Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

2007 - Page 15 of 16 - Visual Basic Blog

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...

TableAdapter and Multiple Result Sets

March 13, 2007 Mar 13, 2007 03/13/07
VBTeam
Several people asked me whether TableAdapter can be used to retrieve multiple result sets from stored procedures. The quick answer is... No, you can't do that with TableAdapter.Fill() method that gets generated as a part of Typed Dataset. But there's a very simple work-around. DataAdapter.Fill() & Multiple Result Sets TableAdapter.Fill() ...

New Data Tools Features in Visual Studio Orcas

March 13, 2007 Mar 13, 2007 03/13/07
VBTeam
Here's a list of new data tools features in Visual Studio. I will be discussing each one in more detail in upcoming posts. Object Relational Designer The object relational mapping technology lets you map relational databases to objects. Once the mapping is done, you can manipulate mapped objects as normal objects and easily submit changes ...

Fun with card tricks (Matt Gertz)

March 12, 2007 Mar 12, 2007 03/12/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Back when I first started writing code, I got interested in game writing, and was fairly sure I could write out text-based games as well as the other offerings one could find on mainframes and, later, on the Commodores/TRS/Apples of the day.   The flow of those games were really very easy – you’d present a block of text to the ...

Extension Methods Best Practices (Extension Methods Part 6)

March 10, 2007 Mar 10, 2007 03/10/07
VBTeam
This is the sixth installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here. Today I am going to talk about some best practices for using extension methods. Most of this content is geared toward authors of class libraries designed for wide spread consumption. Developers of such libraries often...

Making your VB code ready to go global (Matt Gertz)

March 8, 2007 Mar 8, 2007 03/8/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Greetings, all! I’m Matt Gertz, the Dev Manager for Visual Basic team.  I’ve been on the team for a bit over 12 years, via the Blackbird/Visual InterDev side of the product, and in that time have been a dev on various features (mostly IDE-related), dev lead of deployment, dev lead of compiler, and box lead before my current ...

March 2007 Orcas CTP Available

February 28, 2007 Feb 28, 2007 02/28/07
VBTeam
The March 2007 Orcas CTP is now available for download.You can see Soma's anouncement about it here.This is the first Orcas CTP to include new VB 9.0 features and is the first update of VB LINQ since last year's May 2006 LINQ CTP.Amongst a lot of other really cool Orcas stuff, this CTP includes previews of the following VB 9.0 ...