Dear Final Debug: I work as a Visual Basic programmer for a big insurance company. I won’t reveal my name because I don’t want my boss to know how frivolous I can be. Some guys here at work have been trying to dream up the most out-there Visual Basic application. We know that you at Silicon Prairie know everything. (No argument here. — Ed.) So tell us: What’s the wildest Visual Basic app you’ve ever heard of? — Anonymous (not Joe Klein), Lake Shore Drive.
Final Debug Replies: Anyone who spent any time trolling pre-Internet computer bulletin boards knows there are ten of thousands of spurious Visual Basic programs that do everything from calculating backgammon betting probabilities to judging whether two people should get romantically involved. I once did a search on the Channel 1 bulletin board (Channel 1 is now an Internet Service Provider) and found six Visual Basic sun-dial programs. As these examples make clear, people used to write VB programs about anything that happened to pop into their heads.
Of course, anyone can write a simple program that’s only a few steps beyond “Hello, World.” The most interesting and unusual Visual Basic app I’ve seen is A Life Set For Two, an electronic poem that appeared in a 1996 diskette-only collection. It would be a fascinating, affecting poem for its words alone, but the hypertext elements of it are warm and human, and author Robert Kendall’s decision to present it in his own customized Visual Basic environment as opposed to more typical HTML environments gave him an unusual amount of control over this interpretation of hypertext literature.
So if you want to take a break from writing VB programs for insurance, write a poem!
If you know of a weirder Visual Basic application, tell me about it.
A dynamic contest
At last, we have answers to our question: How do you get an ActiveX control to work on a Netscape browser?
Congratulations to all 17 people who submitted correct answers, although we’d like to send a lump of coal to the person who answered “Should we care?” There are several ways to do it, but the first correct suggestion we received was this one from one D. McElwain:
The ScriptActive plug-in for Netscape Navigator from NCompass Labs Inc. allows one to add ActiveX controls and script them using VBScript.
This answer earned D. a copy of sams.net’s Teach Yourself Dynamic HTML in a Week. Come back next week for a new contest. If you want to submit a question, send it!
