Need advice / experience!! - Try my MSOffice-bar style news ticker

[chicocouk]

Hiya guys and girls,

I've been trying for months now on and off to finish off a project I set myself to create a news ticker that can dock to the top or bottom of the desktop, like the office toolbar.

When it's done i'll tidy it up, comment it better, and anyone who wants it can have it to get headlines from their site, can freely give it away etc, as long as they're not making money off it (it's a labour of love / learning for me really)

I've got a fair way on (i think! ), but I need pointers on where i'm going wrong, how to make it better. Basically i'm self-taught, scavenging code here and there, and probably not understanding it enough.

The idea is my ticker pulls a bunch of headlines and urls from a website (from a dynamic .asp page) and then scrolls them in it's own little window. Click a link, and up pops your default browser with the story in it. It also sits in the system tray and has it's own little menu there, and you can set up proxy settings, ticker speed etc.

I'm using the inet control to grab the stories, but for the purposes of this demo, it'll just parse a local .asp file (included) to get story headlines from www.vbworld.com. The red bit on the left is where you would put your website's logo. I've not quite sorted out the error trapping on the inet control (it seems a bit flaky, esp with proxy servers), which is why i'm getting the file locally.

Main problem, I think, is the subclassing to make the app stick to top and bottom of the screen, esp in win 98 .... i got the code from vbsquare.com, and it worked great for a while, but now seems a bit temperamental. This may be 'cos i'm also subclassing for mouseover events, and other things ....



anyway, please please please take a look, any constructive criticism / hints from the more experienced coders out there very much appreciated. If you think my whole approach is wrong, or one aspect is a mess, please tell me why. I just need to get this thing working better for the sake of my sanity ....


to get this to work you'll need to register the vb6 ssubtmr6.dll from vbaccelerator.com, here:

http://www.vbaccelerator.com/codelib...mr/ssubtmr.htm




Thanks a lot in advance, i've never posted code on a site before, so it's all new and odd, like running down a street in your pants

cheers

Iain