Showing category results for Visual Basic

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...

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, let’s ...

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 Timer ...

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 in Wi...

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 back of ...

Several people asked me whether TableAdapter can be used to retrieve multiple result sets from stored procedures. The quick answer is... No, you can't do that with TableAdapter.Fill() method that gets generated as a part of Typed Dataset. But there's a very simple work-around. DataAdapter.Fill() & Multiple Result Sets TableAdapter.Fill() method...

Here's a list of new data tools features in Visual Studio. I will be discussing each one in more detail in upcoming posts. Object Relational Designer The object relational mapping technology lets you map relational databases to objects. Once the mapping is done, you can manipulate mapped objects as normal objects and easily submit changes back to...

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 user to rea...

This is the sixth installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here. Today I am going to talk about some best practices for using extension methods. Most of this content is geared toward authors of class libraries designed for wide spread consumption. Developers of such libraries often need...