Visual Basic Power Pack Now with Shape Controls

I'm an old Visual Basic guy. Not just in age but in going back to early versions of Visual Basic (I installed version 1.0 but upgraded to version 3 soon after) so its not surprising that I miss some of the features that were "lost" when Visual Basic went to .NET. The VB team has been good about not forgetting about us old guys and have gradually added a lot of those features back in as time and budget permit. Edit and continue is back for example. Thanks VB team.

A couple of features are really just hard to do right as base features. One of the ones that a lot of people missed (and trust me I bugged the VB team about it on several occasions) was Print Form - having ones code "dump" an image of the form to a printer. A while back the VB team created a PrintForm control and packaged it up as a free download and called it a Visual Basic Power Pack. And a lot of us were happy about that.

But that still left us missing our old shape controls - lines, rectangles, and ovals. We were faking some of it with picture boxes (for lines and rectangles) or drawing ovals and lines using the graphic functions. But using other controls seemed a bit "heavy" and doing the graphic drawing meant playing with Repaint/Paint and other unfamiliar methods. Well we are not forgotten!

The Visual Basic team released Visual Basic Power Pack 2.0 last week. The Print Form control has been updated. Better yet we now have a new Line, Rectangle and Oval control. Obviously squares are rectangles with all four sides the same size and circles are ovals with height and width the same. These shapes can be filled, have different border thickness, and have their looks changed in all sorts of ways. Pretty much they are just what you would expect.

So if you, like me, are missing the shape controls or Print Form capability you'll want to download and install this power pack ASAP.

PS: Thanks for listening VB team!

Technorati tags: vb2005, visual basic, vb power tools, print form, shape controls