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Visual Basic 6 "Dim" Days

Sorry if you mistook this to be a Microsoft VB6 event which was coming up. :)

If you are a VB6 fan and feel that you have been over-shadowed or drowned in the world of the “uncivilized semi-colon” languages (as Raj calls it), check this out - Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Run.

This reminds me of the VB6 projects that I had done. It was about 3.5 years back when I thought of learning Visual Basic 6. I purchased the Visual Basic 6 Bible which is no way a recommended book for beginers. I tried to follow the samples given in the book but was not completely successful with it. After a short term course, I set out writing small applications including an Astrology software, IVRS Voicemail retrival system and stuff like that.

I had a very good time working on iCafe' Manager - an exhaustive Internet Cafe' management appllication which Sharath and I had done as a part of our academic project, for which we ended-up with an ultra-cool UI (3D bars, shadows, animated menus, etc.) . Thanks to Photoshop and the Visual Basic timer control. We had used almost 10 timer controls to animate the scrolling of menus and other parts of the UI which could be hidden/minimized. It was more of fun doing this though we didnt get much time to optimize the code we wrote.

I did some serious development using VB6 for my final semester project (BCA) which was a ready-to-market 'Email Management over SMS' suite. It was targetted at corporates who wanted to give their employees Email access on the move (when GPRS wasnt as affordable as they are now). This was the first time did some serious development with Winsock (in contrast to winsock chat applications where one usually starts off). Socket based communication with POP and SMTP servers are not always straight-forward. Thanks to Kurian and JK of Xtend Technologies, Cochin, I used their XSMS platform to communicate with the GSM world. I very badly needed to use multi-threading when I was developing this but a VB6 developer would know what that means. Thanks to .NET. Life has changed.

Offlate I have been trying to experiment with the Microsoft Windows Embedded Shared Source Tools - Bluetooth library. I have been facing some referencing problems with it, but will be out of it soon.