Showing results for 2009 - Visual Basic Blog

“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 th...

By now you've likely heard about the major new features coming in VB 2010, but there's also a number of smaller additions in the language and IDE that might not be as readily noticeable.  "Hidden Gems" will be a multi-part series where we'll explore some of these smaller enhancements.  First up - serialization! Let’s say you ha...

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 two fields from...

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/present...

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. JCode for the controls (continued)The Title TextBoxWhen the title changes, we’ll want to indicate that the playlist has changed, and we’ll want to cache the...

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 “The Load-Out”...

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 &nbs...

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’ve been keeping a list of interesting...

We’ve started two new “How Do I” videos series on the Visual Basic Developer Center. More to come, but here’s the latest!

There were a lot of Microsoft announcements that happened yesterday! Many of these happened during Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the SharePoint Developers Conference (Video, Twitter). Here is the list: MSDN subscribers can download Beta 2 now!  We will be opening up Beta 2 for everyone to download starting this Wednesday. In honor of V...