Getting the ball rolling. Which VB6 projects are you working on?

What are others working on? We must as a community all be working on something interesting?

You may well be enthusiastic, but getting around the language censor with slight spelling errors is not allowed, enthusiastic or not. Also, advertising has caused problems. You haven't been around long enough to have seen where that came from, but it's an issue.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

You may well be enthusiastic, but getting around the language censor with slight spelling errors is not allowed, enthusiastic or not. Also, advertising has caused problems. You haven't been around long enough to have seen where that came from, but it's an issue.

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What ARE you talking about?

The part that I removed from the previous thread, which used a bunch of slight variations where S was replaced with 5. There was also a link to a site that opened a door that I am not willing to open.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

The part that I removed from the previous thread, which used a bunch of slight variations where S was replaced with 5. There was also a link to a site that opened a door that I am not willing to open.

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Sorry, unless you quote or name the person/post, no-one knows who you are talking to or about.

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Originally Posted by Niya

I strongly advise you look into obtaining a 3rd party library for this.
Now, I'm not saying that you can't do what you want using just the Windows API but be prepared for the possibility that you'd need to do more and Windows won't offer a way to do it.

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Niya, just letting you know that you were quite right about this recommendation, I am looking to use some theTrick's code to record sound instead of using MCISendString whose output is frankly awful... I just need to find a way of saving the resulting recording to a WAV file and whilst that might be easy for theTrick it isn't obvious to me. Hoping that he will respond to my query for help.

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Originally Posted by yereverluvinuncleber

Sorry, unless you quote or name the person/post, no-one knows who you are talking to or about.

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Well, now the post I replied to has been deleted (and not by me), so my reply makes even less sense than it did before.

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Originally Posted by yereverluvinuncleber

Niya, just letting you know that you were quite right about this recommendation, I am looking to use some theTrick's code to record sound instead of using MCISendString whose output is frankly awful... I just need to find a way of saving the resulting recording to a WAV file and whilst that might be easy for theTrick it isn't obvious to me. Hoping that he will respond to my query for help.

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Yea, this isn't surprising. Like I said, the Windows API is extremely basic when covering anything that has nothing to do with it's primary responsibility as an OS, like sound.

Hope you find what you're looking for.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

so my reply makes even less sense than it did before.

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Very few posts here make a lot of sense so take some comfort from that.

Recent posts in a couple of threads here are reminding me of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Trying to figure out which one of you all is Nurse Ratched and who is Jack Nicholson...

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Originally Posted by szlamany

Trying to figure out which one of you all is Nurse Ratched

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Are you implying that one of us is trying to cover up a murder?

Could the clues lie within that post that I believe never existed on this thread at all? My leetle grey cells tell me that zere is something very wrong with zis forum...

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Originally Posted by yereverluvinuncleber

Are you implying that one of us is trying to cover up a murder?

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Murder? Nah - vb6 died of natural causes from what I see!

Talking about murder, is there a thread here where we can expound our views and hatred and utter contempt for Windows 10+?

Hate? I love Windows 10. It's like a 2021 version of XP, it just doesn't break!

Even Windows 7 used to break. My Bluetooth USB dongle used to blue screen Windows 7. Windows 10 on the other hand, tamed it and made it a docile obedient pet. I love this OS!

I'm not looking for the I love Windows 10 thread.

I don't think you need to state that you hate Win 10. You're the most steampunk person I've encountered. I really do admire your talent for art, and the style you bring to it, but why would you think anybody would even be a little surprised that you hate Win 10?

Personally, I agree with Niya. Every version of Windows has had problems, but they've slowly gotten more and more stable (and I haven't used a few, to be fair). Overall, we're headed towards a certain destination on the OS. We aren't quite there yet, but we're getting close. I've stated it before, but in case you missed it: I believe we're headed towards the point where your computer will fit in your pocket. When you get to a desk, you drop it into a cradle and have the monitors (one or more), the keyboard, the mouse, and whatever other peripherals. When you leave the desk, it goes with you.

I'm using the Surface Pro in that fashion, and it is almost ideal, currently. You can't fit it in your pocket, and that might be a step too far anyways, since the screen would have to be too small to be usable (unless some kind of projection system worked better). However, it is light enough that I was able to take it on my multi-week bike ride, yet sufficiently powerful that I could run several simultaneous instances of VS on it.

