Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Protein is Good for You, part 2 (Matt Gertz)

In yesterday’s blog post, I walked through an engine for translating DNA to its amino acid results via messenger RNA.  In today’s blog, we’ll work on the visualization using WPF StackPanels.  (This example requires VS2008, although it could certainly be written in WinForms as well with just a little bit of extra ...

Protein is Good for You (Matt Gertz)

As I was preparing to graduate from the University of Michigan way back in the late eighties, I had a big decision to make regarding grad school – robotics at Carnegie Mellon, or biology at Washington State?  On the one hand, biology was something I’d always really loved, having even intended to go to med school at one point.&...

Milestone Quality & Dogfooding (Matt Gertz)

After some hard but fruitful work, we’ve just finished our “milestone quality” (MQ) efforts, the goal of which was to get ourselves ready for developing the next versions of Visual Studio, Team System, and .NET.  Although not specific to Visual Basic, I’ve opted to use this “bully pulpit” to let you ...

Keeping Track of Books Using VB (Matt Gertz)

I have a confession to make.  I’m not a database guy.  I’ve done a lot of varied coding over my career, but somehow I’ve never been directly involved in the guts of database coding.  Whenever my code needed some sort of data-caching mechanism, I’ve tended to “roll my own,” as the saying goes.&...

Preparing for the Next Product Cycle (Matt Gertz)

I once had to learn how to juggle in a very brief time in order to get an “A” in my high school computer science class.  I am not making this up.  The idea was that juggling, being a systemic process, was somehow analogous to writing programs and… well, it sort of made sense at the time.  I’d done well ...

Euchre Revisited: Fixing bugs and service releases (Matt Gertz)

It’s really embarrassing when a bug gets out the door in a product.  In particular, it’s hard for me to just sit and take it (however well deserved the criticism is) when a Microsoft product gets nailed in the press for a bad error.  It’s much worse when a friend or relative is the one dealing out the grief.  However, ...

One is the Loneliest Number (Matt Gertz)

(This post assumes that you’ve read my previous post on Windows Media at http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2007/10/30/let-the-music-play-matt-gertz.aspx â€“ I will be modifying that code in this post.) After posting my media player blog sample a couple of weeks ago, I got a few questions from a reader called Saleem on how to adapt it...

Let the Music Play! (Matt Gertz)

Oh, boy.  Sorry I haven’t written any posts lately, but I’ve transitioned to a new job within Visual Studio and have been getting my sea legs there.  One of the job tasks is getting Visual Studio 2008 out to you folks, and while I’ve always been involved with that aspect of the product in the past, it was always to ...

Endgame (Matt Gertz)

Well, I’m back from vacation, pleasantly tired and yet relaxed at the same time.  I’m busy trying to dig out of e-mail, things are going well, Beta2 has been in your hands for several weeks, and I’ve got lots of great ideas to try out on this site.(That’s the theory, anyway.  In reality, I’m writing this...