A Quick Little Bingo Program ...
A reader recently asked for help programming a Bingo game.
"It's for a old people's house ... they're still doing things in the old fashioned way, picking the numbers by hand from a bag. At the end of this year, they won a computer and asked me if I could do something to make easer for them to play bingo."
How could I say no? But the reader also needed the program in VB 6! To write the code, I went back that that VB 6 standard (which is not a part of .NET) "control arrays" to display the numbers. Just to see how it would handle it, I ran it through the VB.NET upgrade wizard too. It had no trouble and used the Microsoft.VisualBasic.Compatibility.VB6 namespace to simulate the array.
I haven't done any VB 6 programming in a while and this was a real blast from the past for me that helped me appreciate what .NET has done! I lost a lot of coding once because I accidentally coded an infinite loop and had to cancel the VB 6 process before the project was saved. And the control array turned out to be a disadvantage in the final analysis because it was a lot of trouble to set up in the form.
If any of you are still using VB 6 ... get over it!
If you are interested in a copy of my code ... click here.
That is an interesting layout for the Bingo Card. I don’t believe I have ever seen one like it.
Usually, the numbers go from 1 to 75.
B 1-15
I 15-30
N 31-45
G 46-60
O 61-75
Hmmmmm … Ya got me.
Hey! The last time I played Bingo, I was in short pants and my grandma just dragged me along ’cause she couldn’t find a sitter. I was lucky to get it as right as I did.
Well … Changing the numbers will be left as “an exercise for the student”.
Hi Dan,
Did you not come across CTRL/BREAK to get out of an infinite loop in those days of VB6?
Geoff (Scotland)
PS. I know some people still using VB 3.0 !! (And some are still TEACHING VB6).
Hi Geoff …
I tried that and was surprised that it didn’t work. Maybe I just forgot the key combination. It has been a while. I should try it again just to see.
As Bob used to say, “Thanks for the memories.”
Bingo Code
I came here today to thanks Mr. Dan Mabbutt, for his kindness to write the BINGO program which you can see abov. That old people’s house, which he has mentioned, is in my neiboughrood, there is where most of the elderly people gathering to play bingo or have a chat with each other but they were still using a very primitive way to pick the balls up, like using a bag and pick the ball by hand. At the end of this year as Mr. Mabbutt said, they won a computer then there came the idea to use that computer to play bingo. For that they would need a simple useful program ease to understand that anyone of then could use it, I am a Visual Basic learner I could not do that kind of program. I seek online for help and there was Mr. Dan Mabbutt, he replayed to my e-mail and I sent him the details, it was on 30 December 2008. The next day, on 31 December 2008 he sent me the program, we installed the program same day and on the 1 January 2009 they were already using the computer, the first thing they did was to get rid of that bag with the balls.
It is nice to know that there is stil some people like Mr Mabbutt out there who do not think just about money and share his knowledge with others, what is the point if you are an intellectual and can do many things that many people cannot do but you keep just for you self?
Thank you very much Mr. Mabbutt for your kindness