There are many tasks that you may want to automate using a custom console. This could be for your Jr. Systems Administrators, for users, or for yourself. One tool that we like to use for this is Visual Tcl, but sometime it is nice to use plain old Visual Basic. If you do use Visual Basic to create an administration console, one of the first problems is dealing with the execution of sequential shell commands. For instance, if you copy a file and then execute the file when you click on a button, the file might not have finished copying before your program tries to execute it. The program does not wait for a shell command to finish before it moves on to the next command. What you need to do is use some code available from Microsoft’s support site: HOWTO: 32-Bit App Can Determine When a Shelled Process Ends (Q129796). Then, just use the ExecCmd statement in your VB code. Some other links that we have found useful, relating to this:

VB Codes (Warning: Lots of popups.)

HOWTO: Copy the Screen or Active Window to the Clipboard from Visual Basic (Q240653)

Create a virtual form

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