Visual Basic Blog

Controls on the fly (Matt Gertz)

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]April 23, 2007Apr 23, 200704/23/07

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, afte

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

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]April 16, 2007Apr 16, 200704/16/07

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 handlin

Simple Animation in Visual Basic (Matt Gertz)

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]April 9, 2007Apr 9, 200704/9/07

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 r

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

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]April 2, 2007Apr 2, 200704/2/07

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 doi

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

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]March 26, 2007Mar 26, 200703/26/07

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 bott

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 8: Remember Me, Show Me, Help Me (Matt Gertz)

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]March 23, 2007Mar 23, 200703/23/07

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 8:  Remember Me, Show Me, Help Me We’re getting close to wrapping up this series.  In this post, I want to cover several “clean up” topics, and then in the following post, I’ll talk about deployment and will attach the entire codebase for your perusal. Settings You’ll note, from earlier posts, tha

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 7: Total Logic (Matt Gertz)

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]March 22, 2007Mar 22, 200703/22/07

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 7:  Total LogicSince I’ve been concentrating on specific VB functionality, you may have noticed that the one topic I haven’t really drilled into yet is game logic, and yet it’s central to what a game is all about.  Games have certainly gotten more sophisticated over the years, and yet that

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 6: Pump up the volume (Matt Gertz)

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]March 20, 2007Mar 20, 200703/20/07

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 6:  Pump up the volume Ever since Commodore first introduced the SID chip to their line of PCs way back in the earlier 80’s, sound has been an important experience in any computer game.  What’s particularly exciting to me is that audio has caught up to graphics as far as game relevance goes – I can’

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 5: Modality is a crutch (Matt Gertz)

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]March 19, 2007Mar 19, 200703/19/07

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 5: Modality is a crutch It’s really tempting to rely on modal dialogs in a program.  It forces the user to pay attention to what you feel is the most important thing.  However, modal dialogs can also be frustrating to users and you should be careful about when you use them.  To illustrate this point,

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 4: Tooltips and Menus (Matt Gertz)

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]March 16, 2007Mar 16, 200703/16/07

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 4: Tooltips and Menus Menus and tooltips are so incredibly important to applications, and yet implementing them sometimes seems to be arcane magic.  In this post, I’m going to do my best to demystify them. Menus To add a menu, you simply drag a MenuStrip control from the toolbox to your form.  As with the