There has to be a better way

[RichardAtherton]

my fault for not explaining the problem fully, if you set the text to spaces as in the load event say textbox1.text = " "
then if textbox1.text = "" doesn't work.

In the end I declared a string

dim blanks as string = " "

much longer than my biggest text box and then used

if instr(blanks, textbox1.text) <> 0 then

- error message

end if

I was trying to make sure that on input for a mandatory text field the use couldn't enter spaces and defeat my edit check, I still think it looks very clumsy but I can't think of a better way