Brad McCabe's WebLog

There has been much discussion about the pending end of Mainstream support for Visual Basic 6.0. About 2 1/2 years ago Microsoft announced the support details for VB 6.0. On March 31st of this year Mainstream support ends. There seems to be a bit of confusion...

Two points from my previous blog that I was not totally clear on in my previous post so I wanted to highlight them. First, during the Extended support period (April 1st on) if you have an MSDN subscriber or have a Premier or Alliance support contract...

I was recently asked how do you shut the system down from VB.NET, the answer is to a make a few calls to the Win32 API to do this. First you need to set up a few constants that we will need when we call the Win32 API. ' Constants Const SE_PRIVILEGE_ENABLED...

Some recently pointed out to me Cory Smith's Coding Guildlines for VB.NET and wondered why they weren't on the VB DevCenter. Let me give you the easy answer. Right now I am in the middle of this fun process called moving a wife, 3 kids (ages 5, 4, and...

I was recently building a system for a client that needed to store lots of documents. Normally I would have handled this by either storing the data in a BLOB field in the database or as a file on the disk. The difference this time is the that the customer...

Pricing and upgrade information was announced today for Visual Studio 2005 and MSDN Subscriptions. Find out more information about the expansion of the product line ( Team System ) and what it means to existing and new MSDN subscribers here .

For those of that have not already seen Dave Templin's new article in MSDN Mag. I encourage you to check it out. I liked it so much I made it a headline this week on the VB DevCenter and have it on the MSDN home page next week. For those of that still...

So Microsoft started talking about XBox 2.0 yesterday and has provided some details. From the press release : The next-generation XBox hardware design principles include the following: A well-balanced system that will deliver more than a teraflop of targeted...

My previous entry was about shutting down and restarting Windows from code. That leads to the next question which is "How do I lock the work station from code." This is simpler process. The only thing we need to do is declare the call to the Win32 API...

I was playing around the other day and I wanted to be able to put the ability to play some video into an application I was building. I thought to myself how nice it would be if I could just put Media Player into my application. Of course I would want...

During my consulting days I spent about a year and half as a database programmer writing T-SQL stored procedures. Often times the application developers would dump requirements down to the database developer that should have been done in the front end...

So one of the great things about starting a new job is you get a fresh look at everything. As a customer I always liked the VB Dev Center and thought it was well run, however I had a few pet peeves I will admit. Who hasn't thought "If I were in charge...

The Visual Basic team is running a quick, about 3 minute, survey to get feedback on partially-trusted application. The survey is looking to understand how many people are building with them and what you think about them. Please take a few minutes to feel...

For those of you that not seen the Enterprise Library was updated in January. If you are not familiar with the Enterprise Library is a combination of all of the prior work that was done by the Patterns and Practices group and released as various Application...

Eric Rudder will be hosting a chat about Whidbey on March 18th at 10AM PST. Check out the details here . Eric Rudder is the Senior Vice President in charge of Developer Tools. Let's not even talk about how many clicks up the org. chart that is from me...

Others have already said things so rather then repeat their words I am simply going to recommend you check out Soma's Blog and Jay Roxe's Blog .

For those of you that have not seen the Version 2.0 of the Updater Application Block has been released. Check it out here . The Updater block is one of my favorite pieces of of the Enterprise Library . If you are have not heard about the Updater block...

Here are some upcoming Web Cast in the next 30 days on Visual Basic. You can find the complete list of all MSDN Web Casts here as well as an RSS feed of upcoming events. It would be nice to be able to filter by technology but at the moment you need to...