Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

March 2007 - Visual Basic Blog

Partial Methods

March 28, 2007 Mar 28, 2007 03/28/07
VBTeam
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 discuss their impressions with Visual Studio and all the cool new features we are ...

Visual Basic "Soup-to-Nuts" Webcast Series

March 27, 2007 Mar 27, 2007 03/27/07
Beth Massi
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 recordings and sign up for the live webcasts here.-Beth Massi, Program Manager VS Core ...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 7: Total Logic (Matt Gertz)

March 22, 2007 Mar 22, 2007 03/22/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 7:  Total LogicSince 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 certainly gotten more sophisticated over the years, and yet that...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 6: Pump up the volume (Matt Gertz)

March 20, 2007 Mar 20, 2007 03/20/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
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 that audio has caught up to graphics as far as game relevance goes – I can’...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 5: Modality is a crutch (Matt Gertz)

March 19, 2007 Mar 19, 2007 03/19/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
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 and you should be careful about when you use them.  To illustrate this point...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 4: Tooltips and Menus (Matt Gertz)

March 16, 2007 Mar 16, 2007 03/16/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
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 a menu, you simply drag a MenuStrip control from the toolbox to your form.  As with the...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 3: Timers (Matt Gertz)

March 14, 2007 Mar 14, 2007 03/14/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 3: TimersIn 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 esoteric controls.Timers and Message PumpsTry this:  go to your Programs menu ...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 2: Show me the cards! (Matt Gertz)

March 13, 2007 Mar 13, 2007 03/13/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
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, the face of each card is going to need an image, and you’ll also need one image for the...