Anthony D. Green [MSFT]

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Kinect SDK For PC – VB Samples available.

June 16th, 2011
Today, Microsoft announced the Kinect SDK for PC  http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/download.aspx  VB Samples are there at launch and available for downloading  http://files.ch9.ms/coding4fun/KinectSDKSamplesVB.zip    ...

Happy 20th Birthday Visual Basic!

May 20th, 2011
Twenty years ago, May 20th, 1991 at Windows World, in Atlanta, Microsoft founder Bill Gates demoed Visual Basic 1.0. Twenty years later, the 10th version of this latest in an unbroken line of Microsoft BASIC languages stretching back to Microsoft’s founding is still going strong. When you look back over the history of a tool that’s...

The Temple of VB (Matt Gertz)

April 29th, 2011
Hi, all!It's been a while since I've posted to this blog, and a lot has happened in my world since then.  Though I've been pretty busy on our engineering systems team, I took a little time off last summer to do some traveling and, more importantly, some long overdue writing.  Although I'd always enjoyed writing the "here's how ...

On The Blink (Matt Gertz)

February 26th, 2010
One of the really fun things about being associated with the Visual Basic team is getting to see all of the varied usages to which our customers put it.  From enterprise software to games, our customer base covers a wide range.  The most fun to see, however, are the hobby applications, because the writers of that code come up with ...

There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Euchre! (Matt Gertz)

December 18th, 2009
“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 ...

Linking Zune media items with LinQ, Part 2 (Matt Gertz)

November 7th, 2009
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 ...

Linking Zune media items with LinQ, Part 1 (Matt Gertz)

November 6th, 2009
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&...

Getting Loopy (Matt Gertz)

October 7th, 2009
In my last post, I talked about the hidden costs that can occur whenever you call out to methods, particularly in loops.  In looking at my examples, reader KG2V commented that another thing that folks need to be aware of is avoiding the assumption that the world (or, in this case, a list) is a static thing.  It’s a good point ...

Hidden Costs (Matt Gertz)

October 6th, 2009
(Note: there was a grievous error in this post based on a bad assumption on my art regarding VB.  Not feeling the need to hide my ignorance :-), I have instead made a number of edits in this post to bring it back to some semblance of reality.)One thing that gets me annoyed with myself is realizing that the product or service I’ve ...

It’s a Small World, After All, part 2 – VB, C#, and GPS (Matt Gertz)

August 5th, 2009
In my previous post, we fixed up a C# GPS library to provide more support, and wrote all of the UI for a VB GPS application, all based on (but modified from) a Mobile GPS sample in the Windows Mobile 6.0 SDK.  In this post, we’ll finish up the app by enabling a bunch of cool functionality not exposed in the original sample.The C# ...