In this example, I put the OpenFileDialog in a function and not a subroutine. The reason for this is that I want to return a value. Functions allow you to return a value whereas a subroutine does not.

Let’s take a look at this screen shot, there are 3 main elements that we can set which I’ll describe in further detail. They are the initial directory, filter, and filter index.

OpenFileDialog

Initial Directory – I guess the easiest one to explain in the initial directory, when you open the dialog box you’ll typically want it to open to a particular folder, in most cases I would guess this to be the user’s My Documents folder.

fileDialogBox.InitialDirectory = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal)

The above line does just that, we query the .NET class Environment to get the locations of the users My Documents folder. But now what if we wanted it to open up in the C:\Program Files folder? Simple enough…

fileDialogBox.InitialDirectory = "C:\Program Files"

Filter – This allows us to filter the filetypes/filenames that we want to see in the OpenFileDialog. For example, if I want to only see *.txt I can create a text filter by assigning fileDialogBox.Filter = Text Files (*.txt)|*.txt| and literally we just repeat this pattern to add more file types. Here’s a few more examples.

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fileDialogBox.Filter = "Text Files (*.txt)|*.text|" _
	    & "Word Documents (*.doc;*.docx)|*.doc;*.docx|" _
	    & "boot.ini (boot.ini)|boot.ini|" _
	    & "All text files beginning with the letter A (a*.txt)|a*.txt|" _
	    & "All files beginning with accesslog* (accesslog*)|accesslog*|" _
	    & "All Files(*.*)|"

Filter Index – To default to a particular filter you will need to select a filter index. In this example you’ll notice that I have boot.ini selected. We can do that by looking at the above piece of code and noticing that boot.ini comes 3rd in that list.

fileDialogBox.FilterIndex = 3

That’s it, this allows us to keep our filters arranged alphabetically and still be able to select an item from the middle of the list.

The Code – Here it is. In the function OpenFile() it will return a string with the filename and path as a string. If no filename is selected, a blank string is returned. In the subroutine btnOpenFile_Click if we do have a file then I’ll just retrieve some of the file info and display it on a message box otherwise I’ll tell the user that they did not select a file.

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'This code was developed by Gerardo Lopez and was downloaded from www.brangle.com
'Complete source code is available at:
'http://www.brangle.com/wordpress/2009/09/howto-use-the-openfiledialog-box-in-vbnet/
 
'This was declared as a function because I want to be able to return a filename
'the filename will be returned as a string
Public Function OpenFile() As String
	'declare a string, this is will contain the filename that we return
	Dim strFileName = ""
	'declare a new open file dialog
	Dim fileDialogBox As New OpenFileDialog()
 
	'add file filters, this step is optional, but if you notice the screenshot
	'above it does not look clean if you leave it off, I explained in further
	'detail on my site how to add/modify these values
	fileDialogBox.Filter = "Rich Text Format (*.rtf)|*.rtf|" _
	    & "Text Files (*.txt)|*.txt|" _
	    & "Word Documents (*.doc;*.docx)|*.doc;*.docx|" _
	    & "Image Files (*.bmp;*.jpg;*.gif)|*.bmp;*.jpg;*.gif|" _
	    & "All Files(*.*)|"
	'this sets the default filter that we created in the line above, if you don't 
	'set a FilterIndex it will automatically default to 1
	fileDialogBox.FilterIndex = 3
	'this line tells the file dialog box what folder it should start off in first
	'I selected the users my document folder
	fileDialogBox.InitialDirectory = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal)
 
	'Check to see if the user clicked the open button
	If (fileDialogBox.ShowDialog() = DialogResult.OK) Then
	    strFileName = fileDialogBox.FileName
	'Else
	'   MsgBox("You did not select a file!")
	End If
 
	'return the name of the file
	Return strFileName
End Function
 
 
Private Sub btnOpenFile_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnOpenFile.Click
	'declare a string to the filename
	Dim strFileNameAndPath As String = OpenFile()
 
	'check to see if they selected a file or just clicked cancel
	If (strFileNameAndPath = "") Then
	    'Chastise the user for not selecting a file :)
	    MsgBox("You did not select a file!")
	Else
	    'Begin doing whatever it is you would normally do with the file!
	    MsgBox("You selected this file: " & strFileNameAndPath & vbCrLf & _
		   "The filename is: " & System.IO.Path.GetFileName(strFileNameAndPath) & vbCrLf & _
		   "Located in: " & System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(strFileNameAndPath) & vbCrLf & _
		   "It has the following extension: " & System.IO.Path.GetExtension(strFileNameAndPath) & vbCrLf & _
		   "The file was created on " & System.IO.File.GetCreationTime(strFileNameAndPath) & vbCrLf & _
		   "The file was last written to on " & System.IO.File.GetLastWriteTime(strFileNameAndPath) _
	    )
	End If
End Sub

