Visual Basic

Designer is showing a gray box but I can't figure out why. Please help.

25-Mar-07 3:20

Does this mean it's an ASP.NET page ? If not, you can just set these properties any time you like. Which bit is causing you grief ?

Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++
Metal Musings - Rex and my new metal blog
"I am working on a project that will convert a FORTRAN code to corresponding C++ code.I am not aware of FORTRAN syntax" ( spotted in the C++/CLI forum )

howardjr24-Mar-07 19:14

howardjr

24-Mar-07 19:14

I developed my own custom web combobox component which used to display just fine in the VS 2003 designer. I also developed the designer for my component in VB.Net 2003. Unfortunately, while I was working on getting the properties in the component to work just the way I wanted them too, the component stop displaying properly in the designer, so now I get the gray box telling me that there was an error creating the component, and a pop-up saying that the style string for my component's button couldn't be set to the values in my ASPX page for all of the instances of the component in the page.

I've walked though the code using the debugger and don't get any errors, and the component renders properly with the settings that the designer is complaining about.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to debug this?

Thank you.

P.S., if anyone knows of some good resources on how to develop designer modules and property editors for the designer, please pass them along. I am in serious need of creating my own property dialogs for my component. Assuming it ever works in the designer again.

Minimise a form

Anybloodyid24-Mar-07 11:50

Anybloodyid

24-Mar-07 11:50

I have a form with no border and I want in a buttons click event
to Minimise the form. can this be done?

Re: Minimise a form [modified]

green2go24-Mar-07 12:13

green2go

24-Mar-07 12:13

Yup,

Are you using images or standard buttons?

Use this to close the application:
Application.Exit()

and this to minimise the form:
Me.WindowState = FormWindowState.Minimized

These need to placed in the correct subs for the corresponding buttons.
Oli

Cross platform encryption issues / PHP & VB.NET Interop [SOLVED]

green2go24-Mar-07 11:15

green2go

24-Mar-07 11:15

Dear All,

I am developing a small VB.NET application to interface using a web client to pass data between the app and a PHP driven back end. I want to secure the data travelling between the two systems. I have been playing about with the encryption methods outlined in Jeff Atwoods article '.NET Encryption Simplified' using symmetric encryption with the Rijndael algorithm with the default key size (256) also setting the key & iv with strings which has been working perfectly both encrypting and decrypting in VB.NET and outputting to a readable base64 string. Now this is where it gets confusing. I have setup a basic PHP script to try and get the same base64 string that VB produces out of PHP using mcrypt. In short I can't get the two strings to tie up (probably due to my lack of knowledge D'Oh! | :doh:

). I have mcrypt setup with the same key, keysize, algorithm, iv & mode (CBC). I try to encode the word 'test' and PHP will spit out a base64 string 44 chars long and VB will generate one 24 long! What I would like to know is has anyone tried doing this before?? Any pointers as where I could be going wrong?? As far as i'm aware at the moment this shouldn't be too much of an issue?? (i.e. encrypting / decrypting between PHP & VB.NET). I'm sorry for being a bit vague.

UPDATE:
I now believe it is the padding type between PHP & VB.NET. PHP Mcrypt padding with 0x00 and VB.NET PKCS.

UPDATE:
It was the padding type! Smile | :)

If anyone is having the same problem, you need to pad the string input with PKCS5 to the required block size before feeding it to PHPs mcrypt. I have also found the same is true with VB.NET & Java interop.

Thanks in advance
Oli

-- modified at 7:52 Monday 26th March, 2007

Help to VB Roadmap

mailquark24-Mar-07 8:11

mailquark

24-Mar-07 8:11

Hi all,

I am new to VB (no .NET) Big Grin | :-D

.

I am learning VB. Can anyone guide me with a sequence of VB Projects (Beginner to Advanced) I should work with.

Thanks in advanced.

Christian Graus24-Mar-07 8:33

24-Mar-07 8:33

mailquark wrote:
I am new to VB (no .NET)

Why would anyone learn VB6 today ? It's long out of date, completely orphaned, and it sucls.

If you have any option, learn .NET.

mailquark wrote:
Can anyone guide me with a sequence of VB Projects (Beginner to Advanced) I should work with.

Buy a book and work through it. There is no definitive list, you're asking for a collection of opinions.

Of course, I doubt any VB6 books are in print, but used books are cheaper anyhow, so....

