Developer.com has been publishing a ton of great VB articles…

Jan 18, 2005 1 min.

I’ve been meaning to mention this for awhile, but better late than never: Discovering Visual Basic .NET By Bill Hatfield – There is no need to put off learning Visual Basic .NET any longer. With this tutorial you will be on your way! Remoting or Web Services, How Do I Decide? By Paul Kimmel – Published 12/31/2004Choosing between XML Web services and .NET remoting isn’t a hard decision. Just use XML Web services almost all of the time, says Paul Kimmel.

Interoperability Webcast Series

Jan 18, 2005 1 min.

“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 experts such as Simon Guest, Dino Chiesa, and Navdip Bhachech.” … check it out here. Includes Simon Guest’s new on-demand videos for 14 web services interop scenarios.

Conga Lines….

Jan 13, 2005 1 min.

A few people have emailed to let me know about the various ‘conga lines’ out there, for people interested in the referral based offers discussed in my previous post. One source for these, that I know of, is a forum on GearLive that lists a few different ones. I guess it isn’t surprising that these things exist, someone created a difficult to follow process, so trust the gadget geeks to quickly try to ‘automate’ it 🙂

Free stuff?

Jan 12, 2005 1 min.

I read this PVP cartoon last week, talking about the free iPod thing, and now I’ve seen similar things (free dvds, free pcs, free video games, etc…) from the same company. After reading about it, I gave in. I signed up for the Columbia deal personally, though the blockbuster offer seems ‘free-er’ … the whole thing is probably another one of those “sign up for the free offer, because we know you are too lazy to remember to cancel before we start charging you money” deals… so check it out at your own risk 🙂

EndIf or End If?

Jan 6, 2005 3 min.

The recent annoucements around [Visual Fox Pro 9.0](http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/productinfo/) have brought up a bunch of memories, and have me tempted to install VFP for the first time in years... Whether or not you have a chance to give VFP 9 a try, if you are planning on getting into .NET or VB .NET specifically and have a FoxPro background like me, you’ll probably find these books useful;

Cool GDI+ Demo with VB.NET

Jan 5, 2005 1 min.

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!! GDI+, GraphicPaths, and Polygons: (vb.net, w/explanation) Author: Terry Voss

January 2005 “Advanced Basics” column up on MSDN

Dec 14, 2004 1 min.

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… Check out the article here: Creating a Five-Star Rating Control

Enter Instead of Tab

Dec 13, 2004 4 min.

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… First, the easy… set your Form’s KeyPreview property to true, override OnKeyUp (or OnKeyDown… can’t think of any real reason to use one or the other in this case), check for the Enter key, then call your Form’s ProcessTabKey method.

Lead Developer position available with MSDN

Dec 13, 2004 2 min.

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 technology! The MSDN/TechNet development team is looking for you to help us innovate in many exciting areas for our Development and IT Professional communities.

Follow up to ‘drawing rotated text’

Dec 9, 2004 2 min.

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… as if it was a glass that you’ve poured water into… so here goes (this is only a snippet of the code, see the original post for the rest); <font color="Blue" family="Microsoft Sans Serif">ByVal e <font color="Blue" family="Microsoft Sans Serif">As System.Windows.Forms.PaintEventArgs) e.Graphics.<font color="Blue" family="Microsoft Sans Serif">Clear(<font color="Blue" family="Microsoft Sans Serif">Me.