Denaes

I use the MSDN all the time. The only thing I've found it to be no help with was the System.XML namespace. It's got no examples and everything is vaguely worded... at least from my perspective. But the online MSDN is just as good (if not better) than the version on your computer normally. I mean if you're using VB4, I'd rather have the old MSDN than the internet version. Otherwise it's more up to date.

I got forced into .Net. I'd taken vb6 in college, started working at a bank and my boss saw me making apps in vb6 and bringing them into the bank to help with my work. So he says "I'll get you vb6 as well." and in the mail 3 days later comes VB.net. Because it was cheaper. I got a basic VB.net book and learned it. It was different, but not really worse or better. Almost immediately I was struck by the simplicity. :eek: If you EVER wanted to change the text on something, it was .Text! Not .Caption or .Label. Just .Text There was a Visual Basic namespace so you could "Rig" your app into working until you found the correct way. I'd just finished doing a 6 month application that I have no clue as to how I could have done in VB6. Just using the ADO.Net wizards and database explorer... f'ing amazing. In like 2 minutes you can have a fully typed ram representation of your database in a typed dataset. :eek: Now ASP.Net is another cow. This has confused me, but I havn't put 100% effort in yet. First you have to have IIS installed on your machine to really use it and test things. It might even be a requirement to even open an ASP.Net application. After that it's just like VB.net, only with web centric commands and having to learn how to deal with a server side language. Right now I'm in the process of getting my .Net MCSD certifications after a hiatus from .net working with PHP.

WIth a chat program you're getting into networking and internet protocols, but not touching on many of the basics. It seems like running before learning to walk if you're not comfortable with ASP.Net... like making a multi-form accounting app in your first month of learning VB.net. Yeah, it can be done, but you have to learn EVERYTHING as you do it. Some can do it. I tend to do that only if I have to, otherwise I get overwealmed. In addition to the Chat program, I'd say to do a website with ASP.net functionality... then make a basic blog, then a more advanced blog where you can get replies and add accounts, then start doing HTML games... If you want to learn ASP.Net, you really have to do all of ASP.net, not just one niche aspect of it. If you really apply yourself, I suppose you can learn the hard stuff first, but that just seems a little backwards to me.

Ok. Someone on the Extreme VB boards told me that I was purchasing a 1 year liscense to use all of the applications and if I wasn't renewing the MSDN subscription it wasn't legal to develop with anymore. Without MSDN I could only afford Visual Studio.net and would wait until 2005 comes out. I already own VB.Net standard to legally sell applications. With MSDN I would have more applications available for development purposes. Thank You

If I purchased MSDN for a year, would I legally be allowed to continue using the applications granted after that year?

Personally use Alcohol 120%. You record disk images to your hard drive and it creates a virtual drive(s) on your computer which can load the images. So rather than having a stack of CDs next to your computer you can keep them put away - only needing them in case of a hard drive failure. I've had too many cases where something would happen (scratched game disc, lost disc, MIA disc case, multiple apps on a daily basis that require the disc in the drive) that would keep me from using my software properly - wether it be installing or running. Very frustrating. I also - for much the same reason - have most of my CDs converted to MP3 so I can load up my MP3 player for the Gym. Heck, my wedding video is still on the harddrive in an uncompressed format taking up 16 gb... Also some games (the few that I do play) play much better fully installed. In fact currently I have a 35gb harddrive in my laptop and a 180gb external USB2.0.

Off what was on my list I got the razor... I did pull off some nice loot though, mostly movies & video games. I don't think I got anything at all computer related.

I find the size limiting. If I had a desktop, I would surely throw that on my master drive and have a huge slave drive... If I could get that hard drive in a larger size I'd throw that in my laptop... I should really look into that - I think laptops use different size hard drives :(

Realistically? Razors, socks, boxerbreifs, maybe a few computer books on PHP/mySQL. A little quiet fanstand for my widescreen laptop. I saw one that allowed ventilation, had fans and had a USB 2.0 hub built into it... yeah mine gets pretty hot if I don't have a deskfan blowing down on it. A new Optical Track Ball with all sorts of nifty programmable buttons and left/right scrollers in addition to up/down. In my Dreams? I really want a HUGE high def LCD/Plasma screen... like 5 feet wide or so (and whatever height that is) then I can put it up on the wall behind my computer desk and hook my laptop... That would be a sweet display! Then watch TV on the Picture in Picture display :) I'd like one of those dual layered DVD burners... external (firewire preferred, USB2.0 is fine though) More Ram (I need to see if I have any open slots in my laptop) and a larger/faster hard drive.

When I did this application, I did it Via SendKeys. I posted the entire code somewere on this site. I would open a file, search for the process, make sure it's on top, and use tab and space to do things. tab to get between controls. Send text into textboxes and space to click a button. It got the program done - which was automating backups in the middle of the night. Works better than moving a mouse because if someone moves the window you want to manipulate - the mouse will miss it's mark because it's based on coordinates. The only way I can see around missing cordinates is going into window handles and basing it off of the windows coordinates... seems like way too much trouble I guess, just in principle it's nice to know how to move the mouse and click it. --edit-- Link to post that gets the job done. http://www.xtremedotnettalk.com/showthread.php?t=76773 I'm thinking of altering it to read from file... maybe even open up a "macrorecorder" and record what you do. Can a .Net program view SendKeys if another program is active (ie your app is in the background and you're using another app)

What? You don't want to scroll through 1.5 million items? Correct me if I'm wrong, wouldn't DataTable(or DataSet) work better for storing and retreiving this information? Not scrollable, but it's searchable.