For that vision to become reality, it is necessary to go to an OS that is equally adept at touch and conventional interfaces. Win 10 is not there, as it is better for conventional, still, but it moved in the right direction. I'm not sure whether Win 11 is a step forwards or backwards towards that goal. It seems like it might be both.

No, I hate Win10 not just because of corporate style that implies we have to conform, that we ought to conform. However, for the moment I hate Win 10 because Cortana holds the default device open that MCISendString API should use, meaning that recording using MCISendString does not work on Win10, instead producing a .WAV file of 44 bytes long containing RIFF$ WAVEfmt # # # D¬ #±# # # data

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Originally Posted by yereverluvinuncleber

No, I hate Win10 not just because of corporate style that implies we have to conform, that we ought to conform.

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Ok...this comment lost me completely.

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Originally Posted by yereverluvinuncleber

However, for the moment I hate Win 10 because Cortana holds the default device open that MCISendString API should use, meaning that recording using MCISendString does not work on Win10, instead producing a .WAV file of 44 bytes long containing RIFF$ WAVEfmt # # # D¬ #±# # # data

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I'm not going to lie, you legit made me laugh with this comment. Like seriously. I really hope no thinks you actually mean this. Your sense of humor is pretty unique.

Well, my opinion... VB6 was born to run on Win10.


Edit: I have reasons to say this because of a certain experience.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

You're the most steampunk person I've encountered. I really do admire your talent for art, and the style you bring to it

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Thankyou. I have nothing else to bring except blood, sweat and tears - and perhaps a certain 'diesel' style in this particular case. I am a useless programmer, more or less an assembler of chunks - but not necessarily in the right order.

Can't understand why you think I am steamy in any way.

Attachment 183086
My Desktop using the forum attachment method.

PS. just testing the image attachment functionality, initially I couldn't get it to work at all but incrementing the number and using manage attachments to show inline it did eventually work following jbpro's method.

https://www.vbforums.com/images/ieimages/2021/11/7.png
My Desktop using imgur.

Still prefer the imgur method over that of the forum. Right click and select view image and you'll see.

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Originally Posted by yereverluvinuncleber

PS. just testing the image attachment functionality, I can't get it to work at all.

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This procedure works for me, maybe it will work for you too.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

I've stated it before, but in case you missed it: I believe we're headed towards the point where your computer will fit in your pocket. When you get to a desk, you drop it into a cradle and have the monitors (one or more), the keyboard, the mouse, and whatever other peripherals. When you leave the desk, it goes with you.

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Haven't we been there ~5 years ago? Windows Continuum was quite a smooth experience. Would Microsoft have not messed up the Phone/Mobile platform's release and marketing in every way possible, who knows where we'd be today? Ubuntu touch/convergence wasn't quite there yet either and also gave up eventually, but in their defense, they had a fraction of the resources to make this work. Microsoft failed out of arrogance/incompetence, Ubuntu failed because money.

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I'm using the Surface Pro in that fashion, and it is almost ideal, currently. You can't fit it in your pocket, and that might be a step too far anyways, since the screen would have to be too small to be usable (unless some kind of projection system worked better). However, it is light enough that I was able to take it on my multi-week bike ride, yet sufficiently powerful that I could run several simultaneous instances of VS on it.

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For me, that's been solved for ages with a Thinkpad + docking station. Although USB-C eliminates the latter, making it even more versatile and portable.

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Originally Posted by Zahl

Haven't we been there ~5 years ago? Windows Continuum was quite a smooth experience. Would Microsoft have not messed up the Phone/Mobile platform's release and marketing in every way possible, who knows where we'd be today? Ubuntu touch/convergence wasn't quite there yet either and also gave up eventually, but in their defense, they had a fraction of the resources to make this work. Microsoft failed out of arrogance/incompetence, Ubuntu failed because money.

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Not quite. Phones are pretty awesome, but they are not the same as desktops, yet. The Windows phones, had they worked, were terribly underpowered. I want to be able to run VS, a program that isn't trivial, but is far from being demanding for system resources. The Windows Phone wouldn't have been able to do that.

What I am wanting is a computer as powerful and capable as a desktop (though perhaps without the graphics), in my pocket. We aren't there, yet.