To copy text, its just a simple one-liner:

Clipboard.SetText(txtTextBox.SelectedText)

To cut text, it’s almost as simple as copying it, but we need to remember to delete the data from the text box once it’s been copied:

Clipboard.SetText(txtTextBox.SelectedText)
txtTextBox.SelectedText = ""

To paste text there’s several things we have to worry about like I mentioned above. We first want to check what’s in the clipboard and verify that the contents of the clipboard can be pasted into whatever field/object we are trying to paste them into. In this example, I’m going to use the GetText method to make sure I only get the text from the clipboard and paste it into the text field. In the example below, I’ll get the data from the clipboard, then check to see if it is text before pasting it.

txtTextBox.SelectedText = Clipboard.GetText

Cut Copy Paste for .NET Applications

This is the code for the above program written in VB.NET

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'This code was developed by Gerardo Lopez and was downloaded from www.brangle.com
'Complete source code is available at:
'http://www.brangle.com/wordpress/2009/08/how-to-cutcopypaste-text-into-clipboard-using-vb-net/
 
Public Class Form1
    Private Sub btnCut_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnCut.Click
        'Checks to see if the user selected anything
        If txtTextBox.SelectedText <> "" Then
            'Good, the user selected something
            'Copy the information to the clipbaord
            Clipboard.SetText(txtTextBox.SelectedText)
            'Since this is a cut command, we want to clear whatever 
            'text they had selected when they clicked cut
            txtTextBox.SelectedText = ""
        Else
            'If there was no text selected, print out an error message box
            MsgBox("No text is selected to cut")
        End If
    End Sub
 
    Private Sub btnCopy_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnCopy.Click
        'Checks to see if the user selected anything
        If txtTextBox.SelectedText <> "" Then
            'Copy the information to the clipboard
            Clipboard.SetText(txtTextBox.SelectedText)
        Else
            'If no text was selected, print out an error message box
            MsgBox("No text is selected to copy")
        End If
    End Sub
 
    Private Sub btnPaste_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnPaste.Click
        'Get the data stored in the clipboard
        Dim iData As IDataObject = Clipboard.GetDataObject()
        'Check to see if the data is in a text format
        If iData.GetDataPresent(DataFormats.Text) Then
            'If it's text, then paste it into the textbox
            txtTextBox.SelectedText = CType(iData.GetData(DataFormats.Text), String)
        Else
            'If it's not text, print a warning message
            MsgBox("Data in the clipboard is not availble for entry into a textbox")
        End If
    End Sub
End Class

Now in general, I don’t think that the clipboard should be cleared by the programmer, it should be cleared by the user. But if you have a legitimate reason to clear the clipboard, here’s the code to do just that:

Clipboard.Clear()

The reason I created it as a console application and not a windows app is because I envisioned this program only really only having a valid function when it’s called from another application. Or even better, you want to spook your girlfriend or parents by making their laptop talk to them when it turns on! Whatever your reasons are, enjoy! Oh and let me know how you use this program in the comments.

Download SpeakToMe App

Here is the complete source code to the above application. Let me know what you think in the comments!

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'This application was developed by Gerardo Lopez and was downloaded from www.brangle.com
'Complete source code is available at:
'http://www.brangle.com/wordpress/2009/08/make-your-computer-talk-with-vb-net-app-source-code/
 
 
Module Module1
    'We want to make sure we grab any arguments as args so that we speak them    
    Sub Main(ByVal args As String())
        'If there are no arguments UBound will return -1
        'Therefore we want to make sure to let the user know how to run the app if 
        'they don't enter any arguments
        If UBound(args) > -1 Then
 
            'Generate an empty string, we'll use this to concatenate all of our arguments 
            'together so we can pass it to the narrator
            Dim input As String = ""
 
            'Concat all of our arguments together and make sure to put a space in 
            'between them so the words don't run together
            For Each arg As String In args
                input = input + arg + " "
            Next
 
            'Create an object and gain access to the narrator
            Dim voice = CreateObject("SAPI.SpVoice")
            'Tells the narrator what to say
            voice.Speak(input)
        Else
            'The is where we tell the user what to say if they didn't enter any arguments
            Console.WriteLine("No arguments specified")
            Console.WriteLine("Try this instead: SpeakToMe.exe Hello World")
            Console.WriteLine(vbCrLf + vbCrLf + "Visit www.brangle.com for other apps")
        End If
    End Sub
End Module
'The End

To run this program from the command line, you can type in something like the following:

SpeakToMeConsole.exe Hello World

And here is the beautiful one-liner!

