Hello, 

My name is Greg.

I am a student at Franklin University, in Columbus, Ohio. I am taking
Programming In Visual Basic.

I am programming in Visual Basic .NET, in a console application.  I am
doing the following assignment;

??.
A company pays its salespeople on a commission basis.  The salespeople
receive $200 per week, plus 9% of their gross sales for that week. 
For example, a salesperson who grosses $5000 in sales in a week
receives $200 plus 9% of $5000, or a total of $650.  Develop a console
program (using a one-dimensional array of counters) that determines
how many of the salespeople earned salaries in each of the following
ranges (assume that each salesperson?s salary is truncated to an
integer amount):

a)	$200-$299
b)	$300-$399
c)	$400-$499
d)	$500-$599
e)	$600-$699
f)	$700-$799
g)	$800-$899
h)	$900-$999
i)	$1000 an over

The program should first ask how many salespeople are in the company,
and then input as integers their grossed sales for that week.
....

I understand the formula for figuring out the salary; (grosssales *
.09) + 200 for the earned salary.

I also understand arrays to a point.  What I cannot figure out is how
to have the calculated salary fall into the array, which by my
understanding cannot have ranges in the elements (e.g. 200 - 299) and
add to the counter or frequency for the salary range.

I have considered creating Case statements for the ranges and using
those but, I am still unsure of how I would have the return variable
fall into the array.

Please help.

Thanks,
Greg

Don't use the salary amount as the array index.  Make an array with 9
elements, with each one representing the salary categories.  Write a
function into which you can pass in the salary amount and have it
return an integer from 0 to 8, based on which range the salary fell. 
Use a case statement in the function that would return 0 if salary
$200-$299 and 1 if salary $300-$399, etc.

Say you call your 9-element array SalaryCounts, the function
GetGroupIndex and the salary amount is in a variable called
salaryAmount.  You can increment your array like this:

SalaryCounts( GetGroupIndex(salaryAmount) ) += 1

Just as a side note, what is supposed to happen if the salary is $299.50?

Also, what if the salary is $50.00?

It's always good to explicitly define these gray areas in your solutions.

Thank you very much. The case statements worked like a charm!

I have the following and as I step through I go through 9 iterations I
believe. Is the array setup correctly?

 Sub Main()

        Dim salespeople As Double
        Console.WriteLine("Please input number of salespeople:")
        salespeople = Console.ReadLine

        While salespeople <> 0


            Dim grosssales As Double
            Console.WriteLine("Please input gross sales for
salesperson: {0}", salespeople)
            grosssales = Console.ReadLine


            Dim salary As Double
            salary = (grosssales * 0.09) + 200
            Console.WriteLine("Salary is:{0} ", salary)


            getgroupindex(salary)

            Dim Salarycounts As Integer()
            Salarycounts = New Integer(9) {}


            For salaryamount = 0 To Salarycounts.GetUpperBound(0)

                Salarycounts(getgroupindex(salaryAmount)) += 1

            Next

            Console.WriteLine("Salary Amount is : {0}", salaryamount)


We have not covered exception handling yet, so I am unsure.  

I am assuming (bad thing to do, I know) that I will have to use a
windows message box, as in our example on pp 250 - 254 of Visual Basic
.NET, 2nd Ed., Dietel, 2002, Upper Saddle River, NJ, ISBN
0-13-029363-3. To properly display the results. Or figure the best way
in the console app to display that and allow for the tie into the # of
sales people.

Thanks again for all your help.

Greg

Kinda of tired and delerious (spelling?) right now

You're on the right track.  This will help you along a bit:

Sub Main()

	' put all your declarations and initialization up here

	Dim salespeople As Double
	Dim grosssales As Double
	Dim salary As Double
	Dim Salarycounts As Integer()
	Salarycounts = New Integer(9) {0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0} ' be sure to
initialize arrays before using them

	Console.WriteLine("Please input number of salespeople:")
	salespeople = Console.ReadLine

        While salespeople <> 0
		Console.WriteLine("Please input gross sales for salesperson: {0}", salespeople)
		grosssales = Console.ReadLine

		salary = (grosssales * 0.09) + 200
		Console.WriteLine("Salary is:{0} ", salary)

                ' increment the appropriate salary-range counter
                Salarycounts(getgroupindex(salary)) += 1
		salespeople -= 1
	Wend


	' display program output	

	Console.WriteLine("Salary $200-$299 : {0}", Salarycounts(0) )
	Console.WriteLine("Salary $300-$399 : {1}", Salarycounts(0) )
	...

End Sub

Function getgroupindex(ByVal s as Integer)
	Select Case s
		Case 200 To 299
			Return 0
		... and so on, or however you've defined this function

End Function