I am enjoying this book and have learned much from it. However, being a novice I had some difficulty with the example discussed on pages 136-142.
Presumably in the interest of clarity, the example uses the Hour property of a DateTimePicker named "dtpHour" as the value of a custom Form property called "Hour". I found it much easier to understand how the code works by renaming the DateTimePicker "dtpSelect", and renaming the custom Form property "Time".

Well. I've plodded ahead through a hashtable and a fireswamp. I'm so lost now, I . . . wait! Is that Amelia Earhart?

Richard,

Hang in there. This book is like life: you have to figure most of it out for yourself. I'm new to programming, too, and have had more than a few moments of frustration with this book, but have been able to fix most of the problems I've come across--sometimes through logical analysis and sometimes through guesses after reading the tooltip error messages. I've gone around the code that couldn't be fixed.

This book is probably no better nor worse than most on the same subject. I have about a dozen VB2005 books--make that 10, because I've thrown two of them into the trash heap. They all have one thing in common: nobody in the publishing world edits the code, nor do they try to run it using the released Visual Studio 2005 IDE software.

So have some fun and make things work your way. If you feel lost on page 136, go back to page 135 or earlier until you feel comfortable again...then go forward again...Amelia be damned!

You have no idea how amazingly good I feel, knowing someone else has had trouble learning this stuff. I'm going to redouble my efforts and figure this out. That tool tip suggestion is like a light in the tunnel. I gotta try that out. Maybe I'm just getting too impatient. Thanks FosterD. Thanks for being there.