Back then during my college days, I got fascinated by programming and was enjoying coding. It was at that time we use to get invite to participate in lot of coding competitions from different colleges. I was doing Bachelor in Computer Science & Education (B.Sc.Ed. Integrated Course) Computer Science.
Project Kickoff
I set out to build something interesting, was doing brainstroming with couple of my friends about what do we do for quite sometime and finally zeroed down to building MP3 Player . I am a huge fan of Music and thought this would be nice thing to do.
Just the begining
Now after setting out to build MP3 Player, we need to identify what are the features we should have in the player. Here is the list we prepared. Something I wanted to make a special feature that I wanted to have. I wanted to have the player play for 20 min. and Shutdown the computer. I need this desperately because at time I doze of working at the desk and the song keeps on playing. Hence I added these two features.
Features
- Play, Pause, Stop
- Playlist Management – Add song to playlist, Remove song from playlist, Create playlist, Open saved playlist.
- Drag and Drop Song to playlist.
- To play for n min. and shutdown the computer.
- To play n songs. and shutdown the computer.
I implemented Shutdown of Computer using Win32API provided by Microsoft. To give little background I would write another complete technical post about the project in detail. Another major technology that I used was ActiveX Controls. ActiveX is a technology built by Microsoft to build Software Components that can be reused by the application and they can be distributed in binary format. This gave a great edge for the developers to build desktop applications much faster. For example instead of building the scrollbar, you can quickly use scrollbar that is already built. But this ActiveX controls have a flip side which is Security concern, Since ActiveX controls are shipped in binary format we have no clue of the code thats is present. Using this flaw lot of hackers built very bad malicious softwares and ship them with the software. Still now ActiveX is prevalent in the Microsoft world.
Good Learning Resource for Visual Basic 6
I was not a pro then with visualbasic, So looked out for some good books and reference for visual basic. I found these books just awesome.
- Visual Basic 6 from the Ground Up by Gary Cornel
- Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 21 days by Nathan Gurewich
This gave me a good grip and confidence to work on the projects. Followup on MSDN Reference that comes with Visual Basic 6 was handy throughout the project.
These exercise lead me to complete the project successfully and we participated in couple of inter-college competitions and won prizes. Computer Society of India, Pondicherry Chapter is something i have close association with during my college days. We are given an opportunity to show case this project at PC Expo 2012. What you see in the picture is we demonstrated this at our College Stall at Computer Society of India Pondicherry Chapter 2012. If you have great eyesight you can see its mentioned there as CSI Stall. It was a great and pridefull moment during my college time. We also gave a name for the projects SAMP3 which is the acronym of my Mother’s Name – S.A.Margret MP3 after cutting out the repeating M.
Source Code: Mp3 Player in Visual basic Source Code