What Is Visual Basic?

What Is Visual Basic?
Visual Basic (VB) - A programming language developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows environment. The current version is Visual Basic 6.0.

Visual Basic can be used in two ways:
1. Writing stand alone applications on Microsoft Windows systems.
2. Writing add-on scripts within Microsoft applications.
To write stand alone applications in VB, you need the Microsoft Visual Basic software, which provides you a development environment for entering, debugging, and compiling your applications.
To write add-on scripts in VB within other Microsoft applications, you need to follow the specifications of the hosting application. Usually, the hosting application will:

Provide you a specific syntax to enter and store your VB scripts.
Provide you an interface to let your scripts to interact with the host application.
Restrict your scripts to access certain operating system resources for security reasons.

Examples of Microsoft applications that supports VB scripts:
Internet Explorer (IE) - Allows you to include VB scripts in HTML documents to be executed while IE rendering HTML documents on the screen. This is also called client side scripting.

Internet Information Services (IIS) - Allows you to include VB scripts in HTML documents to be executed while IIS fetching HTML documents to deliver to the requesting clients. This is also called server side scripting.

Microsoft Access - Allows you to add VB codes to customize forms and reports.

Using Visual Basic within Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (IE) is a Microsoft application that can be used to view HTML documents. IE is one of the Microsoft applications that allows you to write add-on scripts in Visual Basic language in HTML documents.
To add Visual Basic (VB) scripts into your HTML documents, you need to use the "script" tag with the "language=vbscript" attribute. Inside the "script" tag, you can place any number of VB statements. Here is the syntax of adding VB scripts in HTML documents:

The Visual Studio Environment

The Visual Studio Environment
Before using Visual Studio you must understand the VS environment. The environment refers to how VS manages programs and what support tools are found with VS.
When creating a Visual Studio application you will be working with Projects. A Project consists of a collection of files that are contained in a folder that has the project name. For example, if you want to create a Visual Basic application you must first create and name a Project. Within the Project will be contained the files that make up the application. Each file may have it's own name.
When you first start Visual Studio you will see the window like Figure 1.You can create a new project or select an existing project. Some of the previously saved projects are listed and can be directly selected.
When you create a new project you will be asked to assign a project name:
Before selecting a project name and location you should choose the kind of project you want to create. The Project Types area of this dialog box lists the various kinds of Visual Studio projects that can be created and the Templates area list, for each project type, the specific kinds of projects. For example, if you select Visual Basic Projects on the left side of the screen you can then choose the kind of Visual Basic program you want to create in the list on the right hand side of the screen. The most common type selected with be Windows Application.
Select the location of the project (where you want the project folder created) and type a name. When you click OK a folder with the project name is created at the specified location.
If you selected a Windows Application you will see a basic GUI screen:
The screen is divided into three areas. The main area to the left is the GUI design area and is where you design the program GUI elements and write the code. This area will contain a set of tabbed pages with titles across the top. The right side of the screen is divided into two smaller blocks. The top block is the Project Explorer area and lists all the files that makeup the project. When you create new forms or modules they will be created in this area and edited in the main part of the screen. The upper right area can also display help information. The lower block on the right side of the screen displays property information about elements as they are created.
In the far right section of the menu bar at the top of the screen you see five small icons that, when clicked, display the various windows elements. If a window element is closed it can be redisplayed by clicking one of these icons. Moving the mouse over the icon displays what it does.
As you work in the main window, you may have multiple tabbed windows open. If the title bar of a tabbed window contains a * character, this indicates that it needs to be saved. You can select the window and choose File/Save or press Ctrl S to save the window. You can save all the windows at once by choosing File/Save All or pressing Ctrl Shift S.
To the left of the main window you may see the toolbox. If you don't see the toolbox, move the mouse over the toolbox tab and it will pop into the screen. Click the pushpin icon at the top of the toolbox to keep it displayed on the window.
You can choose other toolbox elements by clicking the toolbox name at the top of this window.

