Anthony D. Green [MSFT]

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Dissecting Snippets (Matt Gertz)

June 4th, 2007
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 ...

Error correction (Matt Gertz)

May 21st, 2007
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 &...

Visual Basic & Smart Devices (Matt Gertz)

May 14th, 2007
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 ...

Operator Overloading: A demonstration using matrices (Matt Gertz)

May 7th, 2007
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 ...

The Best of Intentions (Matt Gertz)

April 30th, 2007
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.  ...

Controls on the fly (Matt Gertz)

April 23rd, 2007
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, ...

Using XML as a resource in your code –one more series on gamewriting (Matt Gertz)

April 16th, 2007
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 ...

Simple Animation in Visual Basic (Matt Gertz)

April 9th, 2007
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 ...

It’s Elementary: Using VB To Get Process Information (Matt Gertz)

April 2nd, 2007
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 ...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 9: Into the Wild Blue Yonder (Matt Gertz)

March 26th, 2007
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 ...