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Hi, all! It's been a while since I've posted to this blog, and a lot has happened in my world since then. Though I've been pretty busy on our engineering systems team, I took a little time off last summer to do some traveling and, more importantly, some long overdue writing. Although I'd always...

One of the really fun things about being associated with the Visual Basic team is getting to see all of the varied usages to which our customers put it. From enterprise software to games, our customer base covers a wide range. The most fun to see, however, are the hobby applications, because the writers...

“Oh, no!” I hear you cry, “not another blog about Euchre!” Well, I do like the game, to be sure. But, more importantly, the Euchre scenario enables me to try out any new technologies on a reasonably complex problem (using Visual Basic, of course). It’s my way of checking out our product to make sure...

In this post, I’ll continue on with coding the new playlist shuffler. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, I highly recommend it so that this post will make more sense. J Code for the controls (continued) The Title TextBox When the title changes, we’ll want to indicate that the playlist has changed...

Way back in October 2007, I wrote up a few posts ( here and here ) on my experiments with the Windows Media Player object model. The problem I was trying to solve was that, when I had a playlist set to “shuffle,” WMP would break up songs that should always play together (for example, Jackson Browne’s...

In my last post, I talked about the hidden costs that can occur whenever you call out to methods, particularly in loops. In looking at my examples, reader KG2V commented that another thing that folks need to be aware of is avoiding the assumption that the world (or, in this case, a list) is a static...

(Note: there was a grievous error in this post based on a bad assumption on my art regarding VB. Not feeling the need to hide my ignorance :-), I have instead made a number of edits in this post to bring it back to some semblance of reality.) One thing that gets me annoyed with myself is realizing...

In my previous post, we fixed up a C# GPS library to provide more support, and wrote all of the UI for a VB GPS application, all based on (but modified from) a Mobile GPS sample in the Windows Mobile 6.0 SDK. In this post, we’ll finish up the app by enabling a bunch of cool functionality not exposed...

The title of this blog post has sort of a triple meaning for me. First of all, I just got back from a long (and wonderful!) cruise in the Caribbean, followed by a stop at Disney World. And of course, if you go to Disney World with kids, it’s the law that you have to go through the “It’s a Small World...

By now, many of you will have downloaded the recent beta that we posted to the net, and (hopefully) are getting excited about the features that we’ve been developing. Recently, Beth Massi interviewed me about some of the work that I’ve been doing as a part of that effort. I always enjoy interviews, and...

Ever wonder how we build Visual Studio and the .NET Framework? I mean literally. You know, the build process that spits out a product at the other end?  Well I sure did and it's not just hitting F5 people ;-). In this interview I sit down with Matt Gertz, frequent VB blogger and also the guy in...

In my post “ M. G. Phone Home ,” I discussed how to write a simple phone application for Windows Mobile, using Visual Basic, which accesses the Bluetooth service. What I didn’t discuss was how to deploy it to the phone via CAB. Since I purchased a new phone yesterday (a Samsung Saga, running Windows...

I’ve always enjoyed writing. Putting pen to paper (or, these days, fingers to keyboard) is something that brings a lot of joy into my life, even more than music or any other hobby that I have. I’ve been writing stories since earlier than I can remember, have faithfully kept a daily diary for many years...

As I’ve written elsewhere, the toughest critics for any work you do can always be found in your own family. Pleased at the immense work that I’d done in scanning in and tagging all of my photos and media (as noted in this post ) , and with my ego sufficiently boosted by writing a screensaver in VB that...

In part 1 of this series, I constructed a pair of classes to supporting persisting MIDI data to files. In this entry, I’ll now leverage that code to support an (admittedly limited) music editor experience. Caveat : As I mentioned in the first post, I’m sure many readers will be far more knowledgeable...

As I’ve alluded to in previous blogs, music has always been a big part of my life, particularly performance music. I’ve been a clarinet and saxophone player for many years, am an avid singer, and (with the help of friends) I’ve done my best to teach myself piano and drums. Composition of music, however...

I’ve just completed a task that I set out to do about five years ago, and I am pretty proud (and tired)! I have just finished scanning in every single photo that I’ve acquired over my 40+ years of life, fixing up their dates to reflect the date when the picture was taken, not when it was scanned. Furthermore...

Back in seventh grade, I had a pretty heavy crush on a girl named Melissa. She was a good friend of mine, and so I had no problems talking to her. However, being painfully shy back then, I was far too nervous to ever ask her to “go with” me. (For those not steeped in American traditions, to “go with...

M. G. Phone Home (Matt Gertz) I have a slight problem with my cell phone. It’s a smartphone; I love it, I use it all the time, and I don’t what I’d do without it, but I’ve been pretty aggravated with its support of Bluetooth. It will fail to pair with the Sync system in the car at random times, which...

I was once temporarily taken off the VB team to get an unrelated project back on track, just a mere handful of weeks before it was due to ship. I won’t go into the gory details; suffice it to say that we had reason to believe that the product would have to ship without delay, and that any major failure...

Here's another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time with Matt Gertz. Matt still posts frequently on the VB Team blog even though he's changed roles (look at how big his name still is in our tag cloud on the right ;-)). Matt is a great technical leader...

Well, that was… intense. You may have noticed the lack of articles coming from my direction. I have been so buried in work, and so far behind, that when I look forwards all I see is backwards. I work, I drive home, I work some more, and it all seems to keep piling up. I would like to say that this...

In yesterday’s blog post, I walked through an engine for translating DNA to its amino acid results via messenger RNA. In today’s blog, we’ll work on the visualization using WPF StackPanels. (This example requires VS2008, although it could certainly be written in WinForms as well with just a little bit...

As I was preparing to graduate from the University of Michigan way back in the late eighties, I had a big decision to make regarding grad school – robotics at Carnegie Mellon, or biology at Washington State? On the one hand, biology was something I’d always really loved, having even intended to go to...

Supporting the “pajama programmer” Telecommuting is a great thing, and as the environmentally-conscious person that I strive to be, is something I wholeheartedly endorse when it can be done practically. My current job involves a lot of face-to-face meetings with people, so I don’t actually do a lot...