Before we begin, be forewarned that WMI encompasses A LOT of material and this will be a long article as is required to cover the material at even a high level. I will also preface the article with the fact that many of the diagrams and references included herein were derived from “The Windows Scripting […]

In this 3rd and final article in my Shell Scripting series we will study, through example, methods of creating simple useful shell scripts. Some of the topics I will cover will be review of the previous two articles, others will cover some new things. The idea is to take what you have already […]

This article will focus on an important part of Shell Scripting – Redirection and Piping. Simply put, redirection allows you to use the output of one command as the input for another. This allows you to perform tasks such as keyword searching a directory listing, or making decisions based on the content of […]

This article, we will be dealing with ways to have your program perform the same task a number (not necessarily known at the time you start programming) of times.
For… Next…
Using the For.. Next statement, you can set code to run a predefined number of times. As an example, let’s build a small application that asks […]

If you have worked with any flavor of Unix you have no doubt encountered the shell script. Shell scripts are one of the most important aspects of a Unix system. In fact, virtually all operations that take place on a Unix computer are accomplished via shell scripts. Shell scripts can range in complexity from simple […]

Welcome back to our series of articles about Visual Basic programming. Last article explained the basics of using variables and constants, which were (as we saw) little areas of memory in which we could store values, in order to quickly perform alterations on the values, or just temporarily maintain values, in order to make sure […]

In the last article, we took a look at what the term ‘event-driven’ means. We saw that Visual Basic will only process code after a certain event takes place, and we saw a few tips that can make your programming-life easier. We also started off with a very basic calculator program.
This article, I’ll explain what […]

Last week we took a look at some of the standard controls that come with Visual Basic. We saw that we can change the way a control looks, by fiddling around with it’s properties.
This week, we will look at some other possibilities of controls; events. We will build a very basic program, and I’ll offer […]

ADO is Microsoft’s latest way of making it easier for us developers to retrieve and work with databases. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a SQL-guru to use ADO; however, some basics would be nice.
SQL Basics
SQL (Structured Query Language) is a ‘programming’ language used for querying data within Relational Databases. The most basic command […]

Welcome to the third Article in our Visual Basic section. Last week we installed Visual Basic. This week we will be looking at the environment that you are presented with when you start Visual Basic, and set a few options that will prepare Visual Basic to meet our demands.
Let’s run Visual Basic for the very […]