FREE Application/Program ICONS and/or IMAGES! - Updated _ August 27th!
By Jason | August 27, 2010
(23 votes, average: 3.83 out of 5)
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For sure Icons/Images can really make your Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual Basic.NET applications stand out and shine. Unfortunately alot of the Icons you find either cost money and/or will not allow you to use them in a commercial based application. So that is where this little post comes in. Four out of Five of the ICON/Image sources on this page allows you do to anything with them! I will continue to update this post as new source for Icons are found.
Note: While Visual Basic 5.0/6.0 and Visual Basic.NET 2002/2003 may come with icons, and VB 2005/2008 as well, you might want something alittle more unique.
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Added 08-27-2010
Icon Archive - There are quite a few Icons available at this site. It has a huge mixture of Completely Free-Royalty Free icons, Free for Non-Commercial, and Pay Icons. The site is organized pretty well and is easy to get the icon you want. Just remember to look at the license to decide if the license will fulfill your needs or not. Be sure to check out the rest of this page. Enjoy!
Added 06-12-10
FREE Stock Icons - This site has a huge list of icons that are not only Free but is also Royalty Free (RF, Basically means you don't have to pay them anything if they are used in a money making application or whatever.). The free versions has possible limited image sizes and file formats. All of the free images are at least jpeg which is a perfectly fine format for most people. You can easily convert them to .ico if you want. If you want many different sizes and multiple image formats you can Sign-Up for a account for a certain fee depending on what kind of access you want. Still the 100% free icon images were good quality and had a few different sizes and came in jpeg and .png formats. Most sizes has a Watermark but I think the 48x48 has no Watermark at all and is fully compatible and free for your applications! The ones I downloaded at least...
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FamFam Mini Icons - These are about 144 various icons that you can use for ANY purpose. Completely royalty FREE and are actually good quality as well.
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FamFam Flag Icons - This link has alot of various Flag based icons and images. These are completely Royalty FREE and you can use them in ANY type of application, whether its free, shareware or even commercial.
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FamFam Silk Icons - These are probably close to the BEST Icons you can get that are COMPLETELY FREE with absolutely NO limitations and Royalty Free. He has available more than 700! 16x16 Icons in the download. High Quality as well!
Note: If you find these FamFamFam based icons useful and you want to support him in his work. It would be good if you could send him any amount, especially since he lets you do whatever you want with his icons. He has a link to donate on most of the download pages.
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Farsight Icon Pack by deviantART - While they do not cost anything, the license does NOT allow them to be used in a commercial based application.
There are alot of other various application icons/images at deviantART as well. Click here to goto the main page...
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I will add other Icon and/or Image sources when I get the time and continue to find more. I do hope you found some icons you can use. Have fun!
Jason
Popularity: 51% [?]
Topics: - (.5.0/6.0), - (.5.0/6.0), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), .All VB (Related to All), .All VB (Related to All) | 9 Comments »
Major Site Downtime
By Jason | August 8, 2010
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ...
As you may or may not have known, this Visual Basic for FREE (vbforfree.com) website was down almost a week. My web host apparantly were moving to new servers and it did not go well. The host btw is Netfirms. Many of their customers were affected. Unfortunately the way they dealt with these problems I recommend you do NOT use them as a web host. They didn't keep in touch with me. I sent many support tickets and only got two replys and one of them didn't say much of anything.
I do have a backup server @ vbcodesource.info in case this main site is down and you can't access it. But the backup site is missing some of the latest articles and doesn’t have all of the comments or features that the original site had. Its better than nothing I guess?
Anyways, I just wanted to give you a update. Hopefully things will get worked out.
PS: I also want to mention that the website engine is way past do for some low level updates. So I will eventually have to update the entire site and could have a lot of downtime. So try to remember to go to vbcodesource.info if that hapens and you needed to see a article or something.
Jason H.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Topics: - (.5.0/6.0), - (.5.0/6.0), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - .All VB (Related to All) | No Comments »
Check if the Operating System is 32 Bit or 64 Bit
By Jason | May 28, 2010
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ...I've seen many questions posted about how to check if the operating system the user is running is 64 Bit supported or just 32-Bit capable. 32 Bit is also referred to as x86 and 64-Bit is referred to as x64.
