Duncan Mackenzie.NET

I love Winnipeg, but it doesn't normally get all that many developer focused talks... so if you live there and you are interested in .NET based web development, you should really get down to this event. […]

If you are a dev, then this code formatting plug-in is probably the coolest thing out there... I'm still ranking Tim's Flickr plug-in as #1 at the moment, at least my slightly customized version that is, but if you'd like a list of several available plug-ins then this spaces entry is a good place to […]

Kent points us to a free ASP.NET control that pretties up any source code you output to your site... most systems I've used convert the code into html, but this one lets you leave it in its proper form (for downloading or copying to the user's clipboard) and does the coloring at runtime. […]

Customizing VSTS to work exactly how you or your company needs it to isn't an easy job, but this toolkit should make it easier! […]

My article about the My namespace was revamped and put out in a 'special bonus issue' of MSDN Magazine.

I've been working (as part of a large team!) on the new platform for MSDN, which is up and running at http://msdn2.microsoft.com... and now you can see prototype versions of the MSDN home page ontop of that same platform. Check it out here [

You may have already noticed this, but the current build of MSDN2 has a bug in the way it colors VB code snippets, as you can see here (scroll down, there are quite a few problems in the code snippet coloring, see how many you can spot!)... turns out the code wasn't handling comments right, text in […]

This is the sort of thing that happens with large development teams, one team codes in 'fixes' that break someone else's work... I don't normally do this all by myself! I updated the Flairmaker to support Atom 0.3, then I updated my feeds to Atom 1.0 ... great. See the error, laugh at the coder... o […]

Landed in Vegas for the conference, talk is on Thursday.... I'll be talking about MSDN2.microsoft.com, but more specifically I'll be covering the use of the Virtual Page Provider feature in ASP.NET 2.0, so if that type of thing appeals to you, come by and check it out! […]

I was reading the dotnetjunkies.com newsletter and I spotted these podcasts, a series of them that I have never noticed before, even though they definitely the kind of content I'd be interested in hearing. Moving to .NET from VB6 and C++ Juval Lowy discusses the different perspectives that VB […]

Nick, from "The Coding Monkey" mentioned that he would like to see Atom support in the FlairMaker, so ... having no real reason not to, and having an extra 15 minutes after the kids went to sleep before I started cleaning up the house, I added it... Of course, I've just added this to my forked vers […]

Free chapter on master pages from new ASP.NET 2.0 upgrade guide […]

Neil Enns of the MSBuild team has released the first of a series of posts about how MSBuild works within Visual Studio, how VS projects are used by MSBuild and basically everything you'd want to know about how the two systems interact. […]

Kent's flair was cool... so I made my own, using his code of course, but targetting whatever feed you want... check out the source of this image and I'm sure you can figure out how to change the feed it is […]

I've added Kent's flair to my site, just so I can be one of the cool kids in the class... […]

Thanks to the work of Serge Baranovsky (the guy behind VBCity) a new site is up that aggregates content from various Visual Basic related sources, including personal and team blogs from both inside and outside of Microsoft. Check out the launch annoucement here, and check out the site as soon as you […]

Check it out here...

Back on the weblogs.asp.net site, I had posted an article on how to setup your application to work with the Application Updater from PAG, but that URL was having issues so I have reposted it up onto this site for anyone who might be looking around for it... http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net/duncanma/ […]

In an earlier post, I discussed the fact that the MSDN feeds were failing to validate due to a MIME type that included parameters (charset in this case, like 'text/html ;charset=utf-8'), but I also posted a query about this issue into the listserv for FeedValidator.org. Sam mentioned it on his blog, […]

Now, to me, VB 2005 is the "future", and anything beyond that is really just coffee-break information to read briefly.... but I guess I wouldn't be a very good Microsoft person if I didn't start pushing the version-after-next version of our development tools before the next version has even shipped. […]

I've played around with coding against the Messenger APIs before, but it seems that MSN has really gone all out now and released a bunch of information for coding against their search, messenger, mapping services, and more... check it out on MSDN as of today! http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn/ […]

This is an interesting idea ... http://www.exceptioncollection.com/, something that I've pondered before... […]

I've been messing around with using XSL to display RSS on MSDN, as a simpler alternative to a custom ASP.NET control, and while it works perfectly in the core case (display all the items in a feed in a format), there are two additional requirements that were very easy to handle in a .NET class, but […]

This should only be an issue if you've written code that checks for version=6, instead of version =>6, but that happens so you might want read the following blog entry about this new version.

