A Quick Little Bingo Program

A reader recently asked for help programming a bingo game.

"It's for a old people's house ... they're still doing things in the old fashioned way, picking the numbers by hand from a bag. At the end of this year, they won a computer and asked me if I could do something to make easer for them to play live bingo."

How could I say no? But the reader also needed the program in VB 6! To write the code, I went back that that VB 6 standard (which is not a part of .NET) "control arrays" to display the numbers. Just to see how it would handle it, I ran it through the VB.NET upgrade wizard too. It had no trouble and used the Microsoft.VisualBasic.Compatibility.VB6 namespace to simulate the array.

I haven't done any VB 6 programming in a while and this was a real blast from the past for me that helped me appreciate what .NET has done! I lost a lot of coding once because I accidentally coded an infinite loop and had to cancel the VB 6 process before the project was saved. And the control array turned out to be a disadvantage in the final analysis because it was a lot of trouble to set up in the form.

If any of you are still using VB 6 ... get over it!

News Sources:-
Tuesday December 30, 2008
http://visualbasic.about.com/b/2008/12/30/a-quick-little-bingo-program.htm