March, 2007

About two weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the product group dinner associated with the Global MVP Summit that was behind held here at Microsoft. Besides a free meal, this also gave me the excellent opportunity to meet with some of our MVPs and...

This webcast series is devoted to those who want to learn to really use Visual Basic and what it can do! Learn from Ron Cundiff , Developer Evangelist and featured Microsoft speaker. This is a 20+ part series that's underway. Check out the on demand...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 3: Timers In my previous posts regarding the Euchre game creation, I discussed some issues with creating a complex form and maintaining images to be shown on it. In this posting, I’m going to start covering some of the more...

This is the sixth installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here . Today I am going to talk about some best practices for using extension methods. Most of this content is geared toward authors...

Here's a list of new data tools features in Visual Studio. I will be discussing each one in more detail in upcoming posts. Object Relational Designer The object relational mapping technology lets you map relational databases to objects. Once the...

Back when I first started writing code, I got interested in game writing, and was fairly sure I could write out text-based games as well as the other offerings one could find on mainframes and, later, on the Commodores/TRS/Apples of the day. The flow...

Greetings, all! I’m Matt Gertz, the Dev Manager for Visual Basic team. I’ve been on the team for a bit over 12 years, via the Blackbird/Visual InterDev side of the product, and in that time have been a dev on various features (mostly IDE-related),...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 9: Into the Wild Blue Yonder So, here we are at the end of this series, which I hope you’ve found interesting. In this final post, I’m going to talk about deployment – getting your code shipped to another person. Oh, and...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 6: Pump up the volume Ever since Commodore first introduced the SID chip to their line of PCs way back in the earlier 80’s, sound has been an important experience in any computer game. What’s particularly exciting to me is...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 2: Show me the cards! In my previous post, I discussed using control-drag to speed up the design of a form which uses lots of similar controls. In this post, I’m going to discuss displaying images on those controls. Now...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 4: Tooltips and Menus Menus and tooltips are so incredibly important to applications, and yet implementing them sometimes seems to be arcane magic. In this post, I’m going to do my best to demystify them. Menus To add...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 5: Modality is a crutch It’s really tempting to rely on modal dialogs in a program. It forces the user to pay attention to what you feel is the most important thing. However, modal dialogs can also be frustrating to users...

Several people asked me whether TableAdapter can be used to retrieve multiple result sets from stored procedures. The quick answer is... No, you can't do that with TableAdapter.Fill() method that gets generated as a part of Typed Dataset. But there's...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 7: Total Logic Since I’ve been concentrating on specific VB functionality, you may have noticed that the one topic I haven’t really drilled into yet is game logic, and yet it’s central to what a game is all about. Games have...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 8: Remember Me, Show Me, Help Me We’re getting close to wrapping up this series. In this post, I want to cover several “clean up” topics, and then in the following post, I’ll talk about deployment and will attach the entire...