Converting Time formats

[donrecardo]

I am very new to the forum ( about 50 mins ago) so Hi everyone.

I am almost as new to VB ( about 2 weeks ) . I started learning at college 2 weeks ago, but we only do 1 evening a week and at my age ( 60) with no programming background its not sinking it as fast I would like. I have been doing lots of reading of VB tutorials and that seems to help. Please bear with me if I dont understand everything you explain to me the first go around .

I did have two problems to ask about and after writing a great long screed to you all asking for help how to ,,,,,,, I suddenly worked out the answer for myself , so now I only have one question left ( dont worry , there will be more , lots more )

I have a variable which I called ElapsedTime . I press a button and it displays
the time in seconds since clicking the button, into a label . I did it with

Private Sub Timer2_Tick(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Timer2.Tick
        LblElapsedTime1.Text = ElapsedTime
        ElapsedTime = ElapsedTime + 1

    End Sub

    Private Sub BtnStart_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles BtnStart.Click
        Timer2.Enabled = True

    End Sub

This updates every second a bit like a simple stop watch. Great so far , because I do need the elapsed time ( in seconds) for later use in my app. However , whilst elapsed time is being displayed in this label on the screen I want it to be shown in HH:MM:SS format .
How can I convert it into a new variable " ElapsedTime2 " so that I can show it in the desired format yet still retain my original " ElapsedTime " variable for later

Regards
Don

 

[newguy]

Welcome to the forum...
Then ElapsedTime should be a TimeSpan then update it like:

Dim ElapsedTime As New TimeSpan

'tick event
ElapsedTime = ElapsedTime.Add(New TimeSpan(0,0,1))
'New TimeSpan format is (hr,min,sec)
LblElapsedTime1.Text = ElapsedTime.ToString

 

[donrecardo]

Hi and thanks for the reply.

I updated my code with what you sent me and it runs just as it should

I cant honestly say I understand why it works as having only done a very small ammount with VB I think Timespan is a little advanced for me just yet .
I will have to see what I can find out about it.

I didnt know how to get back the elapsed time in seconds as it was before because your new code had hijacked my old elapsed time variable which had earlier stored the elapsed time in seconds format. I searched out what I could online and it took me three goes but I finally came up with

 ElapsedSeconds = (ElapsedTime.Hours * 3600) + (ElapsedTime.Minutes * 60) + (ElapsedTime.Seconds)
        Label3.Text = ElapsedSeconds

I doubt my way around the problem is the most elegant way to do it but it does seem to work as it should .

I only have one small problem remaining with this section and that is ,,,,,
The system time is reading as it should but the elapsed time both in hours,mins seconds, and my second elapsed time in seconds only both read a slightly different time to system time . It was losing a second per minute compared to system time .
I dont know if I have gone about curing it the right way but I decreased the interval value in the timer from 1000 down to 983 . It then ran fast by 7 seconds in ten minutes or 0.7secs per minute . I guess that means I need to set the tick value to some where between 983 and 1000

Regards
Don

 

[Tom]

Don, take a look at the "StopWatch Class" in the helpfile. It has examples and may explain the use of timespan formatting in more detail for you.

 

[JohnH]

Timer is not a control used to measure time, use time to measure time, and use the Timer to get reocurring events.

Private start As Date

when started:

start = Date.Now

Timer.Tick:

Dim elapsed As TimeSpan = Date.Now.Subtract(start)
Me.LabelElapsed.Text = CInt(elapsed.TotalSeconds).ToString

The StopWatch basically does the same, only wraps up some more functionality, but it is not available for donrecardo in .Net 1.1. Btw I encourage you to upgrade to todays VB; Visual Studio, the language and .Net library is ever evolving: Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition

Here's help for TimeSpan, have a look through its members also: TimeSpan Structure (System)

 

[donrecardo]

Thanks for that John ( and Tom )

and thanks also for the links , I have been trying to get to grips with VB for about 9 hours today so my head is now spinning a bit , but tomorrow after a sleep I will look deeper into what you have sent me

Thanks

Don

 

[donrecardo]

Btw I encourage you to upgrade to todays VB; Visual Studio, the language and .Net library is ever evolving: url]

Hi , Actually at home I do have VB 2008 Express , but I am avoiding using it because at college we use VB 2003 and if I bring my course work home on a USB stick to continue at home it will say it needs to convert it to run on VB2008 and I would assume that it will then no longer work when I take it back to college next week .

Don

 

[JohnH]

That makes sense, VB 2008 is only backwards compatible to.Net 2.0, so that would conflict with what you can do in school projects. I used VB 2003 for a long time before VB 2005 and VB 2008, so I can mostly remember the limitations of the language and .Net 1.1, but I can imagine this can be real troublesome to deal with for you.

 

[donrecardo]

Things are looking up but still more problems

Hi John
things are looking up, I talked with my tutor about what you had discussed with me regarding updating to vb2008 from the outdated vb2003
that they use on our college course. She said although the college wont allow her to have all the college PC's updated to vb2008 she is happy for me to take in my laptop and run vb2008 on that , so at least now I am on a more up to date system.

I have been trying to work through the early (easy) projects from Microsofts visual basic.net:reloaded course , which is what the college is using to teach us . I did the one project which runs fine but now I want to convert it to make it a little more elaborate ( not too much)

I am tryng to build a form that represents an fm radios front panel . It has a label which shows the frequency and will have an up and down tuning button to increase/decrease the displayed frequency by 0.1 Mhz with each press

I decided I needed a starting frequency but cant find out how to dim numbers with decimal places so instead I did
dim tuner as integer =1234
for the high part ( Mhz) i did
dim highpart as integer = tuner / 10 ( so should equal 123)
and for the low part ( Khz) I did
dim lowpart as integer = tuner mod 10 ( so should equal 4)

So far so good , Now I want to display the frequency in the label as

123.4 Mhz , that is to say highpart + a decimal point + lowpart + Mhz

I tried things like

label1.text = highpart + "." + lowpart + " Mhz"

but it wont compile . I am not sure but I think its something to do with Casting ? . I believe I am trying to mix numbers and strings and it doesnt like it . Of course as a total newbie I could be totaly wrong in my assumption. but even if it is a casting error I dont know the way out of it , can you point me in the right direction please

Don