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For me, that's been solved for ages with a Thinkpad + docking station. Although USB-C eliminates the latter, making it even more versatile and portable.

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Yeah, I've been there for ages, as well. Laptops are not sufficiently portable, though. I was never tempted to carry one on a bike trip, because they are too bulky and heavy. The Surface Pro is lighter and quite slim, so I was willing to carry that. I'm not yet willing to carry a Surface Pro hiking, though, because they're still too heavy for that....and probably always will be.

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Originally Posted by jpbro

This procedure works for me, maybe it will work for you too.[/URL]

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Thanks for your assistance.
What vb6 project are you working on Jbpro?

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

What I am wanting is a computer as powerful and capable as a desktop (though perhaps without the graphics), in my pocket. We aren't there, yet.

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It depends how you compare, if you compare cellphones of today with desktops of years ago, cellphones of today are more powerful.

If you want to compare cellphones and desktops of the same time, desktop will always be more powerful because they are bigger in size.

Lol : ()+<

One of my projects is upgrading a Spectrum + 2 128k, just 3.5mhz from 1986, instant to boot, and with an SDCard reader, instant to load programs, BASIC is there almost instantly and now there are cross platform development tools. So, don't talk to me about slow old hardware as I have the slowest and it is instant ON when you press the button.

OK, with fear of turning this into a VB6 vs NET thread, this is one area where using VB6 is a boon. If you can easily and quickly run VB6 on a 13 year old core 2 duo with a 2.7ghz cpus and an SSD (that is the main system upon which I created my four recent applications prior to upgrading to my i7 E6410) then that sort of power is easily obtainable on a modern laptop and almost any current system should be capable of doing VB6 development. I'd like to see such a modern miniature system doing that.

Small screen size is always an issue. I am developing on a 15.1" screen and it is really not quite big enough.

When I moved from VB6 to VB.Net the first time, it was using Visual Studio 2008 on an Intel Core 2 Duo PC. .Net doesn't care about system specs. It cares more about what version of Windows you're using. VB6 has the advantage if you're talking about an old PC running something like Windows ME or Windows 98. As far as I know, .Net applications won't run on those Windows editions but VB6 applications can.

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Originally Posted by Eduardo-

It depends how you compare, if you compare cellphones of today with desktops of years ago, cellphones of today are more powerful.

If you want to compare cellphones and desktops of the same time, desktop will always be more powerful because they are bigger in size.

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Good point. I wrote that poorly. What I meant was actually very specific, yet I wrote that sentence such that it was open to multiple interpretations.

What I want specifically is the ability to run a couple simultaneous instances of the newest version of Visual Studio.

That's a specification which is both particular and testable, yet not all that extreme. What would be extreme is wanting such a computer that could run a majorly graphically intensive game like Red Dead Redemption 2, and I'm not asking for something like that. Running VS doesn't take excessive CPU power or GPU requirements, but it does require at least a goodly level of capability.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

Running VS doesn't take excessive CPU power or GPU requirements, but it does require at least a goodly level of capability.

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It needs a good multi-core CPU. Modern versions of Visual Studio are heavily multi-threaded.

And VS can run on ARM?

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Originally Posted by Eduardo-

And VS can run on ARM?

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Not without emulation.

I think the current Apple Silicon would be more than capable of doing that. It's definitely ahead of other ARM CPUs. But even on Android there are respectable looking 3D games available, probably most infamous currently Fortnite. Sure, it's still visibly behind current-gen RTX cards, but a few years ago that would have been unthinkable. I'm not sure about multiple copies of VS, but a single one, I'm absolutely sure modern flagship phones could handle (assuming a reasonable ARM port would exist :rolleyes:). Would Continuum still exist (and have evolved, it was rather limited), there'd be even more reason to push the performance of phones. You can currently get flagship phones with 8GB RAM; there's no reason they couldn't have even more, it just doesn't make sense for mobile apps. Even 8 seems like overkill, what are you planning to do with that, run 400 copies of Snapchat?
As you might be able to tell, I'm still absolutely fascinated by the idea of having a phone that's also a computer. Continuum was just poorly implemented and unpolished. Add the fact that the app store was a yawning void, it was next to useless.