Ok, so the VB.NET 2003 version worked fine upgraded to 2005, with only one warning, but with the recent release of Beta 2, I thought I should jump on the bandwagon like everyone else :) New .zip download linked from here […]

Refactoring to debut in VB 2005!

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you probably know about my column "Coding4Fun", well now there is an entire site on MSDN going by that name... to be clear, this is not a site all about my column :) ... it is a site dedicated to the same concept though, hobbyist coding. Check it out at: ht […]

jf has been having issues with my control, and I have no idea why... if it will help, him or anyone else, there is the original version of the code and a test form available for download here Now, for jf specifically... feel free to email me your code and maybe I can see why it isn't working for you […]

It seems a few people had questions about the control I posted previously, so here are answers to two of the questions that people might be running into: […]

I was mocking up a UI yesterday, and I wanted to produce an interface that looked like Front Page's "New from Template" dialog... […]

Ok, this may seem really odd, but I swear it happened to me... :) […]

I ran into a problem recently, where duplicate IDs were being generated by my offline ADO.NET code... and I had no real idea why this was happening. I had set up the primary key of my DataTable to have the following propery values: […]

That may not seem like a big deal to most MIcrosoft developers, since most of them write code for that exact purpose, but I have spent most of my time in Redmond writing sample code and even with my switch to development I'm focused on writing internal systems that are not likely to ever be exposed […]

There is even an accompanying article. Oh, and a challenge: The first person that can send me a history file that shows the gameplay getting to 1 piece left (with the default 8x8x2 game), I'll happily annouce it to the world (at least the readers of this site). Do you have what it takes? If yo […]

Looks like I have a new place to hang out and answer questions...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbrun […]

Lately I've been luckily enough to be able to reuse several bits of code I've written in Visual Basic 2002 and 2003, namely code from a few of my earlier MSDN articles (Design Surface and the Control series). Since I was planning to make a few changes, I pulled these projects into Visual Basic 2005 […]

Remembering User Information in Visual Basic .NET

(see this post for an introduction to this topic...) […]

In my last post, I was talking about pulling my articles from MSDN into the chrome of my site. This type of system could be created using a frameset, but frames are evil, so that isn't the approach I […]

Check out my articles page, which is built from an RSS file by the way, and click on any of the "Coding 4 Fun" articles. You'll end up still in my site, […]

If so, wonder no longer... Jay Roxe covers this in a post on his blog and so does Rob Copeland.

This topic has been in the 'news' lately (well, at least in the blogs) and I've been considering replying.... but it turns out I don't have to, because Dave Totzke has done it for me. I don't really agree with his comment that we've kept C++ alive because Office is written in it... it is actually be […]

I use the Exception Handling Block from PAG, so exceptions anywhere in my application generate a nice (full of data) XML file for me to use after the fact to track down the problem... but that file gets written to the user's local machine... so I have to ask folks to send it to me via email. What I […]

A friend of mine at work just asked me this VB question, and it is an interesting one to me because it isn't as simple as it seems... […]

Currently I'm running .Text .94 + a bunch of private modifications and some version of CS:Forums + a bunch of private modifications... so now that CS 1.0's source is out, I want to incorporate my mods into the combined package and then migrate my data and get my site up and running on the new stuff. […]

On the various programming forums I read, a common question is "how can I find out the IP address of my router"... for whatever reason (and there certainly are a few reasons that I can think of) people were really looking for their IP address on the Internet. In general, the solution was to hit one […]

or am I being scribbled? […]

Richard Grimes posted some fairly negative thoughts around .NET and VB.NET specifically, comments that Scott decided to reply to with his own post. I have to say that Richard's comments about C# vs. VB.NET are something that I hear all the time, that it is easy for a VB6 developer to pick up C#, […]

A while ago I moved out of the Content Strategist role and over onto the development team at MSDN, but until this week my position had remained empty! Well, the wait is over, Brad McCabe has joined the illustrious content strategist team at MSDN. No 'official' link to point you to yet, but I'm sure […]

Gratis, the company behind the various www.free***.com sites (and the original free iPod folks), provide banners for use on sites like mine, but they don't really keep them up to date. For example, the banner for the Free PC site is all about the Dell machine you can get, but they recently added a S […]

