[2008] How can i do this

Sorry for the non descriptive title but i dunno how to explain what i wanna do.

basically i have a program that pings my servers at work every minute and displays the reply time and status

heres what it looks like

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...work_utils.jpg

now my problem is all the fields are static, i have say 14 fields for servers, what id like is to make a selection box to how many im going to have, say 1 or 20 and it will adjust it accordingly.

now heres the code im using (its a mess)

vb Code:

Private Sub btnCheckStatus_Click1(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnCheckStatus.Click
        strfail = "Failed Ping"
        Me.txtserver1Status.Text = "down"
        Me.txtserver1Status.ForeColor = Color.Red
        Me.server1_responsetime.Text = ("")
        If My.Settings.server1_ip <> String.Empty Then
            Dim MyPing As New System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping
            Dim MyPingResult As System.Net.NetworkInformation.PingReply = MyPing.Send(My.Settings.server1_ip)
            If MyPingResult.Status = Net.NetworkInformation.IPStatus.Success Then
                log_pings(Me.server1_responsetime.Text, My.Settings.server1_name)
                Me.txtserver1Status.Text = "Up"
                Me.server1_responsetime.Text = (MyPingResult.RoundtripTime.ToString & " ms")
                Me.txtserver1Status.ForeColor = Color.Lime
            Else
                log_database(Date.Now.ToShortTimeString, Date.Now.ToShortDateString, My.Settings.server1_name, strfail)
                Me.txtserver1Status.Text = "down"
                Me.txtserver1Status.ForeColor = Color.Red
                NotifyIcon1.Visible = True
                NotifyIcon1.ShowBalloonTip(5000) '5 second display
                If My.Settings.server1emailalert = True Then
                    send_email()
                End If
            End If
        End If
    End Sub

i have this code copied and pasted 14 times to run when when the same button is clicked, i just name them Private Sub btnCheckStatus_Click1, 2, 3, 4 etc.

how hard will it be for me to squeeze all this code into 1 sub that runs when the button is clicked and will allow me to change how many servers to display.

thanks in advance.

You should create a TableLayoutPanel with the appropriate number of rows and columns, i.e. 1 and 3. Add a Label to each of the cells, leaving the first one blank. Set the TLP's AutoSize property to True. Then you can just add a Label and two TextBoxes for every server you want to test and the TLP will grow automatically.

Another option, since the textboxes are apparently for display only, is to replace them with borderless labels. That way, the user won't see anything if the label is empty.

ok so those 2 options can solve my problem on the front page, but what about if i only have 10 servers hard coded in and say i wanna make it possible to ping 20 servers? is there some code i can ise to ping upt ot 20 or even 30 servers without having to hard code each of them in?

Whenever you add a "server" you can add it to a List, then each time you want to ping you just loop through the List and ping each one. Using my suggestion you don't even really need a List because you can just loop through the rows of the TLP. At each row you get the server address from the TextBox in the second column and then output the result to the TextBox in the third column.

You could also make a user control that encapsulates all the functionality, from actual pinging code, the the UI itself.

Then use the tablelayout like John said, filling it with instances of this user control.

There are many ways to do it.