Visual Basic was the first programming language I learned. I took a community college course about it when I was in high school, but I’d already been dabbling in learning it before taking the course.
Here’s a sampling of some of the most once-useful small-scale software I have made using Visual Basic, some of my first non-homework programming projects, some of which are a bit obsolete now, but fun to look back on none the less.
Twister Spinner
An automated spinner for the board game twister, allowing two players to play together without a player having to remove their hands from the game board to operate the spinner. This was one of my first programs I ever wrote. Originally, I wrote it in Microsoft Access, and later ported it to Visual Basic 6.
Color Tool
Color Tool was an eyedropper tool to generate HTML color codes for web pages based on anything on your computer screen. Also calculates the “long” value representing the color, which was needed to set colors in the windows registry. I also added a feature to Color Tool preview color combinations.
Aim Color Changer
This app was written to overcome a limitation of the long-gone AOL instant messenger (AIM). AIM used a standardized color selection widget with only 16 colors that mostly looked garish together. This app would work around that limitation by editing the Windows registry to set the AIM messaging colors to otherwise unavailable colors.
Same Game
Same Game was a game I had played on KDE (Linux) and really liked, but I couldn’t find the game for windows (at least not with the same scoring rules), so I re-implemented it in Visual Basic for fun. My algorithm was a little slow, so the game was not as responsive as it could have been, but still fun to play.
Checkbook Balance Calculator
This was a really simple app I wrote to balance my checkbook back in the day. It was an electronic version of the checkbook balancing worksheet that came on bank statements. Sure, you could do the same thing in Excel, but this was simple and effective, and looked pretty.
Gifview
Gifview as an application I wrote to preview tiled background images (gif, jpg, and bmp supported), to see which ones were well-suited for being webpage backgrounds. It also could set the Windows wallpaper image and a few other things such as generating HTML test-pages for specific background images.
Wallpaper Changer
This program doesn’t have a screen capture because it had no visible windows. It was basically a script that would silently and automatically change the windows background to a random image from the windows directory every time you booted your computer–back before Windows had rotating wallpaper images as a built-in feature.
Image Lister
Image Lister was a script to create an html file listing all the images in a selected directory. It was used to create image galleries in early editions of my website.