I've seen various options people have come up with like checking WOW64 emulation , ect... I'm not going to get into all of them. From what I understand those methods may not be 100%. So far in MY EXPERIENCE my version has been 100%. That is NOT to say that its perfect or has no flaws. Its just I have not had any problems, yet...
Anyways, its a very simple solution. Use the Windows built-in WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) objects and features. Using WMI is quite easy with .NET. I unfortunately won't be providing VB 5 or Visual Basic 6.0 source code. But the basics are still the same. I think VB classic can get support by referencing the WMI Scripting Library or using some API's.
It looks like Microsoft said the method i'm using it not available on Windows XP. But i've had NO problems so far with running it on XP. Maybe XP needs Service Pack 2 or 3? Although Windows XP 64 Bit has a very small user base, it is possible to run into one. But as i've said, so far I have seen no problems. If you have any definitely let me know and give me the details. It definitely appears to work flawlessly using Vista and Windows 7. 64 Bit operating systems became VERY popular with Vista and especially Windows 7 due to ram being so cheap and if you wanted to address more than the 32 Bit limit of 4GB you needed to have an os that can do 64 Bit addressing and a cpu capable of using AMD's 64 Bit extensions. Intel CPU's actually use AMD64 technology for their 64 Bit processors (Less Itanium)).
Anyways, first of all in DotNET you want to add a Reference to the: System.Managment class. This will provide features to access wmi classes and features with minimal coding on your part. Of interest is the Management Class and the Management Object.
Below is the complete WMI based code that is used to get the Windows info...
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'
'I know this code is not very elegant. Feel free to spiffy it up if you want to. This will make it easier to get any WMI based info. Just provide the Object and Path for the info your interested in.
Public Function getWMIInfo(ByVal wmiObjectInfo As String, ByVal wmiRelativePath As String) As String
Try
'
'Give it something to report in case something wrong happens.
getWMIInfo = "Nothing!"'
Dim wmiClass As New System.Management.ManagementClass
Dim wmiObject As New System.Management.ManagementObject
wmiClass.Path.RelativePath = wmiRelativePath
'
'This will go through each item in the requested info. I only care about the 1st for the most part but remeber that each instance could have different values.
For Each wmiObject In wmiClass.GetInstances
getWMIInfo = (wmiObject(wmiObjectInfo))
'
'I only want the first instance.
Return getWMIInfo
Next
Catch exc As Exception
Return exc.Message
End Try
End Function
Now all thats left to do is provide the object and path your interested in. The code below will throw a Messagebox with the message "32-bit" if your OS is x86 or "64-bit" if your OS is x64.
MsgBox(getWMIInfo("OSArchitecture", "Win32_OperatingSystem"))
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Thats all there is to it! Like I said, so far its worked fine for me. Thats not to say there won't be problems though. This way is the way I would recommend over the others i've seen if it doesn't turn out to be highly inaccurate. Definitely, Let me know of any problems you run into! Anyways have fun! Jason
Popularity: 17% [?]
Topics: - (.5.0,6.0), - (.5.0/6.0), - (.5.0/6.0), - (.5.0/6.0), - (.NET 05/08 Only), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - .All VB (Related to All), .All VB (Related to All), .All VB (Related to All) | 2 Comments »
Updated: USB using Visual Basic.NET and VB 6.0
By Jason | March 4, 2010
(9 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5) Loading ...Update: I changed the title and some other things because they might have mislead thinking that this article gives you the in's and out of USB programming.
The purpose of this post is simply to let you know of some codes/librairies available to help with usb programming like detecting when a usb device has been added/removed, which the .net based class helps with, ect...
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Visual Basic 6.0; VB 5.0
The first library is for Visual Basic 5 and 6.0 and is provided by Intel (Intel is the main inventer of USB as well) and includes various bas/modules for use in your applications. I've had this link and files on my vbcodesource.com page for years but now that I found a .net library that can do alittle something with usb devices I figured it would be worth making a post for both of them. BTW, these VB 6.0 USB modules do Much more than the below .net library.
Click here for the Main Intel page with the downloads and tutorial...