I saw a newsgroup post (by Todd Bowra) that an update was available for my XBox media center extender, but I can't find anything about this on any of the media center sites on http://www.microsoft.com or xbox.com, so I thought I would spread the […]

Aaron Brethorst has a little page of his code samples up at http://www.brethorsting.com/code/ which include a few interesting items including a software version of the Enigma machine in C#. Cool stuff. Aaron is also the author of iRooster, an alarm clock application (that uses playlists from iTunes) […]

Telligent Systems, the company founded by former Microsoftie (and ASP.NET whiz kid) Rob Howard, has finally released Community Server 1.0. Community Server combines the functionality of forums (based on the ASP.NET forums engine Rob worked on while at Microsoft), blogs (based on the […]

Found via the very well-named coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com blog... […]

Further to my previous post, the results are now available here: Visual Basic Usage Survey

First things first, this article is not for people who already code in Visual Studio, or Eclipse, or who are in anyway an experienced developer. This is for folks who are new to code and have decided that VB.NET is the way to get started into this world. I just put this reminder here in the hope of […]

A few months ago, I posted a VB survey up onto my site. That survey received over 1000 responses and I believe it provided some useful data back to the Visual Basic team. I'm considering put the results back up onto my site so you can see them, but I need to determine how much interest there is in s […]

Check it out at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/searchbeta/, pretty cool stuff coming out of some of the other members of the MSDN dev team.

Get the inside story on VB. Watch these Channel 9 interviews with Visual Basic team members Paul Vick (technical lead) and Amanda Silver (program manager), […]

Quick sample (calling the GetShortPathName API) in VB.NET posted to http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/Samples/

I bet I've mentioned these before, but the joy of rediscovery is the positive side of a poor memory... Christopher Frazier pointed to these in a email discussion today, and I thought you might be interested! […]

The Outlook Web Access team is looking for web developers […]

Thanks to a post by Nick Parker, I found out my blog site was not producing valid RSS... and now it is :) […]

An A-List of .NET consultants, including my friend Joel Semeniuk amongst others, are auctioning themselves off on EBay... with the proceeds going towards disaster relief in Indonesia. Check out the details (and the full list of folks)

I'm not sure if this is already over-hyped, but I just heard about it today so please forgive me if everyone is talking about this already :) Mr. Potato Head Darth Tater […]

Google and various blog software vendors recently announced a method to deter comment spam by reducing its benefit to the spammer... it sounds like a pretty good idea, so I updated my installation of .Text to use this new attribute in the comment section by adding just a single line within comments. […]

I've been meaning to mention this for awhile, but better late than never: […]

"a month-long webcast series focusing on interoperability why it matters to the business, common strategies and methods, and guidance on specific implementation scenarios between the major platform players. We'll feature over 40 webcasts, cool giveaways, and brand-new technical guidance from expert […]

The demo is online, building up images dynamically and serving them up to you in a few seconds (depending on connection speed I assume)... but the code and the accompanying explanation is top-notch, so if you are interested in GDI+ info, check this out!! […]

Yet another control development topic... this time I'm building a 'star rating' control, similar to what you find in Windows Media Player's UI... […]

I received another interesting, and common, question today about using Enter instead of (or in addition to) the Tab key to move the focus between fields on a form. Well, that isn't too hard to accomplish, but it can get tricky once you consider all the different situations... […]

Just posted recently, there is a opening at MSDN for a "Software Development Engineering Lead". This is within the same group that I have just joined and it looks like a great job for the right person. Here is a brief snippet from the full job description.... Come leverage state-of-the-art techno […]

The same programmer who ask for an example of rotated text is back with another interesting request; how to partially fill a circle from the bottom up... […]

Customizing the data grid (in Windows Forms) was always one of the most popular topics on the C# or VB developer centers, so I'm sure a lot of people will be interested in this article. It is in C#, so far, but if you'd like to see it in VB I'd suggest you email the writer (email at the bottom of […]

A customer emailed me today (via the VB FAQ blog) with a question; "how can I output text at different angles, to write the cardinal points around a compass for example..." so I decided to fire up a quick sample […]

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The VB team is interested in collecting some stats about how you use VB, so I put a simple survey up for them at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/visualbasicsurvey/, feel free to check it out if you are interested in providing information... For whoever is interested, I used the http://www.nsurvey.or […]

Advanced Basics: Digital Grandma […]

