Turn on Word Wrap to view this file in Windows Notepad.
By David Stewart, Argyle Softstuff
Saturday, July 25, 1992
Bobber and Sinker is a very simple application meant to illustrate how to float an application's window above all windows, even an application withthe focus, in Visual Basic. The FLOAT.MAK and floating form are included as a base for applications of your own.
I put Bobber and Sinker together to answer some questions I received about my two current shareware applications, PowerBar/Write v. 2.2a and PowerBar/Notepad, which I highly recommend you find and try. Besides being good applications in their own rights (in my humble estimate), and despite not being as efficiently coded as I know they could and should be, they do illustrate some interesting concepts. For example, they have timed autosaves that work upon Write and Notepad, time/date stamps, ANSI menus for entering special characters in Write and text files and lots of other neat stuff; both applications can serve as associations for their respective file types, and automatically launch and load their client applications. PowerBar/Notepad automatically turns on Word Wrap when it runs..
You can use the form/code freely. Just open it up as a project, and change the captions and control names, etc., to suit your needs, and use it as a base for your app. You'll notice that the two buttons on the form, as well as the two menu items that function the same way, are in control arrays.
The basic code--the API declarations, Constants and initial executional code, were given in Inside Visual Basic, the Cobb Group's excellent VB how-to monthly, in June and July 1992. Call 1-800-223-8720 for information on the publication. The rest of the code is my own. This piece of work is released into the public domain.
As I am releasing this into the public domain (the Cobb Group doesn't own any of this code, does it? In any case, they give their subscribers the right to use it), I know I can't demand any compensation. But if you do make use of this, I'd appreciate a chance to see how; you could drop me a line or even attach a file on America Online, to Doc Yeah or Eniac I. (Members of many on-line services can use a mail gateway to send mail, but not files, to AOL.) Or drop me a line on Prodigy, ID# CTKJ00D (those are zeroes between the J and D).
Another great book is The Waite Group's Visual Basic How-To. (No, I don't work for either of these organizations!)
