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VBTweeter is an open source Twitter application I wrote to illustrate how easy it is to consume the Twitter API with Visual Basic .NET. I use this application as part of my lectures & user group talks. This is for educational purposes. The application...

One place VB support had been missing for a while was from Microsoft Patterns & Practices’ Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight. I'm happy to announce that the P&P team are now releasing VB versions of the QuickStarts, Hands...

Silverlight Toolkit adds Visual Basic samples The Silverlight Toolkit March 2009 release is enhanced with Visual Basic source code for both Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 . The Toolkit is a collection of controls, components and utilities made available...

Organization of the Core The structure of the Nimble2D library is based on the idea of a central "Core" object that contains references to all of the major component objects and gives a coordinated means for all objects to be able to work off...

Thanks to codeimp's comment on my previous post, I went back to my pixel-plotting test app to add-in a LockBits method to see how it would stand up to the pure GDI+ methods. As it turns out, I found that a poorly-placed "End If" was causing...

I recently ran a little experiment to see which would be the fastest way to plot a bunch of single pixels using the methods available in the System.Drawing namespace. It turns out, for those who haven't looked, that there is no set-pixel type method...

Programming Visual Basic applications? Typemock have released a new version of their unit testing tool, Typemock Isolator 5.2. This version includes a new friendly VB.NET API which makes Isolator the best Isolation tool for unit testing A Visual Basic...

One of the first things I like to think through is how user input will be provided in a game, and how I want to manage that within my game code. I've become fond of working at the higher abstraction level of "user actions" within the game...

The previous post introduced the Game Clock class that I'll be using with the Nimble libraries and walked through a few concepts that were considered in putting the class together. I mentioned in that post that I wanted the system to be flexible enough...

There are some things needed in a game that are independent of the graphics system. One of them is the system used to keep track of time passing as the game runs. I prefer to work with a delta-time based system. This means that we figure out how much...

One thing that the GDI+ (System.Drawing namespace in VB.Net) system is *not* is overly quick. It does a great job of certain things required by a more general, modern OS-based drawing system -- fonts, alpha, lines & shapes, etc. But it isn't game...

As my last post detailed (a couple of months ago), I came to a crossroads and have figured out a direction to go. The games I hope to make in the near future are not very complex and do not require amazing graphics capabilities. So, I will take this blog...

Kathleen Dollard has posted an excellent list of 51 (so far) things that a C# coder should know when working in Visual Basic. I especially like #1 on the list: "Get over the respect thing or quit before you start. VB is a great language." Check...

So, it's been a few months since I posted here. But, it's not like I've been slacking. I've even fleshed out some of the start-up sequence code for Nimble (I ended up changing one of my dev machines, and that caused me to need to do some...