Luckily or sadly, depending on your point of view, I will still be posting the occasional blog entry and responding to at least some of my email, but my output volume will be reduced for the next 4 weeks (thanks Microsoft!!). I'll be spending my time at home with the kids; […]

A month or so ago, Adam Nathan annouced the release of the Code Coverage edition of the .NET Framework 2.0 (Beta 1)... but I was chatting with him recently and he explained the rationale behind this release and really sold me on how you, the developer who will eventually be shipping production code […]

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/express/ for full details, but here is a quick list of the winners: […]

Recently I transitioned the C# Content Strategist role over to Frank Redmond, but that was only the first of several changes for me at MSDN. Today, my boss made the rest of the changes public, so now I can talk about it :) I'm going to be leaving the Content Strategy team completely and joining t […]

(via the Powertoys Blog) […]

This is not about .NET. I just found a site full of information about standard patterns that are being used in user interfaces in both desktop applications and web sites, that I thought you folks might like. There's nothing new here. […]

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had written a new system for producing MSDN's RSS feeds, and those feeds are now live at the same URLs as the previous versions. You might get some duplicates in your aggregators, (since these are new feeds but with some overlap of items from the old feeds) but […]

As Chris already noticed, Charlie Kindel is discussing home data storage and home servers... both topics that interest me for about the same reasons as Chris. I'm a big fan of Windows Media Center, I have a ton of WMA files, digital photos, and I'm starting to have 3 seperate places where I store di […]

Mike Dimmick comments on SQL Server's licensing policy and compares it to Oracle... which puzzled me. I'm no licensing expert, but from my days in MCS I used to read up on Oracle a bit and it seemed to me that they used a similar model to ours in determining per-user licensing costs. So I looked it […]

Robert Green and I are planning a series of articles focused around Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition... quick articles, not a lot of text, but with enough code to do something cool and useful... but we need ideas, and we are looking for submissions of content. If you have some ideas, comment away.. […]

And nowhere is that more evident than in our recent update to the VB and C# home pages here on MSDN.... check out the rotating (changes occasionaly, not on every refresh due to the magic of caching, but from time to time) featured MVP on the front page of both of these sites! […]

I'm working on the bootstrapper chapter for my upcoming ClickOnce book and it occured to me that a lot of people probably haven't heard about the bootstrapper for Visual Studio .NET 2003... […]

... and it is almost ready to ship.... […]

I've put up a new poll on my site: What type of database do you use for the majority of your applications? […]

Had an interesting coffee with Serge Baranovsky,founder of vbCity.com and owner of a cool license plate: […]

I took Scott Watermasysk's 'book control' and modified it recently to display more than one book (moving it to VB.NET along the way), and I reduced the file it pulls from down to just a list of ISBN #s.... but then I wasn't able to display the title of the book as a tooltip (like the original does). […]

As part of the United Way's Day of Caring, I went into Seattle today and did some work for a non-profit counseling center... specifically creating an Access system for them.... a few tables, 3 forms, and a bunch of analysis queries and reports all around stats... […]

My Advanced Basics column from the October 2004 issue is now up online... Building a Progress Bar that Doesn't Progress and if you think that title is odd, here is what Chris Sells had to say when he first heard it... (comments used 100% without permission, but I figure he won't mind)... "I can’ […]

Juanito27 posted this question to the VB.NET forum on GotDotNet last week... […]

Olav Gausaker, a programmer who reads my Coding 4 Fun columns just emailed me with something cool... he wrote (before reading my column on the topic) a web based version of my "Halo2 Countdown" application from July... very nice... in fact, with the large images (refresh to see a variety of differen […]

Shawn, my boss, recommends this AW book by Rebecca Riordan, which is one of the few .NET books I've found time to read lately, and I have to agree... I have doubts on whether or not it will sell as many copies as it should, as people seem to cluster around very focused books even when this book is e […]

I created a Pocket PC remote for Windows Media Player, but I only had speakers right next to the music system... so the remote wasn't all that useful... but I just picked up this wireless speaker; and suddenly it is time to install that software again ... my wife now puts the speaker wherever s […]

Wes shows us how to avoid the '*' character and use the same black circle that windows XP uses...

