rbulph

Aha! Got it at last! If you select the cursor in the Resources tab, as I had done before, you get an entirely different set of properties than if you select it through the "Solution Explorer". Don't know why. But anyway, selecting it through the Solution Explorer does give the Build Action property. If I set that, and then you use your code, but omitting the Rootnamespace qualifier, it works! Thanks.

If I have a System.Type (called sType say), how can I create an object of the type that it represents from it? I would think either I need something like CreateObject(sType) or sType should have a function to do this, but I can't find either. Hmm.

Can see no such property.

Thanks, but doesn't seem to work. I just get an Object is Nothing error. I take it "rootnamespace" in your code should be the name given to my project under that heading in the Application tab of the project?

There doesn't seem to be a style or button style property, only CheckOnClick which is what I'm using at the moment to allow a button to be selected. Would still like to fix this if I can. Maybe I should subclass the non-selected buttons and stop them being repainted.

If you add a cursor as a resource, how can you then use it? I'm having some trouble - I just get the message that an array of bytes cannot be converted to a cursor.

OK, hadn't seen that, thanks. But it's not really what I wanted. Height - ClientHeight gives the height of borders plus the caption. So that's of some help. But I still have to worry about all the docked controls. I would have liked to get the dimensions of the actual client window, where child forms go. If you look with Spy++ or something similar, this is an actual window, so it must be possible to get its dimensions. I tried as I would have done it in VB 6.0 using FindWindowEx to get the handle of this window, but the value returned was wrong. My next step would be to use GetClientRect. Otherwise I'll just have to iterate through all docked controls to find their widths/heights and subtract those.

ScaleWidth and ScaleHeight seem to have gone in .net. How can I get the dimensions of the client area of an MDI form? I suppose I could iterate through all the docked controls plus the title bar (query how I get that) and subtract their dimensions from the width and height of the form, but that's a bit messy.

The form is an MDI child form. The MDI form has resizable panels. The controls can be moved around by the user in the child form to better see the relationship between them. So there are two ways that they could be obscured - by the user moving them or the user resizing the panels. Maybe the fact that they scroll into view when they get focus is acceptable, but the fact that no scrollbar shows when they are off at the left is definitely not.

Is the Autoscroll facility for forms and panels any good? I notice two problems with it straightaway - it doesn't show up if a control is off the left or top of the container, only if it is off the right or bottom, and if a partly obscured control gets focus it scrolls into view, which I don't really like. Is there a way to fix these or should I forget it and use my own scrollbars?

OK, that makes a bit more sense now. Still worth going, since I'm not an MSDN subscriber, but, yes, not worth crossing the Atlantic for. I have to say that from Microsoft's website, I have little understanding of what you can do with the Professional edition that you can't do with the Standard one. Maybe that's an indication that I don't need it! Microsoft Office tools? Presumably that's something more than the automation of Microsoft office programs that you can do with Visual Basic 6.0 since I see you can do this in VB .net Express anyway. But I can't see any explanation of what it actually is.

Anyone going to the "Ready Launch Tour"? Supposedly you get given Visual Studio 2005 for free. It sounds too good to be true. Is it the full version?

How can I go about preventing the toolstrip buttons from getting focus when the mouse is moved over them? I want to have a group of butttons where only one can be checked at a time. If one is checked then I don't want to see the focus button on any other button as this looks exactly the same as the visual indication that a button is checked, so is confusing. Am using the Express Beta 2005 version. Haven't used the older versions of .net, so maybe the Toolstrip is new to this, I don't know.

Thanks. Inheritance would be good to be able to use, but I think I'll give conversion a miss for now, at least.

I understand that VB.Net comes with a utility to convert VB6 code into VB.Net code. I was wondering if anyone had had any experience of using this, and, if so, how effective it is. I also understand that the utility doesn't do everything that is needed. If you have quite a large and complicated program (say around 30,000 lines with half a dozen dlls), can you give an estimate of how much time it would take a developer to finalise the conversion?

I have an add-in which I have used in Visual Basic for writing an ActiveX dll (in case they don't exist in .Net, an add-in is something that you write to extend the programming environment). I am anticipating that people may write additional ActiveX dlls for my application, but given that Microsoft is no longer selling VB, this may have to be done in .Net. I understand that this can be done. My question is, will the add-in work in .Net, with or without some alteration? Indeed, does .Net provide for add-ins?

OK, thanks for everyone's help.

In VB6, if you want to create a dll, you open a project, and if you save that, it has the extension ".vbp". If you compile it, it will have the extension ".dll". I test dlls with my application by looking for them in a particular folder. This works on compiled dlls, but it will also work on a vbp which will compile to a dll and which is currently running in an instance of the development environment. The benefit of this is that you can step through the code for the dll. Presumably dlls written in .Net can still be used by a VB6 application. In anticipation of the fact that future dlls might be written in .Net, I'd like to check for the appropriate file extensions, so that I can provide the same functionality for such dlls as I do for ones written in VB6. Hence my question. But from your third paragraph, it sounds as if all dlls for my application should be written in VB6 anyway?

Don't actually have .Net. If you were writing a dll, could that be either a .vbp/.vbproj or a .sln file?

What's the file extension for a .Net project? Is it ".vbp" as for Visual Basic? Just a little forward compatability issue for a Visual Basic program I'm writing.