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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 ...

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, that there are a l...

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 soph...

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’t imagine Pla...