How to Create a Clock in Visual Basic

Submitted by Yorkiebar on Monday, September 30, 2013 - 06:20.

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Introduction: Welcome to a tutorial on how to create a clock in Visual Basic. Steps of Creation: Step 1: I will just be loading the current time in to a simple, plain label. You can customize yours or set it as a filewriter etc. So first we want to set checking for illegal crossThread calls to false on the form load. This is because we will be using a new thread to run the loop of updating the clock and it will be an illegal crossThread call which would throw an error. We also want to begin our function on form load.

Private Sub Form1_Load(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
    CheckForIllegalCrossThreadCalls = False
    begin()
End Sub

We also want to import a threading namespace...

Imports System.Threading

Step 2: Next we want to create our begin function. This will create our new thread and set it to the addressOf updateClock, another custom function (which is not yet created). We also set it to background and start it.

Private Function begin()
    Dim trd As thread = New Thread(AddressOf updateClock)
    trd.isBackground = True
    trd.Start()
End Function

Step 3: Finally we create our updateClock function. This simply sets the label1 text with the current time in the format of HourHour:MinuteMinute:SecondsSeconds.

Private Function updateClock()
    While True
        Label1.Text = Format(Now, "hh:mm:ss")
        thread.sleep(1000)
    End While
End Function

Project Complete! Below is the full source code and download to the files...

Imports System.Threading
Public Class Form1
    Private Sub Form1_Load(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
        CheckForIllegalCrossThreadCalls = False
        begin()
    End Sub
 
    Private Function begin()
        Dim trd As thread = New Thread(AddressOf updateClock)
        trd.isBackground = True
        trd.Start()
    End Function
 
    Private Function updateClock()
        While True
            Label1.Text = Format(Now, "hh:mm:ss")
            thread.sleep(1000)
        End While
    End Function
End Class

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