Visual Basic Blog

It’s Elementary: Using VB To Get Process Information (Matt Gertz)

April 2, 2007 Apr 2, 2007 04/2/07

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]

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 ...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 9: Into the Wild Blue Yonder (Matt Gertz)

March 26, 2007 Mar 26, 2007 03/26/07

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]

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 ...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 8: Remember Me, Show Me, Help Me (Matt Gertz)

March 23, 2007 Mar 23, 2007 03/23/07

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]

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, ...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 7: Total Logic (Matt Gertz)

March 22, 2007 Mar 22, 2007 03/22/07

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]

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...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 6: Pump up the volume (Matt Gertz)

March 20, 2007 Mar 20, 2007 03/20/07

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]

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’...

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 ...