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...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus) It’s been a while since I wrote one of these XML cookbook entries. Here’s some info on a common problem: Really big XML files. I’m going to show you two things in this recipe. The first is a tip on reading very...

One of the common use-cases of XML literals is creating HTML. However, HTML entities cannot be used in XML literals since LINQ to XML directly supports only the Data type definitions (DTD) defined in the XML 1.0 spec. You can read more about it here . The workaround is to use the Unicode representation...

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...

This one’s going to be long, but for those of you who’ve felt the first 3 in this series were too easy I promise this one’s tougher J . Let’s say you want to list all the customers from a table in a ComboBox, and update the UI based on which one is selected. To do this we’ll need to bring back...

What’s wrong with the following WPF code? Class Window1 Sub OK_Click(sender As Object , e As RoutedEventArgs) Handles OK.Click MsgBox( "Button Clicked" ) End Sub End Class < Window x : Class ="Window1" xmlns ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation...

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 yesterday’s post we saw that the use of the wrong comparison operator with Nothing in an If block can lead to surprising results. Let’s look at a slightly different case today: Dim x As Integer = Nothing If x = Nothing Then MsgBox( "A true statement - we land here" ) Else MsgBox...

Microsoft has this neat mailing list called “Spot the Bug” where developers can send interesting snippets of code that look correct but actually have subtle bugs in them. The puzzles are a lot of fun and I’ve always thought it’d be a fun thing to try here on the team blog. Over the past year or so I...

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...

While helping some Windows API folks with some sample code this week, I stumbled upon...uh...I mean “carefully researched” an issue that you might find handy. You may be aware that the RaiseEvent statement automatically checks to verify if an event handler exists before raising the event. If the event...

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...

About two years ago I posted some code that shows how to dynamically construct LINQ queries at runtime . On average there's a couple questions per month about trying it in some edge case, and usually the support already exists within the API. Recently though someone posted a question that has to do with...

There are a lot of great Entity Framework samples on Code Gallery that you can now find available in Visual Basic .NET. This was recently announced on the ADO.NET team blog . Browse through the list below and start downloading! ADO.NET Entity Framework Query Samples (Download) ADO.NET Entity Framework...

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...

Very exciting news! Developer Express is coming out with a new version of the FREE add-in we all know today as Refactor! . The new product, CodeRush XPress, builds on Refactor! by increasing the refactoring count to 59! It also includes a host of other editing functionality, making it a much richer tool...

Steele wrote a great article in last month's issue of Visual Studio Magazine on XML Literals, WCF and LINQ. He shows how to use these three technologies together to produce more responsive ASP.NET pages, and more readable code. Lots of great tips for VB 2008. VSM's "On VB" Column: XML Literals, WCF...

2009 is the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Press ! To celebrate their b-bay they’re giving away two free e-books, namely Windows Small Business Server 2008 Administrator's Companion by Charlie Russel and Sharon Crawford (27 chapters, 3 appendices, 712 pages) Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express...

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...

Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on using the Touchless SDK. The Touchless SDK enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. "Touch without touching." It's actually pretty cool! In this interview I meet up with Touchless SDK creator, Mike Wasserman...

Alex Turner presented VB XML yesterday here at MIX 09. Check out the video from his session! Video link: http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T72M (The powerpoint slides are attached.) Making XML Really, Really Easy with Microsoft Visual Basic 9 MIX09-T72M Wednesday March 18 |11:55 AM - 12:15 PM |...