Showing results for Matt Gertz - Visual Basic Blog

I hate going so long without blogging, but it’s getting really busy around here as we get closer to the endgame for Visual Studio 2008.  That, combined with “review time,” creates a bit of a problem for writing apps for the blog, and I wasn’t able to give it much attention until last night.  Realizing I really need...

The story of Edit and Continue (which I’ll refer to as EnC) is a very long one.  Having been a cornerstone of Visual Basic in the past, it had always been planned for us to ship an Edit and Continue experience with Visual Studio 2002.  But we didn’t.  Why?  Well, it all came down to time.  VB7 (let’s call ...

The snippet feature is one of the features that I’m fondest of in Visual Basic.  It was another one of a handful of features that got discussed in a series of “What if…” meetings that Sam & I had during the “Whidbey” planning stages.  As I recall, the things that motivated it for Sam was demos...

It’s funny how we come up with a VB feature sometimes. I remember one case pretty well.  I was the new dev lead of the VB editor at the time, and I was talking about possible features for “Whidbey” (i.e. Visual Studio 2005) with my program manager, Sam.  We’d been talking about snippets, a feature that Sam & I ...

Last week I talked a bit about operator overloading, and used the concept to support a library of matrix functions.  This week, we’ll use those functions in a Smart Device application to create a matrix calculator. Smart Device applications It’s extremely easy to create an application for your Smart Device.  Let’s start from the solution ...

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...