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Creating Drop-Shadows
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| Total Hit (2248) |
Demonstrates how to create drop-shadows for windows and controls using the same technique used by Office XP/VS.NET CommandBars.
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Flicker Free API Drawing
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| Total Hit (3000) |
VB offers a way to reduce flicker when drawing a control through its AutoRedraw property. When AutoRedraw is set, VB creates an Off-Screen buffer to draw into, and only transfers this to the drawing surface when the Refresh method is called. Whilst this works well (ish), it doesn't help if you need
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Window Shapes Using Layering
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| Total Hit (2555) |
This article provides an alternative, higher-performance way of creating a custom-shaped Windows region from a bitmap for Windows 2000 and XP systems. Prior to Windows 2000, window shapes could only be customised using the SetWindowsRgn API. In Windows 2000 and above support the Layered Windows APIs
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Creating Window Shapes from Bitmaps
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| Total Hit (2901) |
The Windows Shape article shows how to use the SetWindowRgn function to apply a geometric region to a window using the GDI region creation functions. However, beyond using a simple geometric region, things get difficult. How do you specify the exact shape you want?
This article demonstrates how t
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A window that's star-shaped, circular or tank-shaped
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| Total Hit (2687) |
Just for fun, its surprisingly easy now to create Windows or controls of any shape whatsoever under Visual Basic. This article demonstrates using SetWindowsRgn to create Windows with a variety of geometric shapes.
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Creating Single Pixel Dotted Lines
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| Total Hit (1698) |
One of the drawing features which makes many of the Windows controls draw attractively is the use of single pixel on-off dotted lines. For example, the TreeView control uses these to draw lines, and they are often used in bounding box selections and drag and drop operations.
Unfortunately VB does
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Animated Cursors in VB
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| Total Hit (1904) |
Nice feature in Office - you can set it to show customised animated cursors. For example, when Office is opening a document the cursor switches to an animation of a yellow handbag throwing up a small piece of paper (I think that's what it is, anyway).
It would be nice to do it this in VB too, yes
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Text At Any Angle
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| Total Hit (2498) |
VB doesn't provide you with any method to change the angle text is written out at on a Form or PictureBox. This seems to be a curious oversight of the OLE StdFont object, because it is in fact very simple to create a font with angles other than horizontal. This article shows you how to do it. The so
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Reading and Saving .ICO files and resources in VB
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| Total Hit (2399) |
VB allows you to load an save .ICO files through the LoadPicture and SavePicture methods, which are implemented in the StdPicture object. Unfortunately, this object was really written for 16 bit Windows and doesn't understand Win32 icons at all. A .ICO resource can contain many different images, at
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Drawing Borders and Edges using the API DrawEdge Function
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| Total Hit (2297) |
The DrawEdge function is a useful function provided by the Win32 API. It can draw a variety of the edge styles used to draw buttons, frames and borders around controls and forms. The source code for this article shows you how to:
Use the DrawEdge to achieve a variety of edge styles.
Evaluate the
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Win32 Hooks in VB - The vbAccelerator Hook Library
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| Total Hit (2683) |
When a subclass isn't tough enough for the job, its time to move to an even lower-level and more disruptive technique. Win32 Hooks are a method by which you can tap into the Windows message stream for every single message directed to every window in your application. You can modify or even discard m
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Enabling Mouse Gestures with a WH_MOUSE hook
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| Total Hit (2399) |
Use of mouse gestures to control application is becoming increasingly common in the more sophisticated web browsers. This sample demonstrates how you can support a range of mouse gestures in a Visual Basic application using a Windows Hook.
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Using CBT Hooks to Centre API Dialogs
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| Total Hit (2202) |
Windows sometimes places Common Dialogs and Message Boxes at the "wrong" position on the screen. Whilst there are some ways of working around this for Common Dialogs, a more general solution which applies to any Windows dialog is to use a CBT (Computer-Based Training) Windows Hook. These Hooks provi
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vbAccelerator Accelerator Control
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| Total Hit (846) |
If you've ever tried to pick a keyboard accelerator for the menu items Back and Next in your application, you might have discovered a limitation in VB's ability to set up accelerators. IE offers some sensibly chosen keyboard accelerators for its Back, Next, Home shortcuts, using Alt and the arrow an
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XML Property Bag
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| Total Hit (1490) |
This ActiveX DLL is derived from an excellent original XML PropertyBag sample by Aaron Anderson (Aaron.Anderson@mail.farmcreditbank.com). It allows you to persist and recreate your own objects directly to XML based-files using a simple interface closely related to VB's PropertyBag object. By impleme
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Complete Registry control
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| Total Hit (2255) |
The cRegistry class is an easy, self-contained way to get complete access to the Windows registry. Simple methods allow you to create, enumerate and delete keys and values in the registry, without restriction. You can even read/write binary data to the registry. To see how powerful this library is,
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Setting Your Application to Automatically Run When Windows Starts
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| Total Hit (1908) |
This source code shows how to automatically start an application when Windows starts using the registry. You can either have the application Auto-Start once next time Windows starts, or everytime Windows starts. The method uses my cRegistry class to make it easy to get the registry information.
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Easy INI File Access
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| Total Hit (1827) |
The cIniFile class is an easy, self-contained way to get complete access to INI files. Although use of INI files is no longer recommended under Windows (you should use the registry instead - see my Registry class for an easy migration from this method of using Ini files to using the registry) they a
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Storing and Showing HTML Resources in a VB Application
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| Total Hit (1705) |
Since Internet Explorer 4, it is has been possible to display HTML directly from application resources using the res:// protocol. This article demonstrates how to embed HTML files and images into your application resources to use this function and encapsulate HTML files.
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Icons without forms and document association icons in VB
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| Total Hit (2046) |
VB allows you to choose an icon for an executable, but it offers a somewhat limited choice. The icon must be stored in a form included in your VB project, and you can only pick one icon to be exposed publicly per project. Whilst the single icon is the most important one, you might want to have addit
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Using RC.EXE
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| Total Hit (1704) |
This article provides a short look at how to use the Resource Compiler (RC.EXE) to create resource files (.RES) for Visual Basic applications. Using RC.EXE directly is often better than using the wizards provided with VB5 and 6 as you have more control over including arbitrary data; in addition the
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Reading Data from Local or External Library Resources
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| Total Hit (2951) |
Often your application will have associated data, such as pictures, sounds, static data and so forth you need to ship with it. If you are localizing your application then you also need to be able to provide alternative text strings for menus, messages, labels on so forth. Resources are a great way t
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Getting the Correct Filename for a Shortcut
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| Total Hit (2458) |
If your application creates or otherwise manipulates shortcuts then you should use the Operating System to determine what the filename for the shortcut should be, as the extension is subject to i18n. This article demonstrates how to use the SHGetNewLinkInfo API call to do this, and also provides a h
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Drawing With Textures
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| Total Hit (1811) |
This article provides an extension to the technique demonstrated in Creating Single Pixel Dotted Lines to show how you can easily create a brush for drawing shapes from any bitmap, picture or device context.
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Fading Out Selected Areas Using UpdatedLayeredWindow
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| Total Hit (2245) |
In Windows 2000 and XP, when you click a Start Menu item, such as "Run" an after image of the item you've clicked remains on screen and fades out whilst the Run box starts up. This article provides a reusable form-class you can use to provide this effect in your application.
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