Anthony D. Green [MSFT]

Post by this author

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 8: Remember Me, Show Me, Help Me (Matt Gertz)

March 23rd, 2007
Coding 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. Settings You’ll note, from earlier posts, ...

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

March 22nd, 2007
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 20th, 2007
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 19th, 2007
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 16th, 2007
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 14th, 2007
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 13th, 2007
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...

Fun with card tricks (Matt Gertz)

March 12th, 2007
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 ...

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

March 8th, 2007
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 ...