VB Forum / General / July 2008

? How did you know to look here ?

There are many resources for VB6.

http://vb.mvps.org/
http://vbnet.mvps.org/index.html?welcome.htm
http://www.vbaccelerator.com/home/index.asp
http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/default.asp?lngWId=1

Just to name a few.
Have fun and do not stress too much.

Hi, Fran.

Instructors go about things in different ways. Sometimes they
provide a text book and expect you to read it. That usually works
fairly well. If they do NOT provide a text book, then the students
rely upon the instructor to teach properly, according to ways well
established within the teaching community. They almost always rely
upon a text book which provides 90% of the information needed to
complete things.

One other thing an instructor expects you to do and learn involves
learning the environment in which you work. This only occurs when
the student starts playing around with the environment and then
asks the instructor about things that give problems. That ends up
as a problem sometimes, especially for me, because I tend to read
the books but forget to ask questions. And I only forget because
I did NOT write the question down anywhere and bring a list of
questions to class.

So the BEST thing to do, when playing around with the Visual Basic
environment (the VB IDE), literally keep a pen and blank piece of
paper handy to write down questions. This helps you in two ways,

1) Sometimes by writing a question down, the answer pops into my
  mind. When this occurs, it provides an established means for
  recalling the problem and answer at a later date.
2) It helps one remember the question so if you forget to bring the
  paper to class, the mind ends up likely to recall the question.
  This particularly affects me and I only relate it because I need
  to hand-write things down, otherwise it all ends up put away for
  another day and I forget about it until some day where out of the
  blue it pops into my head when working on something totally un-
  related.

So learn by doing. For instance, start a blank project, add one of
the Microsoft Common Controls. Take notice of the components placed
into the ToolBar at the bottom of the IDE. Then drag and drop one
control at a time. Hold the mouse over the controls to get a small
description pop-up. Everyone learns the same way, by doing.

Something, if you have not already done it, might involve adding a
StatusBar control to a blank form. The StatusBar control exists as
one of the Microsoft Common Controls, so just hold your mouse over
each control in the ToolBox until the word, StatusBar, pops up.
Then drag and drop that control onto a blank form and start playing
around with it. You want to learn how to position the control on
the form, you also want to learn how to add panels to the StatusBar
control and then just play around with the different type of things
that you can display inside of each panel.

All controls pretty much work in the same way. Hope this helps. One
other way to learn involves asking questions. Feel free to ask more
questions.