The snippet feature is one of the features that I’m fondest of in Visual Basic.  It was another one of a handful of features that got discussed in a series of “What if…” meetings that Sam & I had during the “Whidbey” planning stages.  As I recall, the things that motivated it for Sam was demos...

It’s funny how we come up with a VB feature sometimes. I remember one case pretty well.  I was the new dev lead of the VB editor at the time, and I was talking about possible features for “Whidbey” (i.e. Visual Studio 2005) with my program manager, Sam.  We’d been talking about snippets, a feature that Sam & I ...

Last week I talked a bit about operator overloading, and used the concept to support a library of matrix functions.  This week, we’ll use those functions in a Smart Device application to create a matrix calculator. Smart Device applications It’s extremely easy to create an application for your Smart Device.  Let’s start from the solution ...

Over a decade ago, before I joined Microsoft, I was a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon studying robotics.  One of the things that you had to do to get into the doctoral program was pass a qualifier test (“the qual”), which was a three-hour oral examination at the conclusion of the Master’s program.  My qual was, without a doubt, the ...

The title pretty much describes this post.  I had fully intended to work on a Smart Device application for VB last week, and post the walkthrough here.  VB is a great language for coding against devices, and there are a lot of cool things you can use a device for, so I was looking forward to a fun post on that this morning.  However,...

Controls on the fly (Matt Gertz) So last week, I posted up a simple “Maze” game, in which you navigate through a virtual environment similar to the old “Myst” game.  The way I’d coded it, though, it didn’t actually have any “game” to it – you just walked around.  In this post I’ll add some state to it (which, after all, is pretty much all...

Using XML as a resource in your code –one more series on gamewriting (Matt Gertz) This is actually going to be part one of a two-part blog.  In this post, I’m going to cover some basic usage of XML, as well as a few other interesting coding points such as debug-only code.  In the second part, I’ll cover the creation and handling of on-the...

Simple Animation in Visual Basic (Matt Gertz) The basics: You're almost certainly used to placing controls on a form; however, you probably have an expectation that they will stay in place once you put them there.  That need not be the case, however.  Controls have X & Y positions, and you can modify them at any time during the runtim...

I’ve had a wide variety of jobs over my career, beyond working at Microsoft.  I’ve been a burger-flipper and an administrative assistant.  I’ve worked with the DOE and NASA on robotics projects, and back in my NROTC days I spent a month at the helm & planes of a nuclear submarine.  I spent a summer doing re...

Coding 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.  Oh, and the final code (including the deployment project) is included at the bottom of this ...