A group blog from members of the VB team
March 28, 2007Mar 28, 200703/28/07About 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 introducing for Orcas.
March 27, 2007Mar 27, 200703/27/07This 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.
March 26, 2007Mar 26, 200703/26/07Coding 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.
March 23, 2007Mar 23, 200703/23/07Coding 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 codebase for your perusal.
March 22, 2007Mar 22, 200703/22/07Coding 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.
March 20, 2007Mar 20, 200703/20/07Coding 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’t imagine Planescape: Torment having the same sort of immersive experience without Mark Morgan’s haunting,
March 19, 2007Mar 19, 200703/19/07Coding 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.
March 16, 2007Mar 16, 200703/16/07Coding 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,
March 14, 2007Mar 14, 200703/14/07Coding 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 esoteric controls.
March 13, 2007Mar 13, 200703/13/07Coding 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.
