Code Of The Week Issue #27 for Visual Basic

Visual Basic Code of the Week (COTW)
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Issue #27
All content and source code is Copyright (c) 1998 by C&D Programming Corp. No part of this issue can be reprinted or distributed in any manner without express written permission of C&D Programming Corp.

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Requirements for this Issue

The source code in this issue is designed for Visual Basic 5.0 and higher. It will probably work in VB4 32-bit with some minor changes (such as the enum).

In this Issue

This issue introduces a class module for manipulating network connections and retrieving the login name.

cNetworkInterface Class

Description

You might have seen the dialogs built into Windows 95/NT for making and removing network connections. This class makes the necessary calls to the Networking API to show those dialogs. It also provides a property to retrieve the username of the currently logged in user. These functions will only work under Windows 95 and Windows NT. They depend on a DLL called MPR.DLL which should exists on all 95/NT systems that have networking installed. The dialogs are displayed by calling the API functions WNetConnectionDialog and WNetDisconnectDialog. The Login Name is retrieved by calling the API function WNetGetUser.

Declaration

Public Sub ConnectDiskDialog(Optional hParentWnd As Long)
Public Sub ConnectPrinterDialog(Optional hParentWnd As Long)
Public Sub DisconnectDiskDialog(Optional hParentWnd As Long)
Public Sub DisconnectPrinterDialog(Optional hParentWnd As Long)
Public Property Get LoginName() As String

Parameters

hParentWnd - The window handle of the window that should be the parent of this dialog. Typically you will pass the forms Hwnd property, but it is not necessary.

Returns

Only LoginName returns a value. It will return the username the person logged in with.

Sample Usage

This particular example assumes you have a form with six command buttons on it arranged in a control array. The button captions should be as follows:

Button 0 = Connect Disk
Button 1 = Connect Printer
Button 2 = Disconnect Disk
Button 3 = Disconnect Printer
Button 4 = Login Name
Button 5 = Close

The number on the left of the equal sign should be the Index property value and the text on the right hand sign of the equal sign should be the Caption property.

Private Sub cmdActions_Click(Index As Integer)

    Dim Network As New cNetworkInterface

    Select Case Index
        Case 0 ' connect to disk
            Network.ConnectDiskDialog
        Case 1 ' connect to printer
            Network.ConnectPrinterDialog
        Case 2 ' disconnect a disk
            Network.DisconnectDiskDialog
        Case 3 ' disconnect a printer
            Network.DisconnectPrinterDialog
        Case 4 ' show login name
            MsgBox "Current Login Name is: " & Network.LoginName
        Case 5 ' close
            Unload Me
    End Select
End Sub

Button 0 will show the connect to disk resource dialog. Button 1 will show the connect to printer resource dialog. Button 2 will show the disconnect disk resource dialog. Button 3 will show the disconnect printer resource dialog. Button 4 will show a message box with the text "Current Login Name is: " where the will be replaced with the persons username. Button 5 will exit the program.

Next Week

Next week will we expand on this class to show how you can make and remove the network connections directly from your application without requiring the display of the dialog boxes.

Source Code

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Summary

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