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CreateObject("SAPI.SpVoice").Speak("hello from brangle.com")

To shutdown/turn off your computer, just execute the following line of code:

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System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown.exe", "-s -t 0")

To restart/reboot your computer, just execute the following line of code:

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System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown.exe", "-r -t 0")

To log off your computer, just execute the following line of code (and yes, that’s a lowercase L, not the number 1):

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System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown.exe", "-l -t 0")

The number zero at the end of each of those examples is how long the computer should wait in seconds before shutting down/restarting/etc… In this example, I’m going to shutdown the computer in 5 minutes (5 minutes * 60 seconds = 300 seconds)

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System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown.exe", "-s -t 300")

The simplest message box, it only includes an OK button…

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MsgBox("Hello World!")

Ok, so the title of the message box the name of the project, let’s add our own title as the third argument, but first we’ll need to tell VB that we want to have this message box act as an OK only.

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MsgBox("Hello World!", MsgBoxStyle.OkOnly, "www.brangle.com")

The next message box is the OK/Cancel with a custom title.

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MsgBox("Visit brangle.com?", MsgBoxStyle.OkCancel, "www.brangle.com")

OK great, but this time lets detect whether the user clicked OK or Cancel. If the user clicks OK, We’ll launch my website otherwise we’ll do nothing.

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If MsgBox("Visit brangle.com?", MsgBoxStyle.OkCancel, "www.brangle.com") = MsgBoxResult.Ok Then
     Process.Start("http://www.brangle.com/")
End If

Let’s try using an Abort/Retry/Ignore message box.

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Dim result As DialogResult
result = MsgBox("Corrupt File. Try Again?", MsgBoxStyle.AbortRetryIgnore, "www.brangle.com")
If result = Windows.Forms.DialogResult.Abort Then
   'Do some action to abort opening the file
   MsgBox("You clicked abort")
ElseIf result = Windows.Forms.DialogResult.Retry Then
   'Do some action to retry opening the file
   MsgBox("You clicked retry")
ElseIf result = Windows.Forms.DialogResult.Ignore Then
   'Do some action to ignore
   MsgBox("You clicked ignore")
End If

Now let’s launch a message box as critical, this will display the red icon with x thru it

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MsgBox("File not found!", MsgBoxStyle.Critical, "Error")

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$file2 = Get-Content "file2.log"
Add-Content "file1.log" $file2

Now, what if we want to copy the contents of file1.log and file2.log into a completely new file called file3.log

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New-Item -ItemType file "file3.log"
$file1 = Get-Content "file1.log"
$file2 = Get-Content "file2.log"
Add-Content "file3.log" $file1
Add-Content "file3.log" $file2

What if we want to erase everything in file3.log before we add new content? In this case, instead of creating a new file, we’ll use the Clear-Contents cmdlet.

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Clear-Content "file3.log"
$file1 = Get-Content "file1.log"
$file2 = Get-Content "file2.log"
Add-Content "file3.log" $file1
Add-Content "file3.log" $file2

Ok, well, what if I don’t know if file3.log already exists? If it doesn’t exist and I run the Clear-Contents cmdlet then I’ll get an error. And if it does exist and I try to create it as a new file I’ll still get an error. There’s an easy way to do this, we’ll use the New-Item cmdlet from the example above, but we’ll add the -force argument, so even if the file exists it will overwrite it.

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New-Item -ItemType file "file3.log" -force
$file1 = Get-Content "file1.log"
$file2 = Get-Content "file2.log"
Add-Content "file3.log" $file1
Add-Content "file3.log" $file2

Alright, so I guess I got the hang of this, now lastly since these are log files, how can I append the date to the file name? Simple, with the Get-Date cmdlet. Let’s output our file name as YYYYMMDD-WebAccess.log in this example.

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$date= (Get-Date).ToString("yyyyMMdd")
$NewFileName = "$date-WebAccess.log"
New-Item -ItemType file $NewFileName
$file1 = Get-Content "file1.log"
$file2 = Get-Content "file2.log"
Add-Content $NewFileName $file1
Add-Content $NewFileName $file2

Another example of needing a custom ip address is at my company, I’ve needed to check the status of a printer and if I want to try the access it via its hostname http://printername it wont work because the SysAdmin has shared the printer on the network without adding a custom dns host name, even though it has a static IP address on the network. So I added the name of each printer to my hosts file so now I have no problem accessing any printer via its name, without having to first look up its IP address.

