#VisualBasic is an IRC ( Internet Relay Chat ) channel. Before it’s founding in 1994, by Dave Sherman (WHiZ) and Chris Kunicki (ShadowRam), there was no established channel. People occasionally joined, normally didn’t find anyone so they left. If you joined seeking help you were lucky if anyone was even there to help you. All of this changed one day when Dave and Chris decided to collaborate to create a channel that people could come to whenever they wanted to and get help on Visual Basic, come and discuss VB related issues, and just for a general place for VB programmers to meet. From that day on, the channel would never be the same.
A new philosophy was set towards the channel, a structure was formed, and before you knew it there was a fully established channel. While the official founding date is sketchy because many of the changes happened overtime with the rules gradually starting to be enforced up to the day they all went full effect, it is generally accepted to be somewhere in the 3rd-4th quarter in 1994. Naturally some people didn’t like the new rules and the new structure, but they were changes that had to be made in order for the channel to progress towards the vision of the channel’s future the two founders had seen for it.
A couple of the people who didn’t fully agree with changing things left to create their own channel. One of the VB channels they broke off to create is still around. Interestingly enough it’s still very much the same size it has been since it was formed. It has at the most 2-4 people in it at a time that are normally bots or idle clients. The channel they formed is based a lot on the old way we did things before we structured our channel. So the conclusion drawn is that our philosophy and changes were for the best or we would still be where they are at now.
Over our channel’s lifetime we have seen many other VB channels come, and many VB channels go back into the darkness, like they never existed. Through it all we are the only VB channel that has persisted and continued to grow.
Since the channel was founded we have continued to provide help and discussion over an ever-growing variety of topics. Most of all though, we have continued to grow and find new and better ways to make your stay a pleasant one by providing as many ways to help you as possible. We have come from a channel where you are lucky if anyone else is there, to help to a channel that has on average 50 users at given time. Since we have been keeping track of new users, about a year now, we have seen over 34,000 people from different hostmasks stop by for one reason or another. Many of which still stop by now and then, and some of which that stop by every day. There is pretty much always someone alive and active in the channel; after all, with IRC being a global medium we have developers from around the globe joining to help and for help. As a rule of thumb, however, the most developers are on-line from 10am to 2am Eastern Standard Time.
We invite you to stop on by, whether you need some help with VB, have some questions about it, or just want to talk to some other developers. After all, we are here to serve you and the Visual Basic community. Just please remember to be professional and patient, many of us are working in the background and want to help, but it’s possible that it might take a little patience to wait for someone to switch applications back to their IRC client to see you asking for help.
The First step is in getting an IRC client that will allow you to connect to one of the many hundreds of IRC servers around the world.
mIRC is the standard when it comes to IRC clients, so we recommend you use it. It’s highly configurable and provides you with quick and easy access to IRC. Below is a link to mIRC’s homepage.
Ok, so now that you have mIRC, "Now What?" you ask. Well, next you must find an IRC server to connect to. There are lots of IRC networks and lots of servers on each network; in fact mIRC provides a very complete listing of them in its setup information dialog box. Each of these networks has it’s own advantages but overall it’s more a matter of preference then anything else. For the ease of being a beginner we suggest checking out EfNet. Load mIRC, enter your personal info in the setup window, find the STATUS window and type the following:
/server irc.chat.org
This will connect you to a random EfNet IRC server. You will know you are connected to a server when you see a bunch of text fly by in the status window. Now in your STATUS window type:
/join #VisualBasic
Congratulations you are now a member of #VisualBasic!!
For the more seasoned IRC enthusiasts Dave Sherman ( WHiZ ) created a program to link the multiple IRC networks in #VisualBasic. While linking networks together had been done before ( EfNet was once linked in totality to another network when it originally broke off of it. ) Linking networks had never been done on this scale before. The most that had been done before was 2 IRC networks. With Dave pioneering forward into new boundaries he was the first to create a program that linked 3 networks, then 4, then 5, then 6. For this #VisualBasic is in a form of IRC history in our hearts and minds for being the first to ever have such a technology. Due to some of the linked networks not being very populated we pulled a couple of the links.
We currently are linked to the 4 major IRC Networks. Those being EfNet, UnderNet, IRCNet ( EuroNet ), and DalNet. With this link you can see people on the other networks and talk with them much like they were on your network without you having to actually be there. The link has really become an integral part of the channel, because now a developer, no matter what major network his preference, can join #VisualBasic on it and be instantly linked to all of the other developers on all of the other networks. This allows us to help a much greater amount of people from a variety of different places at the same time.
This FAQ is the result of a collaborative effort between four VB professionals from #VisualBasic. They are Dave Sherman ( WHiZ ), Jim Houghtaling ( Phaethon ), Charles Haeberle ( TJack ), and Guy Thompson (reboot). Incase your haven’t figured it out yet, the names you see in parenthesis are called nicknames. They are a lot like the Call Signs pilots get. On IRC everyone is identified by his or her nickname. Below is some information on each of the authors.
David Sherman is a professional living near Cleveland, Ohio. He has been programming now for well over a decade, and programming for a living for over 5 years first as an Independent Computer Consultant and then as the Owner / Lead Developer at Excelsior Software Productions. During this time he has worked with over 10 different programming languages, but is proud to call VB his favorite. Dave has been an avid Visual Basic Programmer since VB 1.0 first came out. He is also one of the two founders of #VisualBasic, of which he is very proud.
Jim Houghtaling has been cursed with curiosity about PC's since 1983 and has never been the same. He spent 4 years working on PC hardware in the military and has been fixing and programming PC's ever since. He discovered Visual Basic and was captivated by the ease of use and flexibility. Currently he works for a small company as the lead developer for multi-user client/server applications and Hand-held computers.
Charles M. Haeberle is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer who works for Software Consortium, Inc., a consulting firm in Towson, MD. He has done work for USF&G, T. Rowe Price, NationsBank and Blue Cross Blue Shield, to name a few. His last project, a teamwork effort, was nominated for the Microsoft Best Application award.
Guy Thompson is lead programmer at J. Goodman and Associates, Inc, a company specializing in document management and imaging software located in Memphis, TN. A professional programmer since 1984, he has watched the PC "grow up" (He claims to still have a copy of Windows 1.0 on 5 1/4" floppy discs). He has been programming in Visual Basic for a little over 3 years now, starting out way back in the dark ages of VB 1.0.
#VisualBasic is currently working on getting it’s official website on-line, in which you will find the official posting of this FAQ. But don’t be sole hearted; we have made arrangements with a couple very quality sites to host official distribution sites for it. Below are a few of them as of revision 1 of this FAQ.
We are looking for more quality sites to host a copy of this FAQ on their websites. If you are a webmaster of a quality site that is dedicated to the VB professional, helping visual basic programmers, or helping the visual basic community and would like to be an official distribution site, please drop one of the authors a /MSG on IRC. In return we will list you as one of the official distribution sites in the next FAQ revision. Better yet you will get a warm and fuzzy feeling inside knowing you are doing your part to help out #VisualBasic and Visual Basic programmers alike. Please note though, we have a limited amount of space for distribution sites we can’t have a listing of a hundred sites here.