April, 2007

Simple Animation in Visual Basic (Matt Gertz) The basics: You're almost certainly used to placing controls on a form; however, you probably have an expectation that they will stay in place once you put them there. That need not be the case, however...

Visual Studio is all about developer productivity. To help developers be more efficient, Visual Studio has built keyboard shortcuts into the product for most of the functions normally found through the user interface – just like CTRL-C for copy. To help...

I’ve had a wide variety of jobs over my career, beyond working at Microsoft. I’ve been a burger-flipper and an administrative assistant. I’ve worked with the DOE and NASA on robotics projects, and back in my NROTC days I spent a month at the helm &...

The Visual Basic team has put together a "Live from Redmond" webcast series aimed at the next version of Visual Basic and Visual Studio code named "Orcas". The live series starts April 18th and will continue to the end of May. Come join us for this exciting...

Since we have so many Orcas posts going up on this blog, I've decided to continue with a few that you can use TODAY in Visual Studio 2005. This one is about working with shortcut keys... For those of you using the Visual Basic Development Settings...

At the Mix conference today in Las Vegas, Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie were dropping goodies like tootsie pops from a piñata. There was so much packed into their over two hour keynote that I thought it would be useful to distill the announcements down...

Woohoo! Its official , we finally got Orcas Beta1 out the door! We’re very excited to get this release out to you so we can finally talk about some of the stuff we’ve been working on in addition to the LINQ and XML feature-set. We believe that Orcas Beta1...

Controls on the fly (Matt Gertz) So last week, I posted up a simple “Maze” game, in which you navigate through a virtual environment similar to the old “Myst” game. The way I’d coded it, though, it didn’t actually have any “game” to it – you just walked...

Using XML as a resource in your code –one more series on gamewriting (Matt Gertz) This is actually going to be part one of a two-part blog. In this post, I’m going to cover some basic usage of XML, as well as a few other interesting coding points such...

This post was inspired by a customer bug on Connect . However, it exposes a cool trick that you all might want to try! Consider the case that you want to make the Command Window item appear in the View menu itself (rather than in its current location...

Now that Orcas Beta1 is on your machines, we’re trying to finish up the Beta2 version of Orcas to deliver those features you are so eagerly awaiting – features like Group By, explicit Joins, Nullable, keyword Intellisense, and Lambda Expressions. Things...

The Visual Basic LINQ Samples have been updated for Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1 ! This is a set of 101 samples that demonstrate all the features of Visual Basic's Language Integrated Query in Orcas Beta 1. Also check out the The LINQ Project page...

Live Meeting had some technical issues for this morning's webcast with John Stallo. Sincerest apologies from the Visual Basic team. We’ve rescheduled the webcast for this Tuesday, April 24th. Please register here . Also don't forget to register for the...

The title pretty much describes this post. I had fully intended to work on a Smart Device application for VB last week, and post the walkthrough here. VB is a great language for coding against devices, and there are a lot of cool things you can use a...