Kevin McFarlane25-Mar-07 3:13

Kevin McFarlane

25-Mar-07 3:13

Christian Graus wrote:
Why would anyone learn VB6 today ? It's long out of date, completely orphaned, and it sucls.

Your anti-VB rants get very tiresome. But regardless of your opinion there are still valid reasons for learning VB. There is a lot of legacy code out there. Much of this may well be being extended in VB. The Office applications still use it. Even some new MS apps., such as Expression Web, use VBA (strangely).

Kevin

Christian Graus25-Mar-07 3:25

25-Mar-07 3:25

Kevin McFarlane wrote:
Your anti-VB rants get very tiresome

LOL - actually, I don't care if people use VB.NET. I don't even care that people support legacy VB6 systems. VB6 was and is crap, however, and either way, why would someone want to learn a language that is unsupported and has no forward path ? Many MVPs petitioned MS to keep VB6 support on the basis that VB.NET is a completely new language with VB like syntax. They were right ( it needed to be, see point one ( VB6 sucks )).

BTW, if you go into the VC forums, you'll see I have just as many bad things to say about people using VC6 today ( for different reasons, VC6 was a very poor C++ implimentation, VC 2002 was a major leap forward ).

Kevin McFarlane25-Mar-07 5:03

Kevin McFarlane

25-Mar-07 5:03

Christian Graus wrote:
VB6 was and is crap

I don't think so. I hate Perl probably almost as much as you hate VB. Smile | :)

But I still wouldn't call it crap.

Christian Graus wrote:
why would someone want to learn a language that is unsupported and has no forward path ?

Depends on their context. Suppose they happen to be lumbered with legacy code that management wants extended rather than rewritten? They may need to learn VB sufficiently to be able to maintain it properly. We don't know what the OP's context is.

Christian Graus wrote:
you'll see I have just as many bad things to say about people using VC6 today ( for different reasons, VC6 was a very poor C++ implimentation, VC 2002 was a major leap forward ).

Same thing applies. Lots of code being maintained in VC 6. I haven't done any C++ since the start of 2005. Prior to this and post-VC 2002 I did quite a lot of C++ in a few contracts. There was not the slightest indication that these customers were going to migrate their C++ to anything newer anytime soon (one client was still stuck on VC++ 1.5, for example). They were more likely to go .NET for legacy VB6, while leaving legacy VC++ components at version 6. IIRC you take a dim view of MFC devs using the MFC collection classes instead of STL?

I just think you need to find out where an OP is coming from before slagging off their choice of tools.

Kevin

Christian Graus25-Mar-07 9:39

25-Mar-07 9:39

Kevin McFarlane wrote:
I don't think so.

OK, well, you're welcome to your opinion. I hope I'm also welcome to mine.

Kevin McFarlane wrote:
We don't know what the OP's context is.

That's true. However, people do still learn VB6, and some schools still teach it. I'd stand by my advice. I left a job I loved because we moved from C++ to Python, and I didn't think that learning Python was a good career move ( or, more specifically, I thought it was better to keep improving my C++ ). If I had a job that suddenly required VB6, I'd look for another. I've turned work down because it was VB, in the past.

Kevin McFarlane wrote:
Lots of code being maintained in VC 6.

True, and if I have to maintain it, I often would stick with VC6. But, I sat in a room of C++ MVPs the other week, and most of them said they would write new code in VC6, because they hate the new IDE. It's still happening, and it just doesn't gel for me, the STL in VC6 was awful, there are so many deviations from the standard, why stick with it ?

Kevin McFarlane wrote:
IIRC you take a dim view of MFC devs using the MFC collection classes instead of STL?

Of course, that's just ignorance. MFC containter classes offer nothing that STL classes do not, and the reverse is most certainly not true. Historically, MS wrote those classes only as a stop gap until they had an STL implimentation in their compiler.

Most of my C++ work was in MFC, but I found a huge productivity gain in moving to the STL containers, and it meant that when I was writing non MFC code, I already was intimately familiar with the containers that I had no choice but to use, when MFC was not there.

Kevin McFarlane wrote:
I just think you need to find out where an OP is coming from before slagging off their choice of tools.

Were the OP to reply that they have no choice, I would offer my sympathy. It would not change my opinion of VB6 as a tool, it seems to me that VB was written to be easy to use, and that the design process for the language was sloppy, to say the least. VB.NET is full of stuff from VB6 that MS tried to do away with, and had to keep due to a revolt ( the VB6 devs are revolting... :P ). VB.NET is at least roughly as powerful as C#, but I'd still recommend C# to a new dev over VB, VB is just full of nastiness and voodoo, it's considerably harder to read, IMO, and the weak typing can lead to all sorts of nasty things happening when you didn't ask them to.

