at least for those of us who do I/O screens: you have a big bunch of buttons to control outputs. The button event should do the exact same thing (turn on an output on the motion controller / PLC / whatever); the only thing that changes is the output bit number.

VB6 Control Arrays work quite nicely for this, but the BCB/Delphi VCL wire many controls to one event handler approach also works well.

The even better approach, which I currently use in Tkinter, is to create all the controls from a mini-database (MetaKit) so adding another output or input is simply a matter of adding another line to the database. That's much better than futzing around with VB GUI screen designer. Still, all the Tkinter output buttons use a common command handler.

Tony

very few people do. And, the support isn't as good as in systems designed for this (Tk, wxWindows, Swing, etc). For example, you don't have good layout managers in VB6.

That's one reason why it's good to learn different languages. After learning Python & Tkinter (plus a little wxPython), when I have to program in VB.nyet (like it looks like I'll be doing soon for a project), I will be be programming differently than I would have a couple of years ago.

Tk has pretty decent layout managers; I can get the layout I want without too much effort. wxWindows seems a little more primitive (but does have a lot of other advantages over Tk). I haven't used Java's Swing. For VB.nyet, I'll probably write my own; MSDN actually has an article on doing it.

Another technique I'll probably use is using a scripting language for flexibility. You can still do this in .nyet (or use class loader), but MS doesn't emphasize it and so most people never think about it....unless you have a scripting background.

Tony

The idea also works very nicely for program configuration dialogs. I use Metakit to store the info (and have the Python class automatically create the class variables from the database).

I'm pretty sure there are open source projects out there with a similar approach, but using XML -- basically creating a UI specified by an XML file.

I've heard that some of the Swing layout managers are hard to grasp. You might want to look at John Grayson's Python and Tkinter Programming book; he does some very interesting things with Tkinter.

Tony