I've been learning to deal with VB.Net (2010) having been used to VB6 forever. It's a bit of a curve, but not as bad as I thought it would be. Providing the power stays on and I have internet access.

 One of my projects that interests me is tracking vehicles via GPS trackers. They're cheap. You put a Cellular Sim in them and they SMS/GPRS the GPS coordinates to you. Since GPRS costs a bundle here, I wanted to make a tracking system using SMS only. This entailed controlling a GSM Modem via the computer, to 'listen' to the vehicle GPS Tracker.

I have a friend who is a realtor, and is constantly driving around. With his permission I installed a GPS Tracker into his vehicle. The tracker has additional options, such as remote lock/unlock of your doors, panic switches, alarms, and cut-offs to really "remote" control your vehicle. In fact, I'm kind of designing this for a commercial application.  In the meantime, I just bundled all the wires and only used the GPS/SMS functions. The rest requires a bit of mechanical work, and since 'in theory' it will all work once the comms infrastructure is finished, This is all that was needed.

I had a Garmin Nuvi 1490 starting giving me alert warnings telling me I needed to update my traffic database. No biggie, the Garmin Web Updater makes it pretty simple. But when I plugged the Garmin into my computer, I got this screen, which was NOT recognizable by the Web Updater: 

Needless to say I was concerned. These aren't cheap units. fortunately I had an extra 1490. I used a non-restricted 14 day trial copy of "All Image" from Towodo Software. That did the trick magnificently!

I updated all the software on my 'good' 1490, and let all the updates run through, rebooting when necessary. After all that was final, I created a fresh 'image' or clone, of the 1490 File System with Towodo's All Image. It took a while, but it completed successfully. It should; it's just a FAT32 filesystem like some other PC's.

I then 'wrote' the new image copy to the 'bad' 1490 using All Image. It took a while as well, but it finally completed. When I unplugged it, it booted right up as good as new. Plugging it into my PC gave my normal filesystem back too.

I was pleased. Give all image a try if you have a need for that kind of software, which we all do sooner or later.

-- Smug

You may have read (if not, it's the article previous to this one, heh) about my foray into vb.net and working with a new progress bar made out of a couple of labels.  I decided to step it up a notch (albeit a small notch) and create a custom control that I can use with my other projects rather than fooling with the labels each and every time.

Fortunately, it works great.  For those who have Visual Basic 2010 (or newer, I suppose) I've zipped up the entire solution for you to fool around with. It includes a demo app that has both the traditional ProgressBar on it, and the SmugProgressBar. All the code is there. It's not documented too well, but it should be fairly obvious what everything does.  As mentioned before, it's merely a rewrite of Sergey Popov's code, so I'm not crowing too loudly about it, other than it's a neat control now.  There are 3 Properties, and 2 subroutines:

Having decided recently to finally make the jump from VB6 to dot Net, I've been creating new utilities in Visual Studio 2010, using the VB.Net 2010.

One of the things I missed was being able to drop in Sergey Popov's slick code for VB6, using 2 labels to create a progress bar that also displays a percentage as well. So after snooping around and finding no elegant solutions, I found it pretty easy to port Sergey's code to dot.Net.  Here's what I did:

Consider I did this for 'my' application. Yours may be slightly different. In 'my' situation, I have a MDI Parent form with my status bar at the bottom (which is actually a split container, but it can be whatever container you want), and I placed my labels inside that.  I then have MDI Children forms that use the progress bar (and other things) on the main form's container.  For this reason I set the properties of the code to 'Public' because I call the procedures from the children form.