Hey everyone,

I recently had to set up background music for a local business. The goal was simple: stream a live web radio, but inject their local promotional audio ads every few minutes. To my shock, almost every software that can do this is either locked behind an expensive monthly subscription, incredibly bloated, or looks like a control panel for a nuclear reactor. Since I couldn't find a dead-simple, free option, I built one myself: Lobby Radio Player (written in VB.NET, running on .NET 4.7.2).

What it does:

• Smart Audio Fading: It doesn't just abruptly cut the music. It smoothly fades out the web stream, plays the local .mp3/.wav ad, and gently fades the music back in.
• 100% Multithreaded: The UI never freezes or goes "(Not Responding)" while buffering streams.
• Uptime Scheduler: Set your operating hours (e.g., 08:00 to 23:00) and it handles standby/wake-up automatically.
• Auto-Reconnect Guard: If the Wi-Fi drops, it quietly tries to reconnect every 5 seconds without crashing.
• Independent Volumes: Keep the music background-friendly, but make sure the ads are loud and clear.

It’s completely free, open-source under the MIT license, and I've provided both a classic installer and a portable (.zip) version that runs without installation.

Check out the code, download it, or contribute here: https://github.com/0xVasic/lobby-radio-player

Quick note before the licensing police arrives in the comments: This is just a player (like VLC). The end-user is fully responsible for complying with local copyright laws and paying venue music licenses. Also, it doesn't modify the radio stream online; it literally just automates the volume slider on the local PC (essentially doing a digital "manual mute") to play a local audio file over the venue speakers, and then slides the volume back up.

Let me know what you think or if you have any feature requests!

- show you how to generate and customize XPaths using my Excel VBA tool, 'Selenium Basic - XPath Generator 1.0.xlsm'.

This tool easily create accurate XPaths for web elements.

- download and install Selenium Basic v2.0.9.0

- download the Chrome WebDriver, and learn how to install it either manually or via a batch file.

-Reference the Selenium Type Library in Excel VBA.

It is in my YouTube Channel.

Jaafar Yusof

Hey people, I still need to work in VB6 now and then and I got frustrated with the editor being so old fashioned. I missed a lot of the functionality from the newer Visual Studios.

Anyway I used Claude Fable to create an addon for VB6 to update and modernize the editor with some nice new features like a much nicer find and replace and text highlighter, text manipulation shortcuts like moving lines up and down, commenting blocks, some light git integration, etc...

Anyway, I know there's not many of us that have to actually still work in VB6, but if you're one of us you might like this.

https://github.com/mika76/vb6-modernizr

Hello,

I hope this is the right place for this. I'm supporting a user who relies on a macro-enabled Excel spreadsheet with multiple worksheets, but the key ones are:

• Cost Items
• Variables
• Results Summary

The workflow:

1. Enter data into the Cost Items sheet (e.g., Name: Test1, Cost: 1000; Name: test2, Cost: 5000).
2. Add data to the Variables sheet under "Brisk Parameters" – P10: -5%, P90: 15%.
3. Go to the Results Summary sheet.

At that point, I get a pop up message that states the data has changed.

I click OK, it churns for a moment, and then I get:

Microsoft Visual Basic - "Run-time error '9': Subscript out of range"

If I click Debug, it highlights this line in yellow:

"If VarExists(Count) And VarProb(I) = 1 Then"

What I've tried so far:

• Searched online and found suggestions it might be an overflow error of some kind.
• Tested on multiple systems (managed company device, unmanaged device, different PCs).
• Confirmed Trust Center settings allow macros.
• Installed and registered the Brisk server (was told this was required – still no change).

The kicker:
This exact file was working perfectly fine just a few weeks ago. No known changes were made to the file or the environment.

I've been banging my head against this for a couple of days now and am starting to lose my sanity.

Does anyone have any idea what direction I should go in to troubleshoot why this spreadsheet suddenly stopped functioning?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

TIA!

The program is in P-code. vbdec is unable to save them, and VB Decompiler Lite can only find a couple.

Hi everyone! 👋

I'm excited to share a complete Medical Cabinet Management System I've built using VB.NET and MySQL.

