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 it out:  http://msmvps.com/blogs/kathleen/archive/2008/07.aspx

We have a new blogger on the site.  Jon Starr has started his TestHelpers blog and forums. I'll let him fill you in on all the details though. 

If you're interested in Microsoft Robotics Studio, but despaired at the lack of VB samples... we're here for you.

Keep checking back to the site as we've got some people working on putting together some VB demos, samples and tutorials. Once they are ready, we'll launch a VB Robotics blog and forums to go with them.

It's been a pretty quiet month over here at ILoveVB.net but don't worry, we're not going anywhere. I've been sick off and on most of the winter (welcome to Minnesota) and when not hacking up a lung, I've just been really busy working on Code Camp sessions and Webinars and the like.  The cool part is that a lot of that work will be making it onto this site eventualy.

Andy Dunn has managed to get some of my VB XNA Samples working on the 360, so that's pretty exciting. Expect blog posts on that before too much longer. 

I've also spent some time on HA! but I'll save that for a different blog post as well.

Now that they tell me Spring is more or less here (aside from the foot of snow we got this weekend) maybe I'll start feeling better and yuo'll start seeing more content on the site again.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris

Not much news lately, I've been really really sick and haven't had much time (or strength) to do, well, anything.   Fortunately we have some first class blogging machines busy on this site keeping the traffic flowing.

Now that I'm feeling better though, expect to see more of me.  (I've been playing ADOM again lately while recuperating, so expect to see an entry or two in the HA! blog.) 

One thing I've noticed (and recently had pointed out to me) was that it takes a while for blog posts to show up on the aggregate (main) page.  They show up right away in the proper blog, and in the aggregate (blogs) page, but the main page is taking a long time to update. 

On the one hand, it's not a big deal because it gives me (and you, the blogger) a chance to take another look at my/your work before it hits the main page.

On the other hand, if it's a performance issue, we're in big trouble because it's only going to get worse once this site actually starts getting some traffic.  

I haven't seen any kind of setting in CS that corresponds to a propagation delay and I don't know of anything my host is doing, so I guess I'll pay a visit to the CS and OW forums this weekend and see if I can hunt down an answer. Once I know something, I'll update this post.

UPDATE:  Apparently this is a known issue. It has to do with the timezone of the database server being different than the local timezone in the site settings. Sure enough, my site thinks it's in (EST) even though I set it to (CST). I'll probably have better luck just changing my site to (EST) than getting them to change the time on the DB server. I'll see if this fixes the problem.

UPDATE: So far, no luck on the delay. 

UPDATE: well the posts eventually showed up, and I know it's a TZ related issue. I've changed a few settings here and there, but only time will tell. There's also a 5 minute cache on the main page, which is user configurable, and probably not necessary for a site with (currently) little traffic. That is being totally overshadowed by the time zone issue though, so I'm not going to bother tweaking it until I can get the other delay resolved.

Matthew Kleinwaks said this earlier today, and I just couldn't agree more.

D'Arcy Lussier joins the site with not one, but two, blogs called VB Web & VB Design respectively.

VB Web can be found in the Project Blogs section and VB Design is in our new Design and Architecture Blogs section.

Welcome D'Arcy!!

Matt Worden, of MWGames.com, has recently moved in and set up a blog for his new project Nimble2D. 

I'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.  Here is the description, in his own words:

Nimble2D is a 2D game development library for .Net based on SlimDX and DirectX9.  It will use Direct3D9's Sprite functionality to create a fast 2D environment (with real-time rotation, scaling and blending), mobile cameras, sprite-based text and primatives, and real-time sound effect panning and volume based on sprite locations.

Lou Vega (aka BrainThump) has recently set up a blog and project forums for his VB.NET work with Mobility.

You can find his project blog here and the project forums here.

Welcome Lou!

If anyone hit the site around 11:30 CST tonight, you may have noticed google ads were turned on (for about 5 minutes.)

They're currently turned back off again. I haven't decided whether I'm going to run them or not. I'm not crazy about how they look and I'm less crazy about the "you too can get a date" type content. I know all of this is configurable in some way, shape or form, but since I dont have the time right now to mess with it on the google end, I'm leaving them off until I do.

Thanks to the nice folks at OrcsWeb (and the helpful forums at Telligent) the file uploading problem has been fixed, so I'm uploading the samples as Zip files again.

Basically the problem involved IIS compression and the CommunityServer custom handler for files. We turned off IIS compression and the problem went away.

For the time being, I'll be uploading samples in RAR format instead of ZIP.

The reason for this is that for some reason, I'm unable to consistently upload valid ZIP files to Community Server. I've tested the files locally and sent them over GTalk to other people who could open them with no problem. When I upload them to Community Server, they get changed. (I've tried this literally 40-50 times) Sometimes it works after the 5th or 6th try, sometimes not at all. It's incredibly frustrating.

Basically what happens is the root folder of the ZIP archive appears to be losing its information. If you extract it and add a ZIP extension, everything opens fine. That's not really an elegant workaround though.

The odd thing is, RAR files don't exhibit this problem. So, for now, I'm taking that option.

Currently when people sign up for the site, I create the blogs, forums, etc manually for them.  CS supports the option to do this automatically, and down the road I might, but for now the demand isn't so great that I can't handle it, and I want to keep the site focused on VB.NET and related content.  Allowing automatic (hands free) blog creation would make that tougher.

I've been waiting until things were closer to "right" before transferring the domain name over. As of roughly 12:45AM on 11/21/07, the site is officially in the tubes.