Also, if you intend to block a website by its hostname then this is also the solution for you.

You can find the hosts file in the following folder…
Windows 95, 98, and ME in the %WinDir%\ directory
NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7 in the %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\ directory (%SystemRoot% is almost always C:\Windows)
iPhone and iTouch in the /private/etc/hosts directory
Linux in the /etc/hosts directory

Also, a note for 0.1% of Windows NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, and Windows 7 users, the actual location may differ, to find the real location you’ll need to dig into the registry key, give the following a look up

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HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

and look for the following string key DataBasePath. On my computer it was declared as %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc I know that’s what I said it would be above, I just want all you SysAdmins to be aware of that 0.1% chance.

Lastly once, you finish making any modifications you’ll need to flush your locally cached DNS on your computer.

In WinXP you can edit the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file by opening it in notepad or any ascii text editor. By default the last line you’ll see is

127.0.0.1       localhost

but other programs can change this. The IP address 127.0.0.1 is always the ip address of the local computer. It doesn’t matter if the computer has a different IP address on the network, 127.0.0.1 is considered a loop back address, in other words, it always points to your computer.

you can add a new hostname followed by the ip address in the text file that’s it, it’s just that simple! Let’s add example.com to our local host names, now if we had apache installed, this ip address would always map to our computer just by adding the following line to the end of your hosts file…

127.0.0.1    example.com

Now what if you want to block a website like MySpace? Add the following line

0.0.0.0       myspace.com

The problem with this approach is it only blocks the hostname myspace.com, it leaves www.myspace.com and login.myspace.com completely accessible, and other hostname that I don’t know about (or worse yet, any future host names that they decide to add). So let’s block all we we can by pointing them to a null IP address

0.0.0.0       myspace.com
0.0.0.0       www.myspace.com
0.0.0.0       login.myspace.com

Ok great, I added my login.myspace.com to the hosts file, but I can still access it, what gives?!? There is two possible fixes for this solution. First close all of your browsers, for example, if you can still access the domain in Internet Explorer or FireFox it’s because the IP address has been cached, close the browser so that the browser can "forget" the IP address. Now before you reopen the application we also need to clear the DNS entry from Windows. We can clear a DNS entry from windows by clicking Start, Run typing ipconfig /flushdns then clicking ok. This will flush the ip address address stored by the operating system. You should now by able to open FireFox and Internet Explorer and verify that they no longer have the IP address cached.

Get-Acl "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator"

Now this return everything that I would expect it to, but I prefer the Format-List view, so let’s check the permissions on the the file C:\Windows\clock.avi and output it in a list view.

Get-Acl "C:\Windows\clock.avi" | Format-List

Ok, now I did say we could check the permissions of a registry key, so let’s go for it…

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Get-Acl HKLM:\Software\Microsoft

Now if you just want to find out the owner of the file you could pull back just that value

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Get-Acl "C:\Windows\clock.avi" | Select Owner

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$ping = New-Object System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping
$ping.Send("www.brangle.com")

We can also set a timeout so that our computer doesn’t hang to long on a server that won’t respond. Let’s add a timeout of a 5 seconds, we will first need to convert this to milliseconds, so that’s 5,000ms. Of course 5 seconds may not be a resonable timeout, you need to figure out what’s appropriate for you and what you’re willing to tolerate.

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$ping = New-Object System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping
$ping.Send("www.brangle.com", 5000)

Technical details: System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping requires that you have .NET 2.0 or greater.

To retrieve the comptuer name

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[System.Environment]::MachineName

Get Operating System Information (such as Platform, service pack, version, and version string)

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[System.Environment]::OSVersion

Checking to see if your computer has started to shutdown

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[System.Environment]::HasShutdownStarted

Instead of trying to remember if you should use `r`n or is it just `n? A simple way is just to get .NET to tell you and assign this value to a variable.

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$nl = [System.Environment]::NewLine

Get the system directory (normally this is C:\Windows\System32), but for some computers it could be different

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[System.Environment]::SystemDirectory

Get the user’s domain name

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[System.Environment]::UserDomainName

Get the user’s name

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[System.Environment]::UserName

Get a list of all environment variables

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[System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariables()

Get a particular environment variable

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$path = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("path")
$temp = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("temp")
$os = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("os")
$homedrive = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("homedrive")

Create a new environment variable, or overwrite an existing one

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[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("VariableName","VariableValue")

Get all logical drives

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[System.Environment]::GetLogicalDrives()