In a previous post, I mentioned that a flaw in the installation routines for telligent's forum system resulted in the deletion of a fairly important set of data... well, after posting that, a few things happened that impressed me... My web host, easerve, contacted me and let me know they had daily […]

I need authentication and role based security for another project that is coming soon, so I've put forums up at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/forums/ ... nothing there at the moment, but feel free to visit the 'discussion' forum and contribute your ideas... What forums should I add? I was thinki […]

Ok, so any action you take against your database is your own responsibility... so this is my fault, but I'm still miffed. […]

Ok, so here's the scoop... Robert Green, the Visual Basic PM focused on Community, is going to be in charge of the /community portion of the VB developer center on MSDN from now on... updating it, designing it, blogging about it, etc.... What does this mean? Well, for one thing it means a big change […]

Check out his post here; Extending the "My" Classes in VB 2005 ... Just Say NO! In case you're curious, I didn't really agree with Mike's title, nor with some of his statements, but that isn't to say that he is wrong... he makes a ton of great and completely accurate points; he and I just end up a […]

Dr. Ex(tensibility) posted this recently; […]

With the recent annoucements, I get to check something off of my personal wishlist.... Avalon (and some connected systems thing... "purple" I think it's called...) will be available on WinXP!! […]

Rotating Is Fun Duncan Mackenzie […]

Every day I get from 1 to 10 emails asking me various VB questions... some I answer by pointing to a link, some by providing code, and sometimes I just point people to the newsgroups or forums that exist for this type of question... but this time I thought I'd just post the question and answer into […]

As I discussed in an earlier post, I wanted to know if people found preview articles useful... and at least a few people said they did, so here is another one.... […]

Serge Baranovsky, the man behind vbCity, just mentioned to me that they have started hosting blogs... just their staff at the moment, but they have plans to grow... Since vbCity is already one of the best sites for VB developers, this is good news! http://blogs.vbcity.com/ […]

One of the nice things about the Updater Application Block is that it was written to be quite extensible... I saw a post today where SamSantiago mentioned he had created a custom class to delete all those old versions on your machine whenever you do an update.... very cool, I'll be trying that out r […]

Soma (whose name you may or may not recognize) is in a position to know a lot about the future of Visual Basic (in his own words, from his intro post... "My name is Somasegar and I run the Developer Division at Microsoft."), so when he decides to post about it, it is probably worth a quick read... […]

I'm sure I'll be one of many commenting on this, but the recent updates to .Text on this site are a wonderful improvement. For the past while I had been unable to really sift out the good comments from the bad, so real (non-spam) comments to the VB or C# FAQ sites, and to this blog... were all being […]

A couple of weeks ago I posted my "Quick Poll" Coding 4 Fun column in its unedited form... was that useful? […]

Blurb copied using the cool "Blog This" link on the ondotnet pages :) Rapid Application Development with VB.NET 2.0 by Jesse Liberty -- For a couple of years now, Jesse Liberty been touting the Microsoft […]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/community […]

Add a Quick Poll to Your Web Site […]

I was just talking with J.D. Meier (from PAG) about the Improving Application Security book and he pointed out a great page to me... the "Solutions At A Glance" list... this page lists a ton of very frequently asked questions around .NET security and provides links deep into all that great PAG secur […]

I noticed yesterday that my poll wasn't showing the question on the top of the list of choices, or the list of results. Viewing the source made it pretty obvious the <asp:label> was rendering, but that it was empty. Checking my code everything seemed fine, but when I retrieved the poll details […]

I blame google.

I've put the draft of my next Coding 4 Fun column ('Duncan Mackenzie describes his process to build a "Quick Poll" using Visual Basic and ASP.NET.') up onto my personal site, click here to check it out.

I've been thinking about books and the MSDN developer centers for some time... I've been wondering what we should do in terms of highlighting books on the MSDN site. […]

I'm running a poll on http://www.duncanmackenzie.net to see what topics I should write about next in my Coding 4 Fun column... There are 7 choices in total, but 3 are getting the lion's […]

a Code Project link, via Darth Pedro's blog... […]

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Partial types have come up a few times lately, and I wasn't sure they had been explained/defined before... so, I stole some prose from another document on this topic, cut and pasted some VB code from VS 2005 and here you go […]

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In an earlier post, I mentioned that I use a trigger to update a "DateCreated" field in one of my tables... and various people commented on this... asking "why not pass in a value in your Insert?" or "why not use a default value?" Since I feel that replying to comments in the comments section is […]

One of the big reasons I redesigned the poll component, was so that I could track votes over time... I did this by adding a 'dateVoted' column to my vote table, and then using an “On Insert” trigger to set that column to the current date/time.... peachy keen, except when I exported the tables and st […]

