Showing results for Matt Gertz - Visual Basic Blog

(This is the fourth and final part of the Paint-by-Numbers series) Late last year, some clever guys on our Visual Basic team released the PrintForm component on the web.  The idea behind the PrintForm component was to make printing and previewing your form very easy in .NET.  I’m going to leverage this component to enable printing of the ...

(This is part 3 of the Paint-by-Numbers series)There are four issues I want to deal with in this post:  New, Open, Save (As), and Exit.  I’ll be doing these in order, but all of them depend on knowing whether or not the application is dirty, so I’ll deal with that problem first.  Opening and saving files isn’t a par...

(This is the second part in my series on creating a Paint-by-Numbers designer application.)This is the first application that I’ve built specifically for this blog, where I’m actually writing the code while I’m writing the blog.  (For example, the Euchre game that I blogged about was something I’d written a couple of ye...

I hate going so long without blogging, but it’s getting really busy around here as we get closer to the endgame for Visual Studio 2008.  That, combined with “review time,” creates a bit of a problem for writing apps for the blog, and I wasn’t able to give it much attention until last night.  Realizing I really need...

The story of Edit and Continue (which I’ll refer to as EnC) is a very long one.  Having been a cornerstone of Visual Basic in the past, it had always been planned for us to ship an Edit and Continue experience with Visual Studio 2002.  But we didn’t.  Why?  Well, it all came down to time.  VB7 (let’s call ...

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,...