Visual Studio NET 2003

What is Visual Studio NET 2003?
Visual Studio is the integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft to support software development using one of the NET languages. Visual Studio 2003 contains a number of very useful development tools that makes it easy to write and debug programs in Visual Basic, Visual C#, C++, and other related Microsoft supported languages.
The various NET compilers (VB, C#, and C++) can all be run from the command prompt. This allows developers to use their own favorite editor to create programs. However, Visual Studio includes a number of very powerful tools that allow programmers to view and control databases (SQL Server), to connect to online resources, and to manage their programming projects. Visual Studio will automatically build code based on selections by the user.
Visual Studio uses a Project based environment where programs are saved inside a folder that has the name of the opened project. When you create a new project, Visual Studio creates a folder with the project name and creates some basic template files. As you create various elements in your application, such as forms or classes, additional files are added to the project.
Visual Studio will compile your program into an EXE file so it can be executed. However, most of the Microsoft Visual languages use NET and so any executable created can only be run in the NET environment.
Visual Studio can be used to manage projects that have modules written in different languages.

Windows Vista

Windows Vista, Microsoft's new OS, brought out in six versions, from Starter to Enterprise editions. All versions are available in both 32 bit (x86) and 64 bit (x86-64) architectures, except Windows Vista Starter (only in 32 bit architecture).

Windows Vista Starter Severely limited for example only allowing a user to launch at most three applications with a user interface at once, will not accept incoming network connections and physical memory is limited to 2 GB. Additionally, only Celeron and Pentium III processors from Intel, and AMD's Duron, Sempron and Geode processors are supported.

Windows Vista Home Basic: Advanced media support is not available, for home use only. Supports up to 8GB of physical memory.


Windows Vista Home Premium: contains all features from Home Basic, this edition will additionally support more advanced features aimed for the home market segment, such as HDTV support and DVD authoring. Extra games, mobile and tablet computer support, file system encryption, and a photo management application are also included and will support up to 16GB of physical memory.

Windows Vista Business: Aimed at business market and does not include the Media Centre features of Home Premium, but does include the IIS Web Server, Fax support, Offline Files, Dual Physical Processor Support capabilities and support for 128GB of memory.

Windows Vista Enterprise: As the name suggests, an Enterprise segment of the market, and is a superset of the Business edition. Single session Version of Virtual PC, Multi-Lingual User Interface support, BitLocker Drive Encryption and UNIX application support. This edition will not be available through retail or OEM channels, but through Microsoft Software Assurance.

Windows Vista Ultimate: This edition combines all the features of Home Premium and Enterprise editions and additionally comes with podcast creation support - which Microsoft has dubbed "blogcasting" - a game performance tweaker (WinSAT), DVD ripping capabilities and special online services for downloadable media, as well as additional customer service options. The Ultimate edition is aimed to be the most impressive edition of Vista, aimed at high-end PC users, gamers, multimedia professionals and PC enthusiasts.

Linux

Linux is a scaled-down UNIX operating system originally developed by Linus Torvalds, then a University student in Finland, now used in everything from PDAs, watches, PCs, Consumer Electronics, Servers and Super Computers.

Beginning: Linux was originally Minix, an educational version of UNIX developed by Andrew Tannenbaum. As an interesting aside, we might be talking about Minix today if not for the licensing that Minix required. Few people have heard about Minix today, far less than have heard about Linux.

Early on, Linux grew as a cheap UNIX that ran on Intel-based PC equipment. At the time, you could purchase UNIX for PCs, but at a high cost (as much as $1500 for a developer's version of interactive UNIX).

Linux Distributions: Technically, Linux is really just an OS Kernel, produced under the direction of Linus Torvalds. But, Linux usually comes with a set of utility, desktop, and Server programs, including networking suites, Web Servers, file systems, compilers and a whole lot more. For example, Linux includes the XFree86 version of the X Window System, the GNU C compiler GCC, and code from quite a lot of other sources. But to make things confusing, there's more than one version of Linux.

