Thursday, December 4, 2008
One Dimensional Arrays
For the last few days we've been learning about One Dimensional Arrays. These 'arrays' provide convenient ways to work with groups of controls, sharing common functionality.
An array is simply made by dimming your variable, but with having a number in brackets after it, like this: (#). The number you input is how many of that type of variable there are, which is what an array is. Essentially, when you make an array, it's not 1 variable, but it's a huge group of variable that depends on the number you put into the brackets. This can be used for a wide variety of reasons, and it is actually the source to making animations in visual basic (something we'll be learning next week in class).
For the past few days we've been getting some work done on our group assignments, as well as getting more in-touch with arrays. We've been learning about how to calculate and format with them, and we've been combining arrays with calls, and application paths. This stuff we've been learning is much, much harder than what we've been learning before. I know I've said this many times, and I don't want you to think I'm being repetitive or extremely stupid, but I can say this with firm group to be true. It's just much harder, and I'm not sure how I'll grasp it, let alone apply it to our assignment.
These past few days haven't been good, we haven't been able to do as much progress on our assignment as we would've like to, and these arrays, calls, and application paths sure aren't helping.
Anyways, this is a sad, sad student signing off.
Posted by Chris Kaminski at 9:50 PM
Monday, December 1, 2008
Test Back + New Complex Stuff
Hey guys!
First thing's first. I got my new test back! Yay! I got a really good mark (the highest in the class), and I now have the highest average :D! I was waiting for this day, I knew it would come, and oh it feels so sweet.
Anyways, onto the new information.
For the last few days we've been learning about calls, which allow you to call code into a different part of the program. This allows your program to be much shorter, and was exampled with a song, with each chorus being called, helping you by not having to write it each and every time. It's a cool feature in VB, that I'm sure I'll use very often in the future.
Today we learned about application paths, which allow you to use information on other documents (mainly notepad, or maybe even only notepad [not sure]) and implement it into the program. This allows people, who aren't advanced with programming, to be able to simply edit the notepad document, while the program does all the work in re-arranging, formatting, and doing calculations with the info. It's pretty cool stuff.
Posted by Chris Kaminski at 9:30 PM