splash screen in the other form's Load event, you're waiting too long. I'd suggest showing the splash screen in the other form's constructor BEFORE it calls InitializeComponent (which might take awhile to run if you have a lot of controls on your form). Also, make sure you build in Release mode to test so you can see what the end-user will be using. -Ners

There's also a new DataGrid control that's similar to the Flex grid. It supports hierarchical data, but in a drill-down fashion. You can still use the old FlexGrid by adding the control manually (right click on the toolbar and select Customize, then locate the OCX). I'm not sure how you'd bind to it unless you use a Recordset but you could always fill it by hand. -Nerseus

This doesn't necessarily answer your question, but it does appear to be related (it's a sample to extract RSS information): http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnexxml/html/xml02172003.asp -Nerseus

You can redefine the API to whatever you want. For example: 'Change Private Declare Function FtpFindFirstFile Lib "wininet.dll" Alias "FtpFindFirstFileA" (ByVal hFtpSession As Long, ByVal lpszSearchFile As String, ByVal lpFindFileData As WIN32_FIND_DATA, ByVal dwFlags As Long, ByVal dwContent As Long) As Long 'to Private Declare Function FtpFindFirstFile Lib "wininet.dll" Alias "FtpFindFirstFileA" (ByVal hFtpSession As Long, ByVal lpszSearchFile As Byte(), ByVal lpFindFileData As WIN32_FIND_DATA, ByVal dwFlags As Long, ByVal dwContent As Long) As Long (Hope my byte array syntax is right in VB... I'm used to C#) Then you can pass a byte array and convert it back to a string. -Nerseus

There is still a ListView, yes. If you want a multi-column list you can also use a ListBox which supports multiple columns using a tab stop. -ner

You can put both strings in the dropdown, such as: Team 1 (Dan Jones) Team 2 (Bob Jones) or Team 1, Dan Jones coach Team 1, Bob Jones coach or something similar. There are many 3rd party controls that support multiple columns in a dropdown. If you want some, search google and I'm sure you can find some that include source (just a guess) and/or are free. -nerseus

Good thing it's called DirectX and not Direct3D :) I would guess most people using DirectX for DirectSound, DirectMusic, etc. are using it for games. And I would further guess that the majority are more interested in doing graphics first, and adding "everything else" later. Hence the nesting of DirectX under Graphics. Plus, it follows the format of the VB forums. It doesn't get that many visitors anyway - I wonder why? Maybe MS should release a dumbed-down version of DX9 like they did with DX6, with a Retained mode (just kidding) :p -nerseus

A post for employers? As in Job-Posting? I'd try dice.com or any of the "bigger" online job sites (monster.com, etc.). -Ner

I can't think of an example where you *wouldn't* want short-circuiting, but I can think of a number of cases where you *would*. For instance, I do this all the time: if(var!=null && (int)var > 5) ... The "old" way of doing it required nesting, as in: if(var!=null) if((int)var > 5) -Nerseus, giving an unrequested opinion :)

I've never used the Crypography in .NET, just know it exists. I've used it in VB6 (through the API) and it wasn't bad once you learn the basics. I'd read the help to figure out basic encryption mechanisms. You'll probably be writing out a binary file (if it's XML) that's encrypted. Just overwrite the file each time. After loading the data into a byte array (you'll have to figure that out, too, if you don't know how), you can decrypt it back to XML and then load it into an XmlDocument (or whatever you want). -Nerseus

You posted this same question in the DirectX forum already... not good for only two posts when one of them is a duplicate... To answer your question though, use DirectX9 not DirectX8. DX8 is not an officially supported SDK for .NET. And doing 3D is going to be hard, so be prepared to work at it. If you want camera movement, zooming, turning objects on/off and more, you're in for a lot of work. I'd start by looking at the samples that come with the DX9 SDK and working through some of the tutorial projects. There are also a number of 3D "engines" and "libraries" available, but they're all going to be non-trivial to learn. There is no library to say "load this 3D object and let me move it around on the screen" - that's the program that you want, not a programmable library :) -Nerseus

There are just about as many fractal sample programs as there are pictures that can be generated by a fractal program. Search google for "C# fractal" you'll find about 1900 hits. -ner

You can use Access and password protect it. You can distribute an MDB file and access it without having Access, but they will need the data providers to access it. Installing MDAC will give them what they need (mdac_typ.exe from MS installs the drivers). You could develop your program using an XML file, and embed it in your EXE when you compile, reading it as XML from a resource (since it's embedded). You could also store it as a file with some simple encryption (or complex - depends on your needs). -ner

