Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Series - Visual Basic Blog

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

March 19, 2007 Mar 19, 2007 03/19/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
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)

March 16, 2007 Mar 16, 2007 03/16/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
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...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 3: Timers (Matt Gertz)

March 14, 2007 Mar 14, 2007 03/14/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 3: TimersIn my previous posts regarding the Euchre game creation, I discussed some issues with creating a complex form and maintaining images to be shown on it.  In this posting, I’m going to start covering some of the more esoteric controls.Timers and Message PumpsTry this:  go to your Programs menu ...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 2: Show me the cards! (Matt Gertz)

March 13, 2007 Mar 13, 2007 03/13/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 2: Show me the cards! In my previous post, I discussed using control-drag to speed up the design of a form which uses lots of similar controls.  In this post, I’m going to discuss displaying images on those controls. Now, the face of each card is going to need an image, and you’ll also need one image for the...

Fun with card tricks (Matt Gertz)

March 12, 2007 Mar 12, 2007 03/12/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Back when I first started writing code, I got interested in game writing, and was fairly sure I could write out text-based games as well as the other offerings one could find on mainframes and, later, on the Commodores/TRS/Apples of the day.   The flow of those games were really very easy – you’d present a block of text to the ...

Making your VB code ready to go global (Matt Gertz)

March 8, 2007 Mar 8, 2007 03/8/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Greetings, all! I’m Matt Gertz, the Dev Manager for Visual Basic team.  I’ve been on the team for a bit over 12 years, via the Blackbird/Visual InterDev side of the product, and in that time have been a dev on various features (mostly IDE-related), dev lead of deployment, dev lead of compiler, and box lead before my current ...

Extension methods and late binding (Extension Methods Part 4)

January 24, 2007 Jan 24, 2007 01/24/07
VBTeam
This is the fourth installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here. Today I'm going to talk about extension methods and late binding. Essentially there isn't much to say about it, other than the fact that we don't support late bound execution of extension methods. For the most part ...

Extension Methods (part 3)

January 19, 2007 Jan 19, 2007 01/19/07
VBTeam
In my previous 2 posts I talked about some of the benefits of extension methods and then delved into the details of our new binding rules for consuming them in your programs. Today I'm going to talk about some perils to be aware of when defining extension methods. First, however, I'm going to dig a little into the mechanics used by the ...

Extension Methods (part 2)

January 11, 2007 Jan 11, 2007 01/11/07
VBTeam
In my previous post I gave a high level overview of some of the benefits of using Extension Methods in VB 9.0. Today I'm going to delve into some of the details about how to define extension methods and then use them in your programs. Defining Extension Methods You can define an extension method by creating a method in a VB module and ...

Extension methods (part 1)

January 5, 2007 Jan 5, 2007 01/5/07
VBTeam
Hi. I'm Scott Wisniewski, a dev on the VB Compiler Team. I've been here for a while now (about a year and a half), but this is my first blog post. I've been spending the past seven months or so working on Orcas, and finally decided it would be a good time to come up for some air, talk about what I've been working on, and start to actually make...