Overall, I have no problem with VB.NET, if I did, I would not be here, trying to help people who use it. I would never advise anyone to use C# over VB, unless they needed to do image processing, or something else that required pointers. VB6 is a whole different ball game. If someone is learning it in 2006, I'd seek to make sure they realise that what they are learning is a dead language.

Kevin McFarlane26-Mar-07 10:19

Kevin McFarlane

26-Mar-07 10:19

Christian Graus wrote:
But, I sat in a room of C++ MVPs the other week, and most of them said they would write new code in VC6, because they hate the new IDE. I

Well, I'm with you there. I've not done any C++ with the .NET-era IDEs. But if I were told to cut some new C++ and was given a choice of IDEs, naturally I would use the up-to-date ones - even if I happened to prefer the old IDE.

Christian Graus wrote:
the STL in VC6 was awful, there are so many deviations from the standard, why stick with it ?

At the start of 2005 I was doing some VC++ 6 maintenance. I used some STL and my boss at the time objected saying: "we don't use STL here." I don't think he was objecting to the VC++ 6 implementation, he just didn't see any benefit over MFC. Fortunately it was only a 3-week project.

(Actually, I've found in the past with C++ that many have barely heard of anything beyond raw arrays and pointers. Even using MFC collection classes is an advance! Stroustrup has ranted on this - in a good way.)

Christian Graus wrote:
VB6 is a whole different ball game. If someone is learning it in 2006, I'd seek to make sure they realise that what they are learning is a dead language.

Fair enough.

Kevin

textbox to a .txt

Brad^24-Mar-07 7:37

24-Mar-07 7:37

Hi guys, the name pretty much says it all, I am as far as savedialogfile but i am completly stuck. My aim is to save a .txt from a textbox with a button.

Thanks in advance, Brad

Christian Graus24-Mar-07 7:41

24-Mar-07 7:41

In VB2005, there's something like File.SaveAllText("filepath", "Text");

Brad^24-Mar-07 14:03

24-Mar-07 14:03

Hi, thanks for teh reply, i still cannot get it to work. Any more ideas or anything specific to know.

Thanks

Christian Graus24-Mar-07 14:13

24-Mar-07 14:13

The problem is sufficiently trivial that if you define 'cannot get it to work' and post your code, I'm sure I can help.

Brad^24-Mar-07 14:24

24-Mar-07 14:24

Hi Christian, At the moment i acually have no code for what i want to do as i have been trailing and erroring for a few hours now but here is screenshot of my design and the code for the form so far. 'button3' is what i want to actually save me file, as of the above posts i want to edit the textboxes and then save/overwrite teh existing file that it is reading from. Hope this helps you out with helping me.

[IMG]http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p14/Br4dZ/code.jpg[/IMG]

Thanks again

Christian Graus24-Mar-07 14:33

24-Mar-07 14:33

I'm at a loss. I gave you one line of code, and you're saying you have no code in your app yet, but the line I gave you doesn't work ?

File.WriteAllText will indeed overwrite the file at the path you provide, with the string you pass into it. Which bit is causing you grief ?

Brad^24-Mar-07 14:39

24-Mar-07 14:39

VB kep throwing expression errors, i have tried to work around it but it is not working at all, I am 18 and been coding for a few months so please excuse my stupidness.

Christian Graus24-Mar-07 14:43

24-Mar-07 14:43

Oh, my bad.

It's System.IO.File.WriteAllText

if you don't have System.IO scoped in already, you need to put the whole thing.

Brad^24-Mar-07 14:40

24-Mar-07 14:40

VB keeps on thrwoing expression errors when i use your code and havw tried to work around it to get it to work but no luck. Please excuse my stupidness as i have been coding for a few months.

Brad^24-Mar-07 15:42

24-Mar-07 15:42

My.Computer.FileSystem.WriteAllText("C:\filename.txt", TextBox1.Text, True)

That is how I have done it! Thanks for the help Christian!

Christian Graus24-Mar-07 15:55

24-Mar-07 15:55

No problem. That's a shortcut for System.IO.File.WriteAllText, it does the same thing. My is a shortcut for VB only, not C#.