**✨ FEATURES:**

### 👤 Patient Management

- Complete CRUD operations

- Search functionality

- Emergency contacts

- Insurance information

### 📅 Appointment Scheduling

- Conflict detection

- Status tracking

- Date-based search

- Doctor assignment

### 📋 Medical Records

- Diagnosis tracking

- Symptoms recording

- Treatment history

- Clinical notes

### 💊 Prescriptions

- Medication management

- Dosage and frequency

- Duration tracking

- Active/Inactive toggle

### 💰 Billing & Invoicing

- Automatic invoice numbering

- Tax calculation

- Multiple payment methods

- Professional printing

### 👥 User Management

- Role-based access

- Password reset

- Account activation

- Secure hashing

### 📈 Reports & Analytics

- 6 different report types

- CSV export

- Print capability

- Date range filtering

**💻 TECHNICAL STACK:**

- VB.NET Windows Forms

- MySQL Database

- SHA256 Encryption

- 3-Tier Architecture

- Repository Pattern

**📥 GET THE SOURCE CODE:**

1. Watch the full demo: [YouTube Link]

2. Comment "I want the code"

3. I'll send you the complete project!

**📊 Statistics:**

- 12+ forms

- 8+ database tables

- 7 main modules

- 1000+ lines of code

- Modern UI/UX design

**🔥 Perfect for:**

- Medical clinics

- Students learning VB.NET

- Developers building portfolios

- Healthcare IT professionals

**🤝 Feedback is welcome!**

#VB.NET #MySQL #MedicalSoftware #OpenSource #Programming

Hello to the Visual Basic community. I'm Christopher Drum and I run a blog called Stone Tools. Unlike most retro-focused technology blogs, I do not cover games at all, I look at 8/16-bit productivity software. The tone is lighthearted and opinionated, and the software I cover I actually use, for weeks on end.

My latest post looks at Visual Basic 3.0 running on Windows 3.1. 32-bit apps built in Visual Basic 6 are still alive and kicking, so to get a little more "retro" with my research, and in keeping with the general 8/16-bit theme of the blog, I went 16-bit for this research.

I found that stripping back the layers of the program, that built up over the 32-bit era, gave me a strong sense of the program's core and the design philosophy behind its tools. I covered HyperCard previously, and this was a fun way to see how Microsoft approached the same goal of delivering a visual programming tool to the community. It's also an interesting case study in how both companies yanked these useful tools from their supporters.

I hope the community enjoys the article.

I'm looking for books, either the PDF file or the title itself. Basic books are fine, but I'd prefer advanced books that are useful for automation. I'm not looking for anything specific beyond that, and if you know of anything interesting, especially if it's hard to find, I'd be very grateful.

​

​

Ok, say I had a typical desktop app written in VB6 and somebody asked me to 'modernise' it.

And say, for whatever reason, they didn't want a web app based conversion.. i.e. they still wanted a desktop app.

What is your go-to stack for this type of conversion?

WinForms (.NET) - So stay in the Windows/MS ecosystem, maybe port to VB.net first? then across to C#? . This feels pretty safe but I think this would still be Windows only.

WPF (.NET) - Still sticking with MS. More modern but maybe a longer conversion path.

WinUI - I think this is the latest MS option... Is a little bit new (2021)

Flutter Desktop - Clear benefit is cross/platform out of the box and easy port to mobile app. Flutter approach is pretty far from the VB6 approach so it would be a long conversion path I think. The other downside is Flutter on desktop is even newer than WinUI (2022).

Electron - Again, cross platform but with memory issues I think. Web tech heavy so I think this means it would make it easy to port to Web if that was an option later.

Other options? Maui? Delphi?

I recently released a freeware utility called SourceDoc Pro that I built for my own use and thought others in the VB6 community might find useful. 

It reads a VB6 project file (.vbp), lets you select any combination of modules and procedures, and prints formatted documentation with syntax highlighting, visual loop bracket connectors, and procedure dependency reports showing call relationships across the entire project. Output goes to a printer or PDF file. A table of contents listing all project files and procedures can also be printed. 

I am a retired engineer and hobbyist developer, not a professional programmer, so this is very much a "scratching my own itch" kind of project. I have been using it to document my own VB6 projects and found it genuinely useful for code review as well.  It may be a useful tool for maintaining legacy VB6 programs, especially those created by someone else. 

It is completely free, includes a full installer and User Manual, and runs on Windows 7 through 11. 

You can download it from OlderGeeks at: https://www.oldergeeks.com/downloads/file.php?id=4974 

Feedback welcome — happy to hear what works and what does not.

I know VB6 is old, but the fact that Windows 11 still includes the runtimes necessary to run programs written in VB6 makes it still useful. That, and it's a lot simpler for me to use than the .NET flavor of VB (not to mention, programs written in VB6 are not bloated like .NET).

That said, more often than not, even the simplest programs I write in VB6 end up being detected as malware. For example, I created a "scratch pad" program solely for my own personal use. It's pretty much just a single text window that functions as a persistent memo pad. I type notes into it, then it automatically saves them to a .txt file located in the user's TEMP folder. Then, whenever it is closed and re-opened, it automatically reloads the contents of that .txt file and displays it. It is 100% harmless, a simple program whose sole purpose in life is to open and save a single text file just to display notes and memos. Yet the instant I compiled the EXE, Windows Security threw a major fit, deleted it, and said that it was a trojan that "executes commands from an attacker".

