(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Software Requirements:

Microsoft Visual Basic Express *100% Free From Microsoft*

Download Link: You must login or register to view this content.
Virus Scan: NONE *This Is Not A 3rd Party Download - From Microsoft Directly*

Estimated Time To Completion:

1 Hour

Level Of Difficulty:

Beginner

Step One:

Install your copy of Microsoft Visual Studio that you downloaded from their site. Once installed load up the program. You are looking for the Link Button that says "New Project", as seen in the following image:
You must login or register to view this content.

Step Two:

Create a new project. Select Visual Basic from the "Installed Templates" section. Then select "Windows Form Application" (NOTE: These are selected for you by default). Give it whatever name you find appropriate, as seen below:
You must login or register to view this content.

Step Three:

From your toolbar area on the left hand column, select the "Button" icon and drag and drop it onto your "Form". Do this once more so you have two buttons on your form, as seen below:
You must login or register to view this content.

Step Four:

From your toolbar area on the left hand column, select the "Timer" icon and drag and drop it onto your "Form", as seen below: *Note: the "Timer" can be found in the "Components" section of the toolbar*
You will note that the "Timer" appears in the components section of your project view, and not on the form itself, as it's a component, not a "Control" object.
You must login or register to view this content.

Step Five:

Double click "Button1" on your form. This will open up the code for the button, when someone clicks it. Here is where you will start to code your program. Type the following code:

    Timer1.Start()

As seen below:
You must login or register to view this content.

Step Six:

Click back on your "Form" design view, so you can see your form in graphical view, not in code view. This is done by clicking "Form1.vb[Design]*", located on the main window of visual basic. Once you are back in graphical view, double click "Timer1" located at the bottom, in the component section of your "Form", then add the follow code:

    SendKeys.Send("My Sig Test")

SendKeys.Send("{Enter}")

SendKeys.Send("Second Line of Test Sig")

SendKeys.Send("{Enter}")

Timer1.Stop()

As seen below:
You must login or register to view this content.
We add the Timer1.Stop() code at the end of the timer because if not, well then, it's going to spam your friends, and that's not "always" a good thing. *But sometimes it is*

Step Seven:

Now that the 'coding' is done, we get to customize this program a little to make it "yours" and not "mine". On the right hand panel you may have noticed a section labeled "Properties". This is where we do all the customizing for the program. Most of these settings you are going to what to play with on your own, but make sure you don't change any of the "Names" of properties, for example: If you select the "Form" itself and then scroll through the properties, you will notice the name is set to "Form1", this is very important, changing these names will render your program useless, unless you know what you are doing. You can however scroll down the "Properties" until you see 'Text'. This is safe to change, it's the graphical change that people will see. This will say "Form1", you can change that to whatever name you named your program, for example: Ralphie's Excellent Siggy Tool. This will show the users of the software the program name. Select each button and name them accordingly. Button1 should be named; Send, Sign, Send Siggy, Do It, etc..and Button2 should be named; End, Exit, Close, etc. As seen below:
You must login or register to view this content.

Step Eight:

Now we need to adjust the "Timer" to suit our needs. The way this program works, it sends the information you provided in the timer, using a component called "SendKeys". The "Timer", when ran, will send the strings of text you specified each time it runs. That is why we added a stop timer function to the end of the timer code in 'Step Six'. We need to adjust the time that it takes to send the keys to our forum post, chat box, shout box, etc. We accomplish this buy selecting the "Timer" then going to the properties section of the "Timer" located at the same place as the the other properties from 'Step Seven'. We are looking for 'Interval' and we need to adjust that. I set mine to 4000(ms), which equals 4 seconds (roughly). The rest of the settings are perfect, and good to go. Visual Basic uses milliseconds by default, unless otherwise specified. As seen below:
You must login or register to view this content.

Step Nine:

Now it's time to test this bad boy out. Go to your favorite forum or even open up notepad, and then run your program, click your 'Start' or 'Send' button and then click on the form you wish it to add the text to. We do it this way because each form is going to have a different name, so we can't tell send keys to send the data to notepad because then it won't send to a forum, or chat box. So we have to run it, then click on the field that we want to it to send to. We don't need a stop button, because we added our own stop timer code in 'Step Six'. If all goes well, you should see your text auto paste into the field of your choosing, then stop.

