Contents Guide Contents

Home Page DigitalDan Home Page

---

• Whenever you work with drives, directories (folders) or files, you should always use a Try...Catch...End Try block because there will always be a risk of unexpected errors.
• If you allow the user any control over what drive/folder/file is selected, you should also move all drive/folder/file access into a background worker. It is not reasonable to expect a user to realise that copying multi-gigabyte files or backing up a primary hard drive could be a slow process.
• When acquiring directory names, you will encounter some occassions where the final "\" is included and others when it is missing. This bit of code suggests one method to ensure consistency

 
Private Shared Function AddSlash(directory As String) As String
if directory="" then return ""
if directory.Length = 1 then directory &= ":"
If Mid(directory, directory.Length, 1) <> "\" Then directory &= "\"
Return directory
End Function

 
If you need to find a special/system directory, you can select the appropriate line from the following code.
NOTE When working with the system directories, you can encounter folders/files that are locked by Windows and experience run-time errors. All folder/file access should be protected by a "Try ... End Try" and pay particular attention to "Catching" the unable to access errors.
 
Dim directory As String directory = My.Computer.FileSystem.SpecialDirectories.Desktop
directory = My.Computer.FileSystem.SpecialDirectories.MyDocuments
directory = My.Computer.FileSystem.SpecialDirectories.MyMusic
directory = My.Computer.FileSystem.SpecialDirectories.MyPictures
directory = My.Computer.FileSystem.SpecialDirectories.ProgramFiles
directory = My.Computer.FileSystem.SpecialDirectories.Programs
directory = My.Computer.FileSystem.SpecialDirectories.Temp

 

---