Visual Basic .NET General FAQ

Question

I am excited to announce the availability of the following FAQ paper which lists some of the questions frequently asked by the Visual Basic .NET General forum members. Although it’s far from complete, but this is the first attempt our forum support team has been trying to make to help development community members find the answers to their questions much easier and fast, and it’s always the top priority for our team to make the MSDN forum a good place for developers to ask questions, talk about technologies etc. With time goes on, this thread will be enhanced with more FAQs and content, so we really welcome and appreciate any feedback or suggestion on how to improve it.

On behalf of the whole forum support team, we owe sincere thanks to Deborah Kurata, Jamie Plenderleith, Rob Teixeira and Hector Minaya, who provided excellent and insightful technical review comments on this paper. And finally I want to thank all the Visual Basic .NET forum members who actively participate in this forum and help other.

General

1.     How does CLR load assembly?

2.     What is the difference between ByVal and ByRef?

3.     How do I inherit an existing control (user control) and add it to the ToolBox?

4.     How do I create a .NET component as a DLL and distribute it?

5.     How can I improve the performance of a Windows Forms application?

6.     How do I localize the Windows application?

7.     What are some useful tips about properly implementing multithreading in a VB.NET application?

8.     How do I redirect the standard I/O of a process?

9.     How do I implement Serial COM Port communication?

10.  How do I associate a File Extension with my application?

11.  How do I embed/play a Flash file (.swf) on WinForm?

12.  How do I play audio/video files in VB.NET?

13.  How do I save a web page in VB.NET?

14.  How do I open/view Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) in a VB.NET Form?

15.  How do I retrieve hardware device information on a machine via WMI?

16.  How do I draw an image respectively on the PictureBox control and Image object?

17.  How do I convert between an image object and Byte Array?

18.  How do I resize an image by the same scale?

P/Invoke

19.  What is Platform Invoke Service (P/Invoke)?

20.  How do I register a hotkey in VB.NET

21.  How do I setup the mouse hook and keyboard hook?

COM Interop

22.     What is COM Interop?

23.     How do I call/use a VB6 dll in VB.NET application?

24.     How do I use Word Automation in VB.NET?

25.     How do I use Excel Automation in VB.NET?

WebBrowser

26.     How do I automate a web page (e.g. retrieve page text, login website, search, click button or hyperlink) via WebBrowser?

27.     How do I create my own Web Browser?

28.     How do I add Favorites/Bookmark features and Tabbed feature to my own web browser?

 

ClickOnce and Setup Deployment

29.     How do I publish/deploy the WinForms application including a database file via ClickOnce?

30.     Where is the location of ClickOnce Installation and what are the restrictions of ClickOnce Deployment?

31.     How do I add/remove application shortcuts from the Startup folder or Desktop?

ADO.NET

32.     How do I create a Login Verification routine (Login Form) and make the password case sensitive?

33.     How do I store BLOB data (e.g. image, document) into the database?

34.     How do I make a basic Data Access application (Next, Previous, First, Last, Update, Delete, Insert, Save)?

35.     How do I search and filter records in the database?

36.     Why doesn’t the database seem to update when restarting an application after some changes?

37.     How do I make a parameterized query in the database with VB.NET?

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