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CDEx does just what you want and is free. It can rip individual tracks or a range to either WAV or MP3. I have just used it to rip an entire CD to a single file. It is a bit slow, but OK if you let it work away in the background while you do something else and don’t have a stack of CDs to convert against a deadline. For commercial CDs, it grabs the track details from online databases and sets the tags automatically. It is what I use for all my ripping needs. Highly recommended. (No connection to the product; just a happy user.)

http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

I was going to recommend Scratch. The other thing you might try (for a more Java-like language) is Greenfoot (http://www.greenfoot.org/door), but for quick gratification try Scratch.

Hello Kobs,

Firstly, you don’t need the line ‘intCount = Convert.ToInt32(dirInfo)’ and I am not sure what it is supposed to do. You initialise intCount to zero, and every time you meet a file whose extension is ‘dat’, you add one to it and end up with a count. So just delete that line.

There are some more errors. GetFiles returns a FileInfo object, so you need to dim files as System.IO.FileInfo. You get the extension with files.extension — you overcomplicated this step. And as you will see, it actually returns the dot as well as the extension. Here is the corrected code:

Dim filepath As String = “C:Gasresult”
Dim dirInfo As New System.IO.DirectoryInfo(filepath)
Dim intCount As Integer = 0
Dim files As System.IO.FileInfo

For Each files In dirInfo.GetFiles
If files.Extension = “.dat” Then
‘intCount = Convert.ToInt32(dirInfo) Delete!
intCount = intCount + 1
End If
Next files
MsgBox(intCount)

But GetFiles has another trick up its sleeve: you can specify a pattern, and this means you can reduce the whole count to one line:

Dim filepath As String = “C:Gasresult”
Dim dirInfo As New System.IO.DirectoryInfo(filepath)
Dim intCount As Integer

intCount = dirInfo.GetFiles(“*.dat”).Count
MsgBox(intCount)

Andrew

A lot of the replies here have concentrated on Outlook as an email client, and certainly there are plenty of good alternatives.
But Outlook also handles Tasks (ToDo lists, with reminders and ability to show how much has been completed), Journal (where you can record the time you spend on activities), Notes (Post-it style notes), Calendar (with reminders and a rich set of features for recurring appointments) and of course Contacts. Your decision may depend on whether you want to use any of these as well and whether you want them integrated.
I use Outlook at home because I have to use it at work and I don’t want to have to get used to two programs, though if it were just for email I probably wouldn’t mind. But I use the Calendar, and use Google Calendar Sync to keep my home and work schedules in sync, even though I rarely visit the Google Calendar itself. I would like to sync Contacts and Notes, but since FusionOne closed down, I haven’t found anything reliable.
The Reminders are pretty important to me, and as I have Outlook open all the time, it works. I found Google Calendar will send email reminders, but they are not as flexible or reliable — emails can get delayed, and there is no ‘snooze’ function!

Paultx was lucky that he found built-in icons that suited his purpose. My point was that you cannot customise the icons like you can in 2003 and there are only about 40 IIRC to choose from, most of which so generic that they cannot reflect the purpose of the button.

I also was pleased to see that Office 2010 allowed editing of the Ribbon, but when I tried it found it was too limited. Most importantly for me, I have in Office 2003 a few macros that I use daily and often, with toolbar buttons I have created for them with recognisable icons. The ability to code time-savers is, old-timers will recall, what computers were once for.
I moved all my personal icons into one toolbar and upgraded to 2010. But does my toolbar appear anywhere? Only via an extra Ribbon tab. I want them to be available all the time, not need two clicks to do what I used to do in one! So I tried putting them on the QAT. This worked, but there’s no way to customise the icons. So now I have a row of a dozen or more identical buttons. Useless.
Believe me, I am hardly up to Sam’s standard with his 5 customised toolbars and I quite like the Ribbon. The QAT would have satisfied me (despite lack of friendly features like separators) but it just falls too far short.
It is annoying that the Ribbon wastes so much space on useless stuff like Copy and Paste — why doesn’t Microsoft use the space to advertise Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to the dumb newbies? — but if you remove that bit, you also lose Format Painter, which is a button I do use sometimes.
I know that programmers can code their own additions to the Ribbon, but it looks too complicated for me. I just went back to 2003 — which is still pretty good!