Visual Basic.NET Compatible Class Library
Strolling through some of the latest updates at thecodeproject.com I noticed someone made a USB library using C# for detecing the attachment and detachment of usb devices. He provides the source code, compiled class, and a demo app with the usb library in action. If you simply want the class to make a reference to, then download the source code version. Then under the Bin/Release directory you will see the 'USBClassLibrary.Dll' which is what you want to make a reference to.
Click here for the main USB Library page...
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Although I don't provide any examples or anything, hopefully this will at least give you a nice jump start on getting your USB basics taken care of. Have Fun!
Jason
Popularity: 29% [?]
Topics: - (.5.0/6.0), - (.5.0/6.0), - (.5.0/6.0), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - .All VB (Related to All), .All VB (Related to All) | 2 Comments »
“How Do I” Videos for Visual Studio 2010 and Release Candidate Available
By Jason | February 10, 2010
(6 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5) Loading ...As expected Microsoft is already starting to release some new videos related to VB 2010 and will continue to add new video's/codes to highlight new features in the new IDE/Framework. Also, Release Candidate1 of Visual Studio 2010 has been released. Check out this link if you want to check out RC1.
Below are some highlights from the Microsoft HowDoI post...
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If you haven’t seen these yet, various members of the languages team have released some How Do I videos on Visual Studio 2010 including new language features in Visual Basic 10 and C# 4.
- How Do I: Use Autoimplemented Properties in Visual Basic?
- How Do I: Use Implicit Line Continuation in Visual Basic 10?
- How Do I: Use Highlight References in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE?
- How Do I: Use Code Snippets in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE?
- How Do I: Use Generate from Usage in Visual Studio 2010?
- How Do I: Enhance Performance in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE when Editing VB Code?
- How Do I: Step with The Debugger in Visual Studio 2010?
- How Do I: Use Named and Optional Parameters in C# 4.0?
- How Do I: Use COM Interop and Office in C# 4.0?
Also make sure to check out the VS 2010 code samples and walkthroughs.
Enjoy!
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If you want to check them out, goto this link to the main post page. Take care! 
Jason
Popularity: 28% [?]
Topics: - (.5.0/6.0), - (.5.0/6.0), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - .All VB (Related to All), .All VB (Related to All) | No Comments »
Some Free Training and Tutorials from AppDev
By Jason | October 13, 2009
(11 votes, average: 3.82 out of 5) Loading ...I've posted on this site before some free tutorials/training courses from AppDev and now they are offering three more for free. I'm fairly sure that these have not been posted here before. The three free tutorials they are offering right now is Not directly related to VB.NET. They are more in-line with ASP.NET and Visual Studio, Sharepoint, ect... Either way it may be worth it for you to check them out. All you really have to do is login/signup for your account and download.
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Free ASP.NET and AJax Training - Download Page
Basic Overview...
| Start learning Microsoft® ASP.NET or AJAX with award-winning training from AppDev! Your free training is taken directly from our actual courses, and features step-by-step presentations and code walkthroughs by our Microsoft MVP and expert instructors. Most courses also include extras like: | |||
| aHands-on lab exercises | aSample Code | aPrintable courseware | aPre/post exams |
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Free Visual Studio 2008 Training - Download Page
Basic Overview...
| Start learning Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 with award-winning training from AppDev! Your free training is taken directly from our actual courses, and features step-by-step presentations and code walkthroughs by our Microsoft MVP and expert instructors. Most courses also include extras like: | |||
| aHands-on lab exercises | aSample Code | aPrintable courseware | aPre/post exams |
----------------------
Free Sharepoint Training - Download Page
Basic Overview...
| Start learning Microsoft® SharePoint® 2007 with award-winning training from AppDev! Your free training is taken directly from our actual courses, and features step-by-step presentations and code walkthroughs by our Microsoft MVP and expert instructors. Most courses also include extras like: | |||
| aHands-on lab exercises | aSample Code | aPrintable courseware | aPre/post exams |
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Thats about it for now. I have NOT seen any of these tutorials so I don't know how good/bad the content is. If you watch them feel free to leave a comment with your opinion about the courses. Take Care...
Jason
Popularity: 46% [?]
Topics: - (.5.0/6.0), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - (.NET All + 05/08), - .All VB (Related to All), .All VB (Related to All) | No Comments »