A number of organizations, commercial and some volunteer, collect together versions of all these programs with the Linux Kernel, test that everything works together, and then release what is called a distribution of Linux.

The main Linux distributions include: RedHat, Kondara MNU/Linux, SUSE (Self CD loading), Linux Mandrake, Knnopix, Slackware.

The best Linux disttribution to try is the one that is handy or readily available from friends, computer magazines or books etc.

For further reference http://Sourceforge.net

PHP vs CGI

PHP seems very much in vogue now - with an increasingly greater number of web hosts providing support for it. For those who have only vaguely heard of it and are not too sure what it is, this article discusses PHP and informally compares it with writing CGI scripts in Perl.

PHP is a free server side scripting language. It can be built into web servers like Apache and you can use it to generate your pages dynamically. You would probably use it in situations you would have otherwise used a CGI script for. For example, thefreecountry.com's Feedback form (among other things) uses a PHP script to generate the form and send the message to me.

1. The Language
If you are coming from a C, C++, Perl, Java or JavaScript background, learning PHP would probably be a piece of cake. In fact, you probably can get started writing your scripts almost immediately (I did).

It uses typeless variables the way Perl does, prefixed with a "$" sign and holding any data type you wish. For example, $whatever can be a variable that you can use to contain strings, numbers, whatever. If $whatever contained a number, you can increment its value using

$whatever++ ;

or

$whatever += 1 ;

or

$whatever = $whatever + 1 ;

Remind you of Perl, C, C++, Java, JavaScript? See what I mean?

2. Built-in Facilities
Unlike Perl, which is a general purpose scripting language that you can use for a wide variety of purposes (and not just generating web pages), PHP was designed from the ground up to be used for scripting web pages. As a result, it has lots of facilities built into that you may have to write yourself or use some pre-written module if you were using Perl.

For example, do you want to send email to yourself from a form on the web page? In Perl, you probably would have to code something like the following:

open ( MAIL,"|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t");
print MAIL "To: myself\@mydomain.com\n" ;
print MAIL "From: visitor\@hisdomain.com\n" ;
print MAIL "Subject: Comments from Web Form\n\n" ;
print MAIL $mainmessage ;
close ( MAIL ) ;

In PHP, the same thing would be coded as follows:

mail ( "myself@mydomain.com", "Comments from Web Form",
$mainmessage, "From: visitor@hisdomain.com" );

Nifty, huh? The same goes for other facilities like sending or retrieving a document via HTTP or FTP, etc. Since PHP was specially designed for a website, the facilities that web designers typically want in a scripting language are built into it.

Another convenience is its handling of form input. Take for example a form with a field like:



You can immediately access that field with the $dateofbirth variable. No need to parse form inputs and the like. All fields in the form are automatically converted to variables that you can access.

Accessing databases is just as easy. There are built-in facilities in PHP to access MySQL, MSQL, Dbase, Oracle, InterBase, and so on (the list is very long). Need to MIME encode your message? There's a function to do it for you too.

There're lots more. I obviously can't run through the entire list - it would take a whole book to be exhaustive. This is just to whet your appetite.

3. Generating web pages
By default anything you type in your PHP document is given verbatim to the web browser. So a simple PHP script might look like the following:


My First PHP Script

My First PHP Script
<' p>
Welcome, Internet user from IP address
. Hope you like my first
PHP page.




Notice that it looks exactly like a web page, except for the bit, which encloses the PHP script. In this case, all we want is for the script to output the visitor's IP address to the page, hence we use the "echo" function. The web server's environment variable REMOTE_ADDR is automatically made available to the PHP script via a variable of the same name (as are all other environment variables and form inputs).

There are many ways to embed your PHP script into your page, or to design your page itself. But you got the general idea. As I said, PHP was designed for web pages, so the idea of output to the server is built into its design. It makes writing such scripts a very pleasant task.

