If you were the content owner of the Visual Basic tracks at the Dutch Microsoft DevDays 2008, which Visual Basic topic would be your favorite? Let me know and I will communicate this to the person within Microsoft Netherlands who is responsible for the overall content. Let us make this a great event for Visual Basic developers!

Send me an e-mail...

With help of an object of the type Graphics, it is very easy to make screen capture. Add the next method  to your form:

Public Function CaptureScreen() As Bitmap

  Dim objBitmap As New Bitmap(SystemInformation.VirtualScreen.Width, _
                              SystemInformation.VirtualScreen.Height)

  Using objGraphics As Graphics = Graphics.FromImage(objBitmap)
    objGraphics.CopyFromScreen(0, 0, 0, 0, objBitmap.Size)
  End Using

  Return objBitmap

End Function

Now you can call this function as follows:

PictureBox1.Image = CaptureScreen()

Happy coding!

Since I have finished the manuscript of my second book (Visual Basic Kooboek), I have some time to play around with some new stuff. For the book I added already a chapter dedicated to Visual Basic 2008. It contains some cool VB2008 recipes, coded in beta 2 of Visual Basic 2008 Express.  But today… I downloaded the iso-file of Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite… a download of 3921 Mb. The installation took a while, but succeeded without any hassle…  I am happy!

I can recommend you this upgrade. You’re still able to write .NET 2.0 applications, but you can use the new features en enhancements of the IDE. The Visual Basic team did an awesome job, by making our favorite language even better. Congratulations… you did great job!

If you are not so lucky that you can work with full Team System edition,  please download the free Visual Basic 2008 Express edition. Install it and learn that this great upgrade makes you more productive as ever before.
I’m planning to blog about the features of VB2008 in the near future. So stay tuned!

Links:
 Members of Visual Basic Team
 More information about Visual Studio 2008 Team System
 Download Visual Basic 2008 Express

The Visual Basic team has put together a "Live from Redmond" webcast series aimed at the next version of Visual Basic and Visual Studio code named "Orcas". The series will start April 18th and will continue into June. Some topics that will be covered: Orcas Overview, LINQ Overview, LINQ to SQL Server & O/R Designer Deep Dive, Building N-Tier Applications, Offline Data Caching, Building Service-Oriented Applications, Using the Interop Toolkit to Migrate your VB6 Application and a couple more!

Blog Visual Basic Team...

On the website of SubMain you can download a free copy of the ebook: C#/VB.NET Coding Guidelines. This 100+ page book can help you to