A reader asked for help coding a loop to input data to a ListBox control. The problem was that the reader was using an ancient holdover from VB6 that still happens to be available in VB.NET ... for backward compatibility. There are better ways and this Quick Tip shows one of them: the Validating Event of a TextBox control. This Quick Tip shows the difference.

VB.NET Shared and Instance Members
Old programmer joke:
There are 10 kinds of programmers. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
There are also 10 kinds of Class members: Shared and Instance.
I was looking for information about this and I found my own article! It answered my questions! But it was a couple of years old so I updated and republished it. Click here to see the result.

In my "other" life, I'm a writer. I was recently thinking about books that have been bypassed by the march of time such as 1984 and 2001: A Space Odyssey. When they were written, their dates were far into the future. Now, they're artifacts of history. The idea of using Visual Basic to write an "eternal" story that would always be current came to me, so I did it. In addition to the VB code, how do you like the story?

If you're interested in calling Microsoft Word from VB.NET, both to display the updated text of the story and for date and time calculations, this program might be of interest to you. In addition, the interface is WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) rather than Windows Forms based. It's also written using VB.NET 2008 Express Edition.

Read the "Eternal Story" here!

If you're more interested in the programming, Click Here to see how the code works.

Anybody above ground knows that Windows 7 is out now. "SpiritualMadMan" sent in this report from the field and I thought I'd share it ...

I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 on an HP DV6609wm and I installed Visual Studio 6 and initially had problems.

However, ignoring Microsoft's dire warnings of incompatibilities I plunged ahead.

Yes, I had problems...

But, the fix was extremely easy.

Navigate through the Folders and Right-Click on the VB6 executable. Under Properties - Compatibility set options for all Users (Checkbox at Bottom) to WindowsXP SP3 Mode and Run as Administrator.

Also, a Note about unsigned drivers... I had been Using FreeOTFE (On The Fly Encryption). However the Installation broke because the Encryption Drivers are all "unsigned".

However, installing VirtualPC allowed me to install FreeOTFE there and recover my Encrypted data. The ease with which I could transfer files between the Virtual Machine and the Win7 was also way much better than VirtualPC 2004.