4. Debugging With PHP Vs Perl CGI

Interestingly, if you're debugging your scripts online, PHP really shines.

Normally, when a Perl CGI script goes awry, you'll get a cryptic error message in your browser: something to the effect of "500 Internal Server Error".

With PHP scripts, you get error messages pinpointing the offending lines in your code to help you locate the error. However, the message is sometimes a cryptic "parse error" or the like, so you still have to crack your head to figure out the problem. But at least you know where it occurred. Contrast that with Perl CGI scripts, where an "Internal Server Error" could have arisen from any number of causes, from a syntax error to a simple case of forgetting to make the file executable or uploading it in text mode.

Debugging offline, however, is another story. Some people have found that the Perl interpreter gives more helpful messages than the PHP interpreter, which tends to label many things as "parse error". This may change, though, as newer versions of the PHP interpreter is released.

4. What's the Catch?
While I obviously enjoy using PHP as my web scripting language, I do not claim that it is the perfect solution for all your website needs.

You might want to consider the following prior to committing yourself ot it. The list, incidentally, is not exhaustive.

a. Not all web hosts provide PHP facilities. While it is true that many also do not provide CGI access, the number providing PHP is even less!

In fact, where free web space providers are concerned, the number providing PHP can probably be counted with one hand. Indeed, even if you manage to find free web hosting with PHP access, you have to ask yourself whether you really want to depend on it for your site. There might be a day when you need to move your site, and you may be hard-pressed to find another free web host that supports PHP.

However, if you host with commercial web hosting companies, you probably will have less problems. It seems to me like the large majority of vendors support PHP, and even those who currently don't provide it plan to support it in the near future.

b. Like all web scripting languages (Perl included), debugging the script can be a pain in the neck unless you download and install your own copy of PHP. Otherwise you might spend many hours online trying to test and debug your script (unless of course it's a trivial script).

Incidentally, you can also operate your own Apache web server at home, so as to mimic the entire environment of your actual site (or as close to it as necessary).

Of course if you have a Linux box around, you're probably all set. Just dig up your installation CDROMs and install the server and PHP module from there if you've not already done so. (Most modern Linux distributions come bundled with the Apache server and PHP Apache module.)

c. It is not a general purpose language. While it has many facilities specifically catered towards web programming, it is not Perl (or C or C++ or Java). I personally however find PHP more than adequate for my web programming needs.

Windows Vista Home Basic Troubleshooting & tips

Enable New windows vista Home Basic Aero Cursors tips.

Troubleshooting tips 1

:Post-beta 2 builds, windows vista has included new Aero cursors that are not turned on by default. To troubleshooting this in vista.Follow the steps below :Right click on your desktop and select Personalize.Click on the Mouse Cursors item to select a Vista graphics different mouse cursor scheme.Change the Scheme from None to Windows vista Aero.Click OK to see the new Aero mouse cursors.

Kill Security center notification problem in Windows Vista Home Basic

Troubleshooting tips 2: windows vista security center remind you all the time about anti virus. Solution guide:- new easy way to disable the security center messages.Click on the Security Center/Windows Security Alerts logo in the system tray.Click Change the way Security Center alerts me.Select I do not want notification messages from Security Center.

Use small icons size tip for Windows vista.

Troubleshooting large Icon

The Windows vista icon size of the recently run programs list on the Start Menu is set to large by default. This is great if you like the large icons but it also cuts down on the number of recently run programs that can be displayed. Follow the steps below to give your Start Menu a cleaner look

disable large icons problem:
Right click on the Start Button and select Properties.
Click on the Customize button.
Scroll to the bottom of the list and remove the check from Use large icons.

You can now also increase the number of recently run programs in vista that are displayed to something larger than 9.