Chats on Visual Basic 2005 […]

Defining and Using Generics in Visual Basic 2005 […]

Web Forms Development with Visual Basic .NET 2003 […]

Building Tools Using the Visual Studio Automation Model […]

How Long Now? […]

What's New in Help for Visual Basic 2005 Beta 1 Find out about the newest Help features in Visual Basic 2005 Beta 1, including distinguishing Visual Basic from other languages, more task-oriented topics, and an emphasis on code examples. […]

Matthew Gertz, Dev Lead for the VB Compiler, Editor & Debugger team has written an article on operator overloading in Visual Basic 2005... […]

Ah, launch day... what else would have most of my colleagues sitting in their offices at 12:30 am in the morning on a Monday... and there isn't a single Halo game running!! […]

As a big fan of components, my applications are often composed of many different assemblies... essentially I break out anything that seems 'ready to reuse'... but perhaps I should reconsider? Grouping classes in an assembly This useful bit of information crossed my desk today: When it comes to pack […]

For various reasons, I'm just buried under work these days... but I still managed to revamp the /vbasic/community area of the VB developer center... check it out and let me know what you think... […]

This new article from Ken Getz provides an overview of many of the new features in Visual Basic 2005, including "My", "Edit and Continue", "AutoCorrect", "Just My Code" and more... […]

Well, maybe not improved, but certainly more complicated... I setup my new data model, built a new voting component in Visual Basic, and put it up at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/ Eventually, once I've run it for awhile and worked out any kinks, this will turn into a published sample... […]

If you follow other people's blogs, then you've probably heard about the Power Pack by now, but I'm happy to annouce that the overview article (complete with pictures!!) is available on MSDN! […]

It is my first "Advanced Basics" column, describing how to create a databound radio button list... I hope you like it!

Just today, I've added the new "Smart Client Offline Application Block" (from PAG), FotoVision, these articles by Cliff Atkinson about PowerPoint... and I brought home Murach's "ASP.NET Web Programming with VB.NET" to start reading in my spare time... While all of these things, and especially that b […]

I'm slowly getting the TechEd slides up and onto MSDN... the first few for VB are up here, SQL's are here... and more are coming very soon now for C#, C++, ASP.NET and others... (Listening To: The Darkest One [The Tragically Hip / In Violet Light]) […]

When I started out to build a voting control, I drew up a set of requirements that led to a 5+ table system... some form of UI for creating/editing polls... plus the control itself. Then, when I had SQL running behind my web site, I wanted something up fast.... so I just grabbed a simple voting […]

Scott Watermasysk blogs about the new 'Using' statement in VB.NET 2005... Using in VB.NET […]

Then, first let me say you have my pity, and then let me direct you to this nice piece by my old business partner (we started our first consulting business together out of our house)...   […]

I haven't taken into account the comments to Paul Vick's request for VB bloggers, but the page has been updated a bit based on my own list of folks that blog about VB. […]

It appears to work fine... assuming you haven't voted from the machine you are currently on, you should be able to see the new button (and try it out) at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net […]

I've added some functionality to my personal site because I now have SQL Server available on the back end... so, as a test, I've put a voting component onto the home page at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net ... I plan to add some features to […]

For most folks working with ASP.NET, this should be taken as essential information... Don't let the Whidbey reference in the first paragraph fool you, by the way, this post describes how to accomplish debugging as a non-admin in Visual Studio .NET 2003. Debugging an ASP.NET applicat […]

You may have been hearing a bit about nullable types in Whidbey (a feature in both VB and C#) but you should read this post by Paul to get an explanation of what they are, how they work and why they are useful... all from a VB point of view! The Truth about […]

The 3 Leaf guys, (well probably just one of them... but who knows which one), talk about "Application Level Events" in Whidbey […]

Who are the best VB bloggers? […]

I get this question a lot, and I explain many of the same things that Paul goes through in this post, so I'd love it if more people would read this material: […]

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Paul Vick, language guy for Visual Basic and unofficial spokesman for Krispy Kreme (look at the picture to understand that comment), arrived yesterday at TechEd.... Look for him around the Developer Division Cabanas (5 and 6), the Visual Studio 2005 booth and at the "Meet the VB Team" session (Thurs […]

