Section: Blogs

Survey Results Posted

Feb 14, 2005 1 min.

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

Betsy Aoki writes about VS for the first-time programmer!

Feb 14, 2005 1 min.

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 preventing a whole bunch of low ratings that say things like “I already know this…”, “I program in VS every day…”, “Why are you writing about something so simple?

Interested in the results of the Visual Basic usage survey?

Feb 13, 2005 1 min.

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 seeing this information. Let me know via the comments if you think this would be useful and I’ll get started on creating an HTML view of the info.

Beta MSDN Search up….

Feb 11, 2005 1 min.

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.

It seems referral swapping is the way to go… but you end up signed up for a bunch more sites

Feb 11, 2005 1 min.

I signed up for RefStop, where you create a list of the current ‘free offer’ sites that you have accounts with and then you are matched up with folks who can do a referral for you in return for you doing one for them… and it works pretty good, I now have 5 out of the 8 I need for the Free Flat Screen offer, and 7 out of the 10 I need for the Mac Mini site (from which I actually have selected the $450 paypal offer, not the mini mac itself … this is a nice feature of any of the sites run by OfferCentric, they all have a Pay Pal option instead of the standard items).

Great set of VB videos posted on Channel 9… Paul Vick and Amanada Silver

Feb 7, 2005 2 min.

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), Paul Vick – Why would a VB 6.0'er consider VB.NET?If you're a Visual Basic 6.0 programmer, why would you consider moving to VB.NET? Paul talks to us about the trials and tribulations of learning VB.NET from the VB6'er point of view. Paul Vick – What makes a great Visual Basic programmer?

Getting the 8.3 filename…

Feb 6, 2005 1 min.

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

Free XP Themed Windows Forms Controls

Feb 3, 2005 1 min.

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! SteepValley.NET: XP Common Controls The XP Common Controls are a collection of themed and unthemed controls that are currently missing from the Visual Studio IDE… The new Release of Version 2.0 from Sept. 9th, 2004 includes several new features including:

Fun quotes via GapingVoid.com

Feb 2, 2005 2 min.

In the comments of this post; “I bet they [Microsoft] think people’s idea of fun on the weekend is sitting around at home wearing company golf shirts and making corporate presentations for their upcoming week at work.” — Brad Whittington and following a multi-step path from SeatlleDuck, from BBSpot… this little post Microsoft leaves no doubt what their products are. If they made toilet paper it would be called Butt Wiper.