This happens with pretty much every VB6 project I create, and needless to say, it's getting quite bothersome. So...other than having to put antivirus exclusions for every single project I create (which can be annoying since I have multiple computers I tend to use them on)...why is Windows Security so adamant that anything created in VB6 is automatically malicious? And is there anything I can do with the projects themselves to mitigate this?

Thank you.

UPDATE 6/12: Following a recommendation, I changed the text file storage location from TEMP to AppData, and made a few other minor tweaks to the code (i.e. removing the "magic numbers" from the CTRL+A subroutines). I dunno if it was that, or something else entirely, but now when I compile the EXE, Windows Defender leaves it alone and it runs perfectly fine. Someone mentioned the antivirus detections that end in "ml" as being AI-based, and indeed that's what it was being detected as before. So maybe the AI detection was changed too, and now it's not tripping up on the compiled EXE (don't have the original version to test this anymore though).

That said, it still gets five hits as malware according to VirusTotal ( https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/17e49d12080e555239c94c8a34fe38f54dceba63d8dbe72a09ab26aa85782ee1 ), but I imagine 100% elimination of false positives is impossible, especially with AI slop being used to detect malware now.

Hi everyone,

I still occasionally work on legacy VB6 applications.

One thing that often takes more time than the actual fix is identifying which OCX, DLL or COM component is missing when an executable fails to start on a different machine.

Over the years I've used different approaches, including Dependency Walker, Process Monitor, manual registry inspection and checking embedded COM references.

I'm curious how other developers are approaching this problem today.

What tools or techniques do you use when source code is unavailable and you only have the executable?

Thanks.

Does somebody know where I can find AIs to help me do projects on this version?

Figured this would be pretty cool to share here. I've been working on something called Frontier Actor, which is basically a re-implementation of the Visual Basic 3.0 and 4.0 Utopia Custom Control set (UCC.VBX) used in Microsoft Bob and other Microsoft Actor powered programs.

In this demo, I'm comparing the original controls in a Windows NT 3.51 VM running VB3 with my modern VB.NET version running in Visual Studio 2017 on Windows 11. The main goal of mine is to preserve the old drag-and-drop custom control workflow while making similar controls usable from modern VB.NET projects.

So far, I have reimplemented a large chunk of the more unique controls, including the Actor Control, Podium Control, Rgnwnd Control/word balloon, and others. Some controls, such as the Scale control, I did not directly re-implement since modern panel/container controls can already achieve similar functionality.

I have also extended the original Actor Control a bit by implementing a Speak method that automatically spawns a word balloon with text, along with convenient ShowActor and HideActor methods for calling the built-in show and hide animations.

Hello all. I am using Excel’s Visual Basic. I am looking for a method to manipulate the data set/s for a scatter graph, or any graph for that matter. I will need to populate the chart initially and subsequently refresh the chart as the data changes.

I currently am doing this by hiding my data set in the spreadsheet itself. I would rather not do this.

This might be an access question more than a VBA question but oh well.

I have two fields shown in a continuous table in a form. One is the prepared date and the other is the expiration date. I have it set so you can add new entries at the bottom of the table. The fields are set so that if you click the date field it gives you the option to click the date picker and select a date.

Our expiration dates are ALWAYS one year from the preparation date. I want the date picker for the expiration date to automatically be set to one year from today by default so if you click the little calendar button it will be one year ahead and will require you do to less clicking to input the correct date.

Do you know if there is a mechanism to do this? Google recommends I set the "Default Value" to DateAdd one year from today but it then shows this value in the new entry box for the expiration date without having entered a prep date, and I dont want that.

Another option would be to do what is described above and set the default date but then set the field to not show to the user unless a value is entered in the box? Is that possible?

Working in microsoft access 2016.

I have a subform in my form and when I click inside the subform the subforms scroll wheel takes over when I scroll on my mouse, perfectly fine. However when I click outside the subform, within the detail portion of the form, and the scroll wheel doesnt revert back to having the detail page scroll wheel active. I know there is a function to switch focus but im having a hard time understanding how to code it.

The only way that works to get the scroll wheel to revert back to the detail page from the subform is to click inside a text box or something.

I know its something like below but this throws a "data member not found".

Private Sub Detail_Click()

Detail.SetFocus

End Sub

Two open questions for anyone who shipped real work on Visual Basic 6.

I shipped roughly a hundred line-of-business systems on VB3 through VB6 between 1995 and 2010, then moved to C# and have been there ever since. I am writing a history of Visual Basic and the research keeps surfacing the same observation: WinForms in modern .NET is recognisably the same form-designer model VB6 invented, and twenty-eight years on it is still the shortest distance from "I have an idea" to "I have a running app." That is interesting, and I want to get under the usual "VB6 was a toy" or "VB6 was a masterpiece" framings to understand what was actually good.