I wouldn't have known about this site, if the site's owner wasn't sitting behind me on the plane to TechEd, so I thought the rest of you might not know about it either :) TryIIS.com is a new site dedicated to resources for evaluating IIS, and contains over 100 whitepapers and other materials... No […]

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Like Eric, Brad, and Paul I will be at TechEd and am participating in the Rio tool for meetings. Feel free to look me up and schedule something if you'd like to talk about.... umm... VB / C# / Coding 4 Fun / MSDN ... or whatever...   […]

Recently we launched a series of videos about VB.NET onto the Visual Basic Developer Center, releasing them only a few at a time... but now we've finished that process and all 101 of the videos are available on the site. […]

Look for lots of posts from the upcoming TechEd conference as well as material around all things VB... […]

Those wild and crazy PAG guys are at it again... […]

I answer quite a few questions on the forums on GotDotNet, and sometimes those answers are interesting enough (in my opinion) to be exposed to a larger audience.... Coding this particular one caused Brian Johnson to say... "cool", so it seems worth posting about here :) The question was (paraphrased […]

Paul Vick (Technical Lead on the VB team and author of this book) provides a list of key VB sessions scheduled for the upcoming TechEd conference... and his schedule for the week. TechEd 2004 sessions (from Panopticon Central) I'll be there too... and I'll post my sched […]

Part of vbCity's newsletter, the 'diary' column always has some great content focused on how-to information for people who are ramping up on VB.NET... the latest post talks about the concept of an Owned Form, and it is pretty useful stuff... […]

Watch Mike Schinkel interview Joe Binder (PM of VB's My feature) about VB 2005's "My" Classes. Not into video, check out my article on the same topic. […]

Amazing stuff... Adam Nathan creates pinvoke.net, to general acclaim, and then follows only a few days later with a great VS.NET Add-In that allows you to search for, insert and even contribute PInvoke signatures to his site. […]

Very cool article from Code Project; this is something I have wanted for awhile..... from the moment we started outputing RSS from MSDN, it seemed to me that you'd want to view them inside of VS... I'm downloading this right to try it out, but the article is well written and covers a lot of good top […]

We just launched a series of videos about VB.NET onto the Visual Basic Developer Center, check them out! […]

From Paschal's blog... […]

This very recent article from CodeProject.com shows a Windows Forms control (C#) that allows you to browse AD objects... I have some issues with the implemenation (mainly: why use a User Control... why not just inherit from TreeView?), but the idea is great and well... it works, so why not take a lo […]

It is all about "My", a feature of Visual Basic 2005... and I think it is fairly interesting stuff :)

I had read this in the 'offline' version of MSDN magazine (you know, that one that uses paper and is hard to copy and paste from?), but I hadn't noticed it was available online until now: […]

Adam Nathan has created a home for a ton of PInvoke signatures, organized by Module/DLL and pre-populated (by the man himself) with a ton of the most common signatures... I'll let the site describe itself with this text from the "What is this site?" page; PINVO […]

Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats for a full listing of upcoming chats, but here are a couple of VB ones that you might be interested in... […]

I've done this myself, including using a C++ shim to authenticode sign my add-in to get around

Visual Basic 2003 or 2005 (Whidbey) questions are welcome... just come on over and post your thoughts: http://blogs.msdn.com/vbfaq/

In a very 'Easter-Egg-ish' post, Grant Richins (a developer on the C# Compiler Team), explains a configuration option of 'alink.dll'. […]

Waltham 4/14 (Steven Lees and Amanda Silver) New York 4/15 (Steven Lees and Amanda Silver) Louisville 4/20 (Jay Schmelzer and Paul Vick) Chicago 4/21 (Jay Schmelzer and Paul Vick) Philadelphia 4/21 (Sean Draine and Joe Binder) Denver 4/26 (Robert Green and Jay Roxe) St Louis 4/26 (Paul Yuknew […]

If you are using the CTP (Community Technical Preview) or you are just interested in Whidbey/VS2005, then you'll definitely want to check out the new blog created to allow various team members to post info on VS2005. Check it out here. […]

This is so very cool... a great idea, good explanations, tons of useful bits of code and information, and even a very graphically pleasing set of diagrams in the article!! […]

Make sure you check out your University/College bookstore! "vbjay" mentioned today (on GotDotNet) that he bought the Academic version of VS.NET 2003 from his college bookstore for just a bit over $100.00. I did some googling around and found several University bookstores offering the software for ar […]

