Section: Blogs

Cool Quote from the “My” chat going on right now…

Jul 15, 2004 1 min.

<font face="Tahoma" color="#000080" size="2">Tyler_MS : <font face="Tahoma" size="2">Q: Is "My" customizable so that people can create their own "shortcuts" to frequently used sections? <font size="2"> <font face="Tahoma" color="#000080" size="2">Tyler_MS : <font face="Tahoma" size="2">A: Yes, it is customizable. It is done via partial classes. We will be writing a whitepaper on how to do it. You can add things at the My. level, the My.Computer. level (e.g. My.Computer.BarCodeReader), and at the My.

Default Values, Triggers, and Code supplied values &#8230; oh my!

Jul 14, 2004 3 min.

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 generally just a black hole, I thought I’d raise this discussion up to a proper blog entry of its own 🙂

&#8220;Express Paint&#8221; article up&#8230;

Jul 14, 2004 1 min.

This article, by John Kennedy, discusses the creation of an image editing application completely built with C# Express Edition. [ExpressPaint](http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/2005/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/ExprsPaint.asp) Summary: Use C# Express to create an image processing application that's ideal for putting the final touch to your digital photographs. This program is easy to expand with your own unique touches. (6 printed pages) Enjoy!

New Poll is up and a silly mistake&#8230;

Jul 11, 2004 1 min.

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 stored procs to my live SQL box, I forgot to include my triggers… so all the votes on my previous poll have no date/time info.

Andrew Troelsen&#8217;s Refactoring Article is up&#8230;

Jul 10, 2004 1 min.

[Refactoring C# Code Using Visual Studio 2005](http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/vs05_refac.asp)Andrew W. TroelsenIntertech TrainingSummary: This article examines the role of code refactoring, and the refactoring techniques supported by Visual Studio 2005. (23 printed pages)

Get a listing of all the upcoming VB Chats

Jul 8, 2004 1 min.

[Chats on Visual Basic 2005](http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2004/07/07/175635.aspx) _ For the past year, I've been organizing the Visual Basic chats that appear at _ [ _http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/_ ](http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/) _. For the most part, these chats focused on answering your questions about Visual Basic._ _Naturally, now that the Beta 1 for Visual Basic 2005 is available, I wanted to schedule some chats to answer your Beta questions. But after discussing this with Robert Green, we decided to change the format somewhat; instead of just answering questions, the chat hosts will also be looking for feedback about what you like (or don't like) about the selected feature.

Generics in VB 2005 Article now live on MSDN&#8230;

Jul 8, 2004 1 min.

[Defining and Using Generics in Visual Basic 2005](http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/whidbey/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/vb2005_generics.asp) [Harish Kantamneni](http://blogs.msdn.com/harishk)Visual Basic TeamMicrosoft CorporationJuly 2004 Summary: Provides an overview of the generics feature in Visual Basic 2005, and explains the basic concepts involved in defining and using generics and their usefulness to the Visual Basic developer.

Webcast today on the new features of VB 2005&#8230;

Jul 2, 2004 1 min.

In case you didn’t notice this on the /vbasic home page… MSDN Webcast: New Features for Visual Basic 2005 DevelopersFriday, July 02, 2004 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)In this webcast, you’ll learn about the new features in the language, and in the Visual Studio .NET environment, including the My namespace, IntelliTasks, new exception-handling features, data binding support, generics, operator overloading and more.

Cool new MSDN TV (on creating a RSS reader that runs as a tool window in VS)

Jul 2, 2004 1 min.

[**Building Tools Using the Visual Studio Automation Model**](http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20040701VSTUDIOCS/manifest.xml)In this episode, Craig Skibo uses the Visual Studio .NET 2003 automation model to build a tool window hosted within Visual Studio that allows you to read blog postings.