Site Archives for June 2004


My new Coding 4 Fun Column is up on MSDN...

Posted on June 30th

How Long Now? […]

Another new article posted yesterday... "What's New In Help for VB 2005"

Posted on June 30th

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. […]

Operator Overloading in VB 2005

Posted on June 30th

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

Spiderman 2... the game, not the movie...

Posted on June 30th

I had been planning to go to Spiderman 2 last night at 12:01 am... but I decided to skip it instead... so I went out during the day and spent my Father's Day gift (a gift certificate for Best Buy... my wife made a great choice) on a wireless xbox controller from Logitech and the new Spiderman 2 game […]

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 and the Express Edition Betas have launched...

Posted on June 29th

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!! […]

Eric Gunnerson discusses grouping classes within an assembly...

Posted on June 26th

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 […]

Oh man... I guess this isn't new, but I'm impressed...

Posted on June 26th

I installed MCE onto my main home computer recently, which happens to have a modem that supports caller id.... and I was just sitting in front of it tonight watching a recorded episode of “The Dead Zone” when someone called... a nice transparent message floated up telling me their name and #.... and […]

New Community Page for your viewing pleasure...

Posted on June 25th

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... […]

A sneak preview of Visual Basic 2005 (article) is up on MSDN...

Posted on June 22nd

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... […]

Just saw a concert... already have the live CD...

Posted on June 21st

It is like bootleg concert recordings but the quality is better and I had to pay for it :) […]

Today's Team Chat (Thursday 6/24 at 1pm Pacific Time) has been cancelled

Posted on June 20th

Update: This chat has been cancelled, sorry folks!! […]

Andy Pennell and Scott Nonnenberg are looking for your opinion...

Posted on June 18th

Debugger Window Menu Items: Where should they be? […]

Replaced the Poll Component with my 'new and improved' one...

Posted on June 17th

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... […]

Ended the "Most anticipated release" poll...

Posted on June 17th

And (hopefully the formatting will work out ok in the blog) here are the results :) […]

Mark Davis discusses a C# feature....

Posted on June 17th

and it isn't about Whidbey, oh my... :) […]

Visual Basic Power Pack Article Up on MSDN

Posted on June 16th

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! […]

My MSDN Magazine article is up online...

Posted on June 16th

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

C# TechEd Page started...

Posted on June 16th

I've put a few of the sessions up here... more to follow!

Ach... my reading list is growing too fast...

Posted on June 16th

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 […]

TechEd Slides working their way online...

Posted on June 15th

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]) […]

I just like to make things complicated...

Posted on June 15th

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 […]

'Using' statement added to VB in Whidbey release...

Posted on June 12th

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

If you write RFPs to get work...

Posted on June 12th

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)...   […]

More playing with ASP.NET

Posted on June 12th

As with my earlier messing around with a poll, I took a concept from the www.asp.net site today and made my own "CheckDotNet.aspx" page. The one on www.asp.net only checks for the .NET Framework 1.0 or better, so I modified the logic to detect 1.1 and 1.0 as two distinct cases... recommending an upg […]

Updated the 'blogs' page on msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic

Posted on June 11th

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. […]

Very Very Cool... 3D Pie Chart in C#

Posted on June 11th

In yet another great article from CodeProject, Julijan Sribar describes the details of drawing out a 3D Pie Chart, and not only does it work, but his explanation is exteremely clear, detailed and includes lots of diagrams that really add to the explanation.   […]

A love little samples like this...

Posted on June 10th

From Justin Rogers […]

Celebrities in the locker room... career opportunity or creepy awkwardness?

Posted on June 9th

As other people have probably mentioned here and there, there is a very nice health club near Microsoft and a membership to that club is one of the options in our benefits plan. Therefore, it isn't all that surprising that most of the folks in the gym at any particular time are […]

I added the "no vote, just show me the results" feature to that polling component...

Posted on June 8th

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 […]

Draft posts... what should they display for 'date posted'?

Posted on June 8th

I've been using unpublished posts as a way to create planned blog posts for later... then, when I have a chance I go back and finish them up and mark them as 'Published'... but I just noticed that when I do that, the published date is the date on which I originally created the unpublished post. I […]

I'm playing around a bit...

Posted on June 7th

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 […]

Outlook programming article now available...

Posted on June 7th

It has been up for a few days now, but in case you haven't found it yet... Andrew Troelsen has written a good article on programming Outlook with C#, covering using the object model and building Add-ins... […]

Greggm describes how to debug ASP.NET as a non-admin...

Posted on June 6th

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 […]

Whidbey docs up on MSDN's lab servers...

Posted on June 6th

Check out this link to go right to the VB section... lots of great info in there... or check out the C# section here. (found via the VSTO2 blog...) Note that this is not a prototype of the next version of MSDN... it is intended to be consumed by the internal browser in Visual Studio... so the non-IE […]

Paul Vick discusses Nullable Types in the Whidbey release of Visual Basic

Posted on June 5th

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 […]

Early & Adopter fill you in on "Application Level Events"

Posted on June 5th

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

Paul is looking for a list of the 'best' VB Bloggers...

Posted on June 3rd

Who are the best VB bloggers? […]