Don't have VB.Net available on this machine, but I can see one area or two to trim some fat. Unless you post the code with your connection ("readstream") people cannot look into helping with that. As it is, you can remove the string tmpString. Unless you cut out code where it does something else - this is a bottleneck. Not saying it's your problem, but Strings are fairly slow and you're copying it an extra time here. Dim start As Integer Dim ende As Integer Dim anzahl As Integer 'Dim tmpString As String start = System.Environment.TickCount() ListView1.BeginUpdate() While (readstream.Peek() <> -1) 'tmpString = readstream.ReadLine() 'ListView1.Items.Add(tmpString) ListView1.Items.Add(readstream.ReadLine()) anzahl += 1 End While ListView1.EndUpdate() ende = System.Environment.TickCount() MessageBox.Show("Es dauerte: " & CType(ende - start, String) & " für " & anzahl.ToString & " Zeilen") I'm honestly not sure if this is slowing things down: While (readstream.Peek() <> -1) I used to use something along the lines of: While (not readstream.EoF()) Again, I don't have VS open until I get home tonite (probobly another 10 hours) so I can't really test anything - just give advice. I'm not entirely sure why your listbox is taking so long to populate - what is your code for the listbox?

Post the code you're using to read the ASCII data. .Net provides some easy ways to access ASCII, which by default are slower. So unless you've looked into better ASCII performance - you're not getting it. It doesn't help that most VB users are still able to use the old VB6 function which is really slow. Post your code and someone can advise you on how to kick it up a notch.

You hooked the same monitor up to two seperate video inputs at once? The Hardware (monitor) is probobly programmed to only work with one input. I'd think they'd just choose one as the "master" input and ignore the other one but you never know... The Clone/Span and Digital Video/Analog is for two seperate displays, not the same one. It might be the card giving the problem, though I'd think it would be the monitor. What exactly are you trying to do? Overlay the two images (which should be the same)? Just see what happens?

hmm... maybe that's why the office is empty today...

The amazing thing is that Google searches through that many pages and still gives you thousands of results in like 3 seconds. I don't know if it's because gmail is beta and not too busy, but so far it slams other email in speed and usability! Only reason why I havn't dropped yahoo is that GMail won't let you add .Zip files as attachments and I sometimes need to email myself VB projects/code or files to get to work or home. In this case is a monopoly even bad? They provide a service that others cannot even touch. It's not based on "preference" or "style" like an OS might be (no matter how much Windows might be superier to Mac, others will still prefer something else and visa versa). It's a friggin search page. I think there is a difference between MS horning in on others ideas and leveraging their own software over others and Google providing the same service as every other search engine, plus more and faster. I think I'm going to leave the US if they start deciding people are monopolies because they do something better than others can.

Ack! I didn't know that. I'm only running 3.

Alcohol 120% is a cheap software that allows you to create an unlimited amount of virtual drive as well as create images (ISO and other popular formats). Then you can load the images into the Virtual Drive like it was a CD. Doing this, you can save Read/Write time by keeping the images on the hard drive. You can also keep all of the images on a DVD - so if you have a game like Baldurs Gate with 5 CDs, you can have "BG-1.iso", "BG-2.iso", etc. on a DVD. When it asks for a new CD, you click on the Virtual Drive and select an option to load a new image - ie, the next disk.

I recall doing work with Flexgrids (the one built into VB6, not a 3rd party) with a bit of a learning curve. Even the .NET one I'm working with (component one) seems less than intuitive. I'd think you could just select a cell like FlexgridName.Cell(3,8).select (or whatever). I recall the VB6 version wasn't so straight forward - or intuitive. The Component One pack I got for free has two flexgrids - one like the VB6 version and one that has a LOT more options. After working with it so much I just sort of fell into how they were doing things. Still not very intuitive, but it's well documented to say the least. One word of advice, if you havn't done so already, you might want to try to get help over on our sister forums ExtremeVBTalk (link is at the bottom of these forums). Now, be warned, don't go crap talking vb6 there as you ask for advice/help, be polite. Over there it's still primarily VB6 and these are guys who use it to do virtually anything.

haha :) Joe in VB6... I'm sure it must be pure unadultrated hell for you :D

If you have VS, there isn't a reason to use another editor. Its another story entirely if you don't have it... then I'd go with the webmatrix probobly. From what I'd gathered (not much), it's a basic text editor geared for compiling and linking with the framework. All I can say is that after all my win forms, I really don't like asp.net. Its just so... I want to say limited - but thats not it. It's just so different. Alien to the concept of a "cool app" that I could do lickity split in win forms... trying to get all the information from one page to another while dealing with multiple users/sessions... I'm sure once you get used to it, it's just fine, but I'm by far more comfortable with winforms.