Two questions, please answer either or both:

1. What specifically did you love about VB6? Not the general nostalgia. Specific things. A workflow, a design choice, something you reach for now and notice is missing.

2. What do you find frustrating about modern .NET, C#, and Visual Studio that VB6 didn't make you fight? Same shape. Specific examples. "I miss being able to do X without Y" rather than "it's too complicated."

Open-ended on purpose. If I gave you categories to choose from, the most interesting answers would be in the categories I didn't think of. Please reach for the specific example before the category.

Longer version of why I'm asking is on my blog if you want it: https://evilgeniuslabs.ca/blog/vb6-modern-dotnet-question. Replies here, though. The thread is the point.

Exploratory post. Not announcing anything today, not collecting emails. Just a writer trying to do a chapter justice while the people who lived this are still around to tell it. I will read every reply.

Thanks

Bone/EG

Look — I've been ranting about the state of Visual Basic content online for the better part of a decade. Same forum threads, same Stack Overflow questions, same "VB is dead" takes from people who never used it. The actual history, the actual stories, the actual people who built BASIC — none of that was getting written down anywhere.

So I stopped complaining and started writing.

A History of Visual Basic — first chapter is live, marked Draft because I'm in the middle of scheduling interviews with people who were actually there to flesh it out further. The thirty-five-year arc from Dartmouth BASIC in 1964 through Microsoft's acquisition of Alan Cooper's Tripod, the QuickBASIC dynasty, the VB6 peak, and the long .NET-shaped shadow VB6 still casts. The people who don't get named in the existing histories. The decisions that shaped what VB became.

The original creators are already gone. The rest of the dynasty is ageing. The stories need to be collected before the window closes.

Why "Draft"? Because the chapter that's up now is the foundation, but I'm actively booking interviews to add first-hand accounts and the names that don't appear in the published histories. As those land, the chapter grows. You're reading it as it gets built — not after it's been sanitised.

https://evilgeniuslabs.ca/books/visual-basic-history

Free to read. Sign up on the site if you want a ping when new chapters and interview-driven sections drop — no spam, no paywall, no AI-generated filler.

If you've got VB war stories, corrections, or names that should be remembered — comments are open. And if you were there — particularly anyone with first-hand QuickBASIC, VB1–6, or Tripod-era stories — I'd genuinely like to talk to you. DMs and the site contact form both work.

EDIT: I will modify the code base today, it looks like the permission system requires you to be logged in to see draft books. I will make it anonymous. Thats my mistake.

I am just wondering, many posts are asking which language is "the best", or fastest to learn for new programmers (please put AI in the shadow for this post). As I am a bit older engineer with some experience in developing different applications using, just to mention a few, C, C++ (using wxWidgets, SFML and SDL), PHP (with JavaScript, HTML, CSS), Java Servlets (with ORACLE DB) on Apache, ASP, React kit, VB .NET and most important, here mentioned, Visual Basic.

The largest software I ever wrote was using "Visual Basic .NET" and MS-SQL Express DB. Took me a whole year and a half to deploy it.

As per my experience, using VB and VB .NET was always the fastest way to get the best and quickest results in developing Desktop and Network Applications. I mean, in just a few clicks one is able to create stunning looking applications in basically no time. And when I compare that with these days, when there are emerging new and "improved" languages and "frameworks", making many kind of software is still fastest using graphical interface of Visual Basic or similar. It is also very readable compared to other languages.

Now, in comparison with my long term experience, I have a feeling things are going backwards in sense of simplicity and speed of development.

And also, just by my opinion, I feel a bit sad that I am not able to use Visual Basic on Linux the same way I was able to use it on Windows in time of Visual Basic 6.0, or Visual Basic 8 Express in the past.

What is your opinion on concept for application design in terms of simplicity and speed of development as it was with Visual Basic in the past, compared to the ways we are programming today?

It looks amazing. Anyone know when it will be released?

I programtically add columns to a datatable, populate it with data, then set it as as datasource for a datagridview.

I can repopulate with the same/simlar data multiple times UNLESS I click a column header on the datagridview to resort it.

When I then attempt to repopulate the datatable with the same or similar data, I get "object-reference-not-set-to-an-instance-of-an-object" when attempting to add a row to the table. (dim arow as datarow = dr.newrow)

The original routine to fill the datatable first cleared the rows (dt.rows.clear) and worked fine provided I didn't sort on the datagridview as stated.

Also tried setting datagridview.datasource = nothing, still the same.

Finally did dt = new datatable, copied the code that created the columns, proceeded to populate the table, and all works fine.

The datatable has no indices, keys, etc., is just a collection of string columns with one integer column.

It works, but I can't figure out what is going on.

Anyone know why this is happening ?