ListBox - Select Multiple Items

I've seen quite a number of forums posts asking how to get the selected items of a listbox when the listbox selection mode has been changed to allow for multiple items to be selected. It's actually pretty simple to do in .net.

What you need to do is to loop through the SelectedItems collection to get to the items that have been selected. The list box also has a property called SelectedIndices that you can use.

Download the zip file to see the sample code on this which also shows you how to add a name-value pair item like we used to do in VB6.

Date Delimiter for Access and SQL Server

Microsoft's two most popular databases (MS Access & MS SQL Server) implement date delimiter differntly. This makes it hard to write queries that are compatible with both.

What I normally do this in situation would be creating a flag to indicate which database is being used and use the appropriate delimiter as follow:

Dim bAccessInUse As Boolean
Dim sSql As String

Function DateOut(byVal TheDate as String) as String
If bAccessInUse Then
Return "#" & TheDate & "#"
Else Return "'" & TheDate & "'"
End If
End Function

sSQL = "Select * From tablename Where date_col=" & DateOut(the_date)

If you use this function throughout your code and set and the flag by checking the connection string, you should have no problem making it run against either database without any modification.

Simple Way To Add Watermark

Here's a pretty simple way to add watermark to your image in VB6.

Private Sub Form_Load()
Dim Message As String
With Picture1
.AutoRedraw = True
With .Font
.Name = "Arial"
.Size = 18
.Bold = True
End With
Message = "Hello World"
.CurrentX = (.Width - .TextWidth(Message)) / 2
.CurrentY = (.Height - .TextHeight(Message)) / 2
End With
Picture1.Print Message
End Sub

File System Object

The FileSystemObject object library, which is part of the Microsoft Scripting Runtime library (Scrrun.dll) provides an object-oriented approach to directories & files manipulation. For instance, system folder creation and deletion is one common task your code will need to perform. Naturally, before you attempt to either create or delete a folder, your procedure will want to determine if it exists. The FileSystemObject library provides the perfect solution.

First, you'll need to set a project reference to the Scrrun.dll. The FileSystemObject is the top-level object within the file hierarchy, and you create an instance of it just like you would with any other object variable:

VB6

Set oFSO = New Scripting.FileSystemObject

ASP

Set oFSO = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

The FolderExists() method returns True if the folder exists and False if not. The CreateFolder() and DeleteFolder() methods create and delete folders respectively. All three of these methods require the full path to the folder in question. The following code shows how to use these methods (assuming you've set a reference to the Microsoft Scripting Runtime library):

If Not oFSO.FolderExists("C:\Test") Then
Call oFSO.CreateFolder "C:\Test"
End If
Call oFSO.DeleteFolder "C:\Test"
Set oFSO = Nothing