Showing results for Matt Gertz - Visual Basic Blog

It’s a big day for us on the Managed Languages team! As announced at the //BUILD conference earlier today, and as posted by Soma on his blog, we are not just delivering a new preview of Roslyn to all of you, but are in fact moving all of the compiler code to open source! The code will be released and maintained by MS Open Tech, who are our partners...

(For the next few posts, I’m going to introduce readers to the different feature teams in the Managed Languages org.  Today, I’m starting this with a focus on the performance team.)Back in 2000, I found myself assigned to be the performance lead of the Visual Basic team, and my first assigned goal was to drive the performance marks...

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, we ended up with a little too much time between previews, to our subsequent embarrassment. In fact, it came to our attention recently that the licensing for the most “recent” CTP (and admittedly I use the term “recent” loosely, given that it was released in September 2012) is set to e...

So, the entryway to my house has eight light switches along the wall.  Two of them control the porch lights, and another two work the same entryway light (despite the switches being only a couple of feet apart).  I haven’t the foggiest idea what the rest of the switches do.  I’ve been scared to try them out, actually.&nb...

Hi, all!It's been a while since I've posted to this blog, and a lot has happened in my world since then.  Though I've been pretty busy on our engineering systems team, I took a little time off last summer to do some traveling and, more importantly, some long overdue writing.  Although I'd always enjoyed writing the "here's how you bu...

One of the really fun things about being associated with the Visual Basic team is getting to see all of the varied usages to which our customers put it.  From enterprise software to games, our customer base covers a wide range.  The most fun to see, however, are the hobby applications, because the writers of that code come up with some pr...

“Oh, no!”  I hear you cry, “not another blog about Euchre!”Well, I do like the game, to be sure.  But, more importantly, the Euchre scenario enables me to try out any new technologies on a reasonably complex problem (using Visual Basic, of course).  It’s my way of checking out our product to make sure th...

In this post, I’ll continue on with coding the new playlist shuffler.  If you haven’t read part 1 yet, I highly recommend it so that this post will make more sense. JCode for the controls (continued)The Title TextBoxWhen the title changes, we’ll want to indicate that the playlist has changed, and we’ll want to cache the...

Way back in October 2007, I wrote up a few posts (here and here) on my experiments with the Windows Media Player object model.  The problem I was trying to solve was that, when I had a playlist set to “shuffle,” WMP would break up songs that should always play together (for example, Jackson Browne’s “The Load-Out”...

In my last post, I talked about the hidden costs that can occur whenever you call out to methods, particularly in loops.  In looking at my examples, reader KG2V commented that another thing that folks need to be aware of is avoiding the assumption that the world (or, in this case, a list) is a static thing.  It’s a good point and it...