I didn't know this existed... so I'm going to assume that a few of you don't know about it either... there is a Blog site for MVPs at http://www.msmvps.com/, with some blogs hosted on that site (using .Text) and links to MVP blogs on other sites. […]

I was browsing DevX's Visual Basic Zone (http://www.devx.com/vb) and I found so much great stuff I just thought I'd better point out a couple of useful items; Printing Info for VB6 in two parts (part 1 and part 2)and I also found http://www.freevbcode.com/ which has a ton of VB6 code snippets (and i […]

Someone suggested to me that VB.NET Whidbey didn't have support for 'Generic Methods', so I quickly wrote a bit of sample code to check (yes, it does support Generic Methods) and I thought I'd post that test code for your amusement. […]

One of the changes from VB6 to VB.NET was the removal of non-zero lower bounded arrays... a concept discussed by Eric Gunnerson recently, and now covered by Paul... giving it a bit of VB perspective. Non-zero lower bounded arrays (the other side of the coin) ... To finesse this issue, the CLR desig […]

You may never see the actual web interface to my blog, but if you do you'll see two new graphics along the left-hand side... […]

CodeSmith 2.5 is available, and although I've mentioned it in a few articles on MSDN already, I have to tell you again... I use this utility all the time. […]

From Dave Wanta, the guy behind kbalertz.com, a detailed FAQ for the SMTP mail classes in the .NET Framework. If you are using System.Web.Mail, then you'll want to check it out: http://www.systemwebmail.net/ […]

Shaykat, a PM on the C# Team, has been posting some great tips on VS.NET 2003 so I thought I would collect them here for your linking pleasure; Tip #1: Stop the solution explorer flashiness when opening a project! Tip #2: Macros Tip #3: View exception information with $exception Tip #4: Demo be […]

Ok... so I'm biased here, Pedro used to be my grand-boss at MSDN, and now works on some very cool and very graphical magic as part of the Whitehorse team... but on the side it appears he has been developing some Windows Forms controls, so I would suggest you check them out; This ControlLibrary con […]

Turns out we (MSDN) are looking for a few good testers to come and work with us in Redmond... if you are interested in a position, and the following job description (which you may have also seen on Laura or Kent's blog...) is appealing, let us know via this link. Are you ready to join an exciting t […]

Well, if you haven't managed to see any of them live yet... don't fret, they are all available on-demand as well (after the live presentation that is). If you are a VB6 programmer interested in learning .NET or if you are already programming in VB.NET, you have to check them out... Session 1: Prog […]

Brian Randell has written 4 (really 7, but 3 of them are just the same article as both VB and C#) articles on using MSDE in your applications... (via Kent Sharkey's blog); Using MSDE? A whole whack of articles from Brian Randell on working with MSDE in your Web applications […]

Hey folks.... I've been thinking (dangerous, I know) and I've decided that you need to see more code. This might mean more code in this blog, more on the site, more pointed to that lives on other sites.... […]

In a recent post to his blog, Paul Vick discusses the new IsNot Operator (and the history/rational behind the Is operator), which allows you to write;

Hmm... I had no idea it was going up, but there it is... Click to read Chapter 3: Building Windows Applications The Way Things WereThe Windows Forms ModelHandling Events in .NETCoding Without Control ArraysConfiguring Your Form for ResizingProgramming Without Default Form InstancesWorking with Mul […]

This bit of news is getting quite a bit of airplay, so you've likely heard already, but the ASP.NET Resource Kit is now available... full of tons of code, videos, free book chapters, white papers, controls, and more... how can you miss it? Click here for more information! […]

Free sample modules available from the following training courses... […]

My simple class: […]

Joel Semeniuk, (my former roommate, co-founder of my first software development company, and now a co-founder of Imaginets), is doing a security webcast for MSDN... something about 'threat modeling' or 'model threatening', I'm really not sure which, but I'm sure it will be entertaining either way. […]

Robert Green, a PM on the Visual Basic team, has recently started up a blog... and he already has posted a bunch of cool Visual Basic Whidbey information! Check it out. […]

Debugging Visual Basic .NET Applications Join members of the Visual Basic .NET and Debugging teams to discuss debugging Visual Basic .NET applications with the Visual Studio .NET Debugger. Almost every program will need to be debugged sometime, so take this opportunity to learn more about […]

Part 3: Binary Trees and BSTs […]