Hit OK when you are finished.

windows Vista adiitional clock

Windows Vista, you can add additional clocks to the system tray. Click the clock, and then click Date and Time Settings. Click the Additional Clocks tab. You can add one or two additional clocks to the tray and select their time zones.

Vista's word and notepad document more secure

You can create XML documents, which are more secure than regular text files or even word processor docs. Just create a document in a word processor, print(not print out ) it via the options menu, and select the XPS printer.Thats it u have secure document.

Vista Home Basic Internet Explorer Problem

If you’re annoyed by Internet Explorer’s incessant barking that you’ve lowered your security settings , launch “gpedit.msc” from either the Run command or Start Search field, navigate through Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Vista Components / Internet Explorer. In the rightmost pane, double-click “Turn off the Security Settings Check feature” and set it to Enabled.

Windows Vista Task manager for troubleshooting

The Windows Task Manager gives you a lot more troubleshooting information in Vista.Click ctr+alt+del, Flip to the Processes tab, and in the View menu, click “Select Columns” and add Description, Command Line, and Image Path Name. Moreover, when you right-click a process, you can select either “Go to Service(s)” or “Open File Location.” These are all long overdue options.

Displaying Run on the vista Desktop

You can create a shortcut for the Run command on your desktopFrom the Start Menu, go to All Programs / AccessoriesDrag a shortcut for Run to the desktop.

vista Displaying Run on the Start Menu

By default, Run is not shown when you open the Start Menu.To enable this:Right click on the taskbarSelect PropertiesClick on the Start Menu tabClick on the Customize buttonScroll down and check Run (it's about 2/3's of the way towards the bottom.

Allowing Network Access with Blank Passwords with Vista

Although you can log in locally without a password, by default, Vista does not allow network users to access the computer without a password. To change this setting in windows vista: Run gpedit.msc Go to Computer Configuration / Windows vista Settings /Security Settings / Local Policies / Security Options Double click on Accounts: Limit local account use of blank passwords to console login only Disable this option.

Adding the IE 7 Icon to the desktop

By default, the icon for the Vista graphics Internet Explorer 7 does not show up on the Vista desktopTo add it back in again, a registry edit is needed. [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\NewStartPanel]"{871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D}"=dword:00000000 Then log off and back on again.

Resizing Partitions Vista .

Vista now has the ability to resize partitions. Right click on my Computer on vista tip desktop Select Manage Click on Disk Management Right click on a partition Select Shrink or Extend depending on what you want to do Note: As with all changes to partition sizes, have a good set of backups beforehand is a good idea.

.Access Denied to Folders

If you are getting Access Denied errors when trying to open folderslike Documents and Settings, Application Data, Local settings: Right click on the Folder Select Properties Click on the Security tab Click on the Advanced button Click on the Owner tab Click on the Edit button In the Change owner to box, highlight your account Check Replace owner on subcontainers and objects Click on Apply Click on Yes to replace all permissions Continue to click on OK until you.

Services You Can Disable with vista

There are several services you can disable to help improve performance.

Desktop Window Manager Session Manager - Provides Desktop Window Manager startup and maintenance services.If you don't plan on using Aero Glass, you can disable this service.

Diagnostic Policy Service - Enables problem detection, troubleshooting and resolution for Windows componentsSet to Disabled

Diagnostic Service Host - Same as above

Diagnostic System Host - Same as above

vista Offline Files - The Offline Files service performs maintenance activities on the Offline Files cache, responds to user logon and logoff events, implements the internals of the public API, and dispatches interesting events to those interested in Offline Files activities and changes in cache state.

vista Terminal Services - Allows users to connect interactively to a remote computer. Remote Desktop and Terminal Server depend on this service. If you don't use either of these, then you can disable the service in vista.

Windows vista Error Reporting Service - Allows errors to be reported when programs stop working or responding and allows existing solutions to be delivered.

Windows vista Search - Formerly this was the Indexing Service. Provides content indexing in vista.

comment: futher tips for microsoft windows vista available in future.