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Originally Posted by yereverluvinuncleber

Thanks for your assistance.
What vb6 project are you working on Jbpro?

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No problem - looks like there's an even better way according to Steve R Jones. Haven't tried it myself yet though.

As for what I'm working on, I don't think we're supposed to link to commercial products at the forum, so i'll just say that my day job is working on an application that helps architects, engineers, and interior designers better manage the documentation and money side of the construction phase of their projects. As for other projects, I have a few things in the codebank that you may have seen, and I work on the occasional "fun" project for my own purposes.

My favourite "fun" one is probably an old jukebox program I wrote many years ago. Back when I had roommates, I got an old Pentium II box (I think) hoooked up to our "big screen" CRT, and rewired an old Xbox controller so that it would work on a desktop. I can't remember now if it was rewired to work as USB or serial, it's been a long time! There was a Xbox controller driver floating around the internet that somebody else wrote, but it allowed me to get button presses from the Xbox controller in VB6. I spent a couple of weeks ripping all my CDs to FLAC (for backup purposes), then converting those to VBR MP3's to save space on the desktop HD. I also spent a stupid amount of time grabbing album covers off of Amazon (I think) so that the jukebox would show album covers along with track lists.

I then wrote an VB6 app that would build the track list and allow you to search for songs/artists/albums. It also automated Winamp to play any MP3 selected by the Xbox controller, and automatically activate the "Milkdrop" (I think) visualization plugin fullscreen after a short period of input inactivity (and automatically disable it if you tried to use the controller to pick another song). Nice and "trippy" visualizations would accompany the playlist.

It had a couple of cool features that made it great for parties IMHO. First, you couldn't interrupt a song that was playing - when you chose a song it would add it to the queue. One button would add it to the end of the queue, another would insert the song at the front of the queue, so if you were listening to a song and got into a conversation about another song, you could sneak it into the next slot of the playlist. It also wouldn't let you queue a song more than once, so when a lot of different people were choosing music over the course of the night, you wouldn't end up with the same song playing a bunch of times throughout the evening. I think I added an "admin" override sequence that would allow me to cheat and get around those restrictions if I really wanted to, but that might have just been an idea that I never implemented. Lastly, it was also "always on" when launched - if everyone was too engrossed in other things to pick a song and the queue emptied out, then a random song would play. AFAIK it was not totally random, but weighted towards songs that had been chosen before, with the idea that it would play songs that it thought were well liked. The "weighted pick" is another feature I can't remember 100% if I added or just wanted to add, so perhaps it was completely random.

Anyway, it got a fair amount of use over a few years and was well received by everyone who played around with it. Eventually I got my own place, and just tended to pick MP3s to play without the help of the app, and now I've largely moved on to Spotify.

No idea if I still have the source code anywhere...probably hanging around on an old HD (if it would still spin up). I imagine the code would be frighteningly bad, though it held together well enough in practice. Never needed to restart the app in the middle of a party at least!

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Originally Posted by jpbro

No idea if I still have the source code anywhere...probably hanging around on an old HD (if it would still spin up). I imagine the code would be frighteningly bad, though it held together well enough in practice. Never needed to restart the app in the middle of a party at least!

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I'd like to see it. From my perspective a working tool with a useful interface is as important as good code any day. I have created a mediaplayer for the desktop using .js which I use to this day but it is not designed to be large and full screen, rather small and discrete. I have toy-ed with replicating it in VB6 but I think to do so I would have to dig into RC5 first.

Going to try to embed another picture...

Attachment 183099

my older Win98 SP2, machine was looking at using Windows XP SP2, at the time. it only worked for a good weekend, then told me that there was a memory malfunction in the hardware, then died as such and then the like of it...

I did SkyscraperFX for SketchUp and AutoCAD in VB6.

https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...y=skyscraperfx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apsGil9Gd38

The apps ZEN and GLD versions allow a user to generate automatic 3d skyscrapers in SketchUp from 2d geometry in AutoCAD.

A user can then save the styles in a library.

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Originally Posted by geometry777

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apsGil9Gd38

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Well, that's completely different from the usual...

I just gave your video a "thumbs up". Youtube told me that it had only received 3 views and zero likes since 2016. Something must be wrong there.

You can embed videos here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apsGil9Gd38