Folks...

I am new to the website, and I am not very computer literate, but I have run into a dreadful (for me) VB problem. I have been writing code on a big project for some time, but in this last week or so I have noticed a dreadful problem.

Over the months of writing the program, I have been storing the progressing versions of it in separate folders, all with different names. To protect the contents of the folders, I have been zipping the files at (say) 6 hour intervals, as I code.

The problem is that VB will let me visit my own program archives, but even though VB tells me that I last saved the archive (say) a week ago (it states last saved date and time when I hover over it), when I click on to the archive  file.vbp, the latest version (perhaps last saved this morning) is the version that VB insists I use. It does not warn me either, it just keeps loading it, again and again.

Effectively, this is killing my archives for use on that computer. I have tried loading an archive onto my lap top, and I can see that the  file.vbp is an archive, so the lap-top is allowing me to use an archive file, but my desktop will not.

I have tried every trick in my book. I have re-named the folders, I have transferred files between folders, I have zipped, and unzipped, I have even encrypted the files. The problem is that when I unzip an archive file, the latest version I last saved is waiting for me, and is right there, in my face, and there is no warning.

I notice that some of the older archives are not suffering from this problem, but they are not so useful now, and some have errors in them anyway, and certainly lack the latest updates.

Folks, what on earth have I done wrong?

How do I break loose from this dreadful constraint?

Thanks.

I forgot to point out that I am using VB version 5.

It's rather old, I am reminded.

Tonight, we tried again, loading one of the program files onto a new computer, with VB v5.

The problem re-appeared. The first program loaded, but the program history followed to the next program load, and we could not shake it off.

We even re-loaded VB 5 in its entirety, again.

Then we tried to load a new program, and the old file history was waiting for us, overwriting everything.

Folks, what the heck is going on? Is there a Windows file in there that we do not know about? A re-load of VB would not shake off the old file history.

This is crazy and it's driving us crazy too.

Surely VB5 could not have been sold with this problem?

This isn't a VB net question, so it should've been put in another place (I kept it here so you would be able to find it).

However, it's possible the file you're opening is telling it what files to open -- the path to the file's are stored (in vb6 at least) in the project file.  If the main project file tells it the path/folder of where to find the file it'll open that up.  Unless you manually save EVERY file in the project separately to the new folder, and then save the main project file -- it's going to use different files when you open the project.


Although it'd be a lot simpler to save the program.  Then copy the folder itself as a backup -- but keep the same folder for all current edits.  That way the current version of the program is always in "program name" folder, and backups are of just the folder itself, and never directly opened by VB.

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Thanks.

That file storage technique you recommend is what we have been doing. We keep a single folder as "latest", and periodically save the "latest" to archive, then .zip the archive copy.

The problem is that no matter what we do, we cannot rid ourselves of the latest code.... it is always the latest code that arrives, no matter what archive we open.

The archive is correctly dated, as (for example) three weeks ago, but when we open the archive, the code is the latest code... again, and again.

Something is insisting we use latest code, even though the archive does not have it.

It's crazy.

We have to load to a NEW PC to have any hope of seeing an archive.

Sounds like the archive .vbs (or whatever the project file extension is) has the full path to the folder.

ex:
For forms, instead of "mainform.vb" it has "path_to_current_version\mainform.vb"

The project file that you open (from what I remember) is just a file with links to all the files that make up the program.  So I'd open it up in notepad, and see what it's linking -- possibly editing it so that the file locations are to the archive folder (by removing the path information whenever possible)

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