Welcome and thank you for downloading the Programmer's Lab. The Programmer's Lab presents a compiled collection of over 500 functions that empower limited programming languages and simplify complex code at the same time. It accomplishes these two seemingly different things by acting like a dynamic link library (DLL).

Like a dynamic link library, the Programmer's Lab receives a request for a specific function from a software program. The software program communicates with the Programmer's Lab through the common "shell," "execute," or "run" command found in popular programming languages like Visual Basic, WSH (Windows Script Host), and even the DOS batch file.

The Programmer's Lab then uses common programming functions (date, time, file, folder, math, system, media, networking, and string commands) to store the results of those functions for the software program that requested it.

Results are stored in a textbox, a small file, or the end-user's clipboard for the taking.

The Programmer's Lab provides over 500 functions in nine distinct areas:

• Date - From adding dates to grabbing the current year.
• File - From opening a specific Excel worksheet to grabbing the current version of Word.
• Math - From getting a number's absolute value to grabbing a two-tailed p-value of a z-test.
• Media - From getting the blue component of a color to grabbing a window.s current state.
• Networking - From disconnecting a network drive to uploading a file to an FTP server.
• String - From working with ASCII code to stripping all white space from a string of text.
• System - From activating a window to grabbing the current/active working directory.

All of these functions (and even more in-between) will help you transform an elementary development program into a very sophisticated piece of work.

None of the functions above would be very helpful if they weren't easy to use. That's why the Programmer's Lab was designed to simplify what can seem like programming chaos. The Programmer's Lab:

• Works with any Windows-based programming language (even e-books!).
• Reduces anywhere from 5 to 20 lines of code to just one.
• Comes with an easy-to-use interface for safe testing and experimentation.
• Takes up under 1MB of disk space. (That's tiny!)
• Automatically updates without any effort on your part.
• Makes the complex simple and the inconceivable believable.
• Takes advantage of Microsoft products like Excel, Access, and Word.
• Costs absolutely nothing to use or distribute. The Programmer's Lab is 100% free.