Problem with Microsoft Internet Controls (at least in VB 6)

Does this error sound familiar?
File not found: "C:\WINDOWS\system32\ieframe.dll\1"

Well, this appears to be an IE 7 issue...


In order to fix this issue,
Open the Components Window, and click on browse
Goto the system32 folder and browse for shdocvw.dll, then hit Open
Automatically, it will replace the Microsoft Internet Controls with shdocvw.dll instead of ieframe.dll.
This should solve the issue...


The explanation,
The following explanation is based on my analysis, and may be wrong
Before version 7, Microsoft had the correct resources needed to use the control "WebBrowser" inside ieframe.dll, but after releasing version 7, they had split it into two files (at least), ieframe.dll and shdocvw.dll, and in order to use the WebBrowser you need the shdocvw.dll instead...



Hope that helps,


Best Regards
Firas S Assaad

How not to let the System Date Format control you

I once had a problem with the System Date format, because the data that i was playing with had the date in MM/DD/YYYY format and in the same time, the date was recorded in string format.

So whenever i wanted to use the value of the Date String (ex: comparing dates, adding/subtracting days, etc) i had to convert the date string to a date value.
This will work fine only when the System Date Format is MM/DD/YYYYBut what if the user changed the format to, for example, MMMM/YY
That will completely screw up the data, especially if you want to store the date results back to string!

So the main problem with the date in my situation, was how to convert a string date to a date type without letting the system date interfere.
After looking around and gathered enough information to know more about the capability of Globalization, i added the pieces together and got to the idea where i would use a culture that works only for my program without interfering with the system culture.

First i include the following:

Imports System.Globalization
Imports System.Threading

Then i will tell VB to create a new culture for me (that will only affect the current running program and has no effect on the system's culture):

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = New CultureInfo("", False)

The "" part is the place where you normally define the culture name.In my case the only culture that has the date format exactly as MM/DD/YYYY was the culture "nothing" or ""...
I will explain in a different post how to know each cultures date, time, currency, etc formats...

The False part is for useUserOverride parameter, as it is called i dont want to use the override of the users settings!

Just by executing the last line, the whole program will now depend on the the specified culture (Thanks to Threading in vb.net)


Hope this helps people who got frustrated (like me) trying to deal with such or similar situation...


Any questions/comments are welcome!


Best Regards
Firas S Assaad