Step Ten:

We need to add a way to exit the program. Sometimes when we just hit the 'X' button to close it, the program will continue to run in the processes, so we need to 'end' that. The way we accomplish this is by double clicking our Exit, End, etc button and adding this code:

    End

As seen below:
You must login or register to view this content.

Step Eleven:

**OPTIONAL** We can further customize this program by clicking on the form in the designer view to select it. Then head over to the properties section and look for 'TopMost' (located right below 'Text', change that value to say "True". This will make your form run on top of all other windows, this is a easy way to let your siggy run while you know you are going to be using it often, without having to constantly switch windows to get to it and switch back to where you want it to paste to. As seen below:
You must login or register to view this content.

Step Twelve:

If you didn't already realize how to run your program, or compile it, here it goes: Once our program is complete, or at any time you want to test it, we need to click 'ebug', located on the Menu Bar of Microsoft Visual Basic Express, alternatively, you can press F5 or click the green 'Play' arrow to achieve the same effect. Once we have ran our program, and we are satisfied with all the results, we can move on to compiling it. We need to click the Debug option from the Menu Bar once again, then click "Build (Your Project Name)", this is usually the second option on the Debug drop down by default.

Step Thirteen:

None: It's bad luck!!

Step Fourteen:

Passing around your program, or creating it for others is one of the most rewarding reasons to make software. Here is how you locate the .exe file you just created. Navigate to your Documents folder (varies depending on version of windows your using). We then go to: Visual Studio 2010/Projects/YourProgramName/YourProgramName/bin/Debug -- We can now see the .exe file created for us, this .exe file can be handed out to our friends, or used to directly run the software we just created. There are other ways of doing this i.e. 'Building' your project, that creates an installer, and sometimes it can be messy and require users to download .netframework and it turns a lot of people off. I opted to use the faster method that will cause you least headache.

Further Customization:

By now you will have seen that you can change a lot in the properties section of each function of your form i.e. buttons, ect. You will notice that you can change font styles, colors, sizes, as well as background colors, images, etc. Get creative, throw in your own background image, color your program out to meet your own needs, or a clients/friends needs. "The Only Limit, Is Your Own Imagination" I would love to see what people have come up with on their own, feel free to respond on this thread with examples of how you took this tutorial and owned it to make it your own!

*Coding Customization*

To add some more flare to your siggy, you can use bbcode inside your code, and seperate lines with blank spaces. I will provide an example here:

     SendKeys.Send("[color=red]My Sig Test[/color]")

SendKeys.Send("{Enter}")

SendKeys.Send("{Enter}")

SendKeys.Send("[url=https://www.google.com]Google It!![/url]")

SendKeys.Send("{Enter}")

SendKeys.Send("{Enter}")

SendKeys.Send("[img]Your Graphical Siggy Image Link Here.gif[/img]")

SendKeys.Send("{Enter}")

Timer1.Stop()

Be creative, let your mind flow like water

Apologies:

My Spelling
My Punctuation
Starting Sentences With Prepositional Phrases
Not Making This A Video Instead

All of my tutorials are created by me: RalphieRocks
I do not copy and paste tutorials, I spend a lot of time on them. I enjoy helping others. If you have any questions, or issues please let me know. I am here to help.
Some will say don't use "End" on the button2 code, that is a varied opinion, I will not get into the details, this is a tiny program. It will not hurt your pc or your processor/speed to use End on a 20k program lol.

You got broken links bud :dumb:

Where are they?

---------- Post added at 10:59 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:57 PM ----------

If it's for the Microsoft Visual Basic Express 2010, that's because it's for U.S. citizens, others need to google that if the .com link don't work in your country.

Wait I think I might be mistaken. They're probably just your signature I'm looking at :fa:

Okay I guess

More of skimmed it but have to say, good job compiling and posting this.

Thanks for acknowledging the time taken to compile the tute, and take screen shots.

No problem. We need more of these on here, this section dies after a week or two because rarely anyone really submits anything.