The DLLs that .NET wants must be COM DLLs. A COM DLL is a special DLL that contains objects and interfaces. The important part is that a COM DLL is self-describing as it is meant to be interfaced to, even more than a standard C-style DLL. A C-style DLL exposes functions (and a little more), but isn't self-describing. To use a C-style DLL in .NET you'll have to use DllImport (see the help) and expose the functions yourself. For example, to expose the function SendMessage in the windows DLL "user32.dll", you use: [DllImport("user32")] private static extern int SendMessage(int hwnd, int msg, int wparam, int lparam); If you want to mainting (not re-write) your old DOS-based programs, you're likely stuck with Turbo-C, Turbo-Pascal, etc. Borland, as far as I know, is the only one who made a good DOS-based compiler for writing robust "windows"-like apps. .NET is for Windows applications though there are ports for other OS's. I can almost guarantee that there will *never* be a port for DOS as MS owns DOS and won't take the time to do it. For $600, the retail clients can buy a PIII 700 and upgrade to some version of Windows. The UI enhancements over DOS are well worth it in terms of screen space alone. But if they have their amber screens and like them, I wouldn't try to change it and that means staying with Turbo-C. -Nerseus

I don't know much about PCAnywhere, heck I can barely spell CPU. But if it exposes anything, it's most likely a COM interface or a standard DLL. If it's COM, you can load it into .NET through Project References and look at it in the object browser (ctrl-alt-k). That will show you what objects and methods it exposes, though there won't be any help to explain it. If it's not COM but just a standard DLL you're mostly out of luck unless they have public (free) docs explaining how to interface to it. Since you said ".CHF dialer", I assume you mean CHF is the file extension? If it's a simple format, such as containing an IP address or something, then you might be able to figure out how to make one yourself using .NET's IO library. -Nerseus

If you want an object that works like VB6's Collection, then a Hashtable is very similar, assuming you want to put objects in and retreive them by a Key. .NET supports many types of "collections", such as a Stack, a Queue, the ArrayList, Hashtable, and more. Plus, as divil mentioned, you can create your own collection objects that are type-safe. -Nerseus

Try sending the window a message to return it's windowstate to Normal instead of minimized? Just a suggestion -Ner

You'll have to tweak it slightly. The .NET colors are in the format AARRGGBB, the ones that the SETCOLOR message wants is in the format 00BBGGRR. Use this format: // The first param, 0, is the alpha - needs to be 0 for SETCOLOR messages Color.FromArgb(0, Color.Red.B, Color.Red.G, Color.Red.R).ToArgb() From the FromArgb method, you can see what you'd need to do to get a color converted from one format to another... -Nerseus

Set the Form's AcceptButton property to the button you want to click when "Enter" is pressed. A form also has a CancelButton property that is auto-magically clicked when they press Escape. :) Certain controls, such as a multi-line textbox, will NOT click the button even if it's the AcceptButton for the form. -Nerseus

Try a Hashtable. -ner

Whoa, whoa! First, Web Server controls (part of .NET) do spit out just HTML - and you can set the compatability to work with IE, Netscape and more. ActiveX controls can be hosted in the browser and mostly work with IE but also work somewhat with Netscape 6 and higher. The Web Server controls do NOT need the 20mb framework on a client machine, only on the server. If you're not running .NET on the server, you obviously wouldn't need the framework there either (then you might just have ASP not ASP.NET pages). As for being able to copy files and start an EXE you CANNOT use the Web Server controls as they don't have the permission to run on a client machine. An ActiveX control can do this, but usually (and hopefully) the user will be prompted to install and run your ActiveX control which you'll want to have signed so that the user will have some idea whether to "trust" your code or not. If you develop the ActiveX control, I'd suggest using VB6. In that case, you'll have to make sure the end-user has the VB6 runtime (which should be on just about everyone's machine anyway). An alternative to ActiveX would be a Java class. I'm not real familiar with developing those classes, so I can't speak on the permission you'll have but I would guess it's the same as ActiveX (you'll have to get prompted before having any Java code run that could harm a user's machine, such as copying files or starting EXEs). -Nerseus

Have you tried creating a VS.NET DataBase project to connect to your MSDE database? I haven't tried it yet, thought I have used the DB project type to connect to SQL Server and LOVE it (stored procs in SourceSafe - oh yeah!). -nerseus

The code snippet you posted uses COM (it's VB6 sample code, must be COM). The SQLDMO object IS COM. Check out the first line of your code snippet: Dim oServer As New SQLDMO.Application That's creating a COM component from the library SQLDMO, the class is called Application. Just add a reference to your .NET project. Click on the COM tab and find the reference or browse to it. Then you can create the SQLDMO.Application object with new() and access all the same methods/properties. -nerseus

I believe that the SQLDMO objects have NOT been converted to .NET. You'll have to use the COM version for now. -Nerseus

Can you not just call that function directly? For the "sender" pass in the variable name itself. Pass in dummy arguments for the second one. For example: dateTimePicker1_ValueChanged(dateTimePicker1, new System.EventArgs()); Remember, an event is just a function. The event handler code (usually in InitializeComponent) just hooks the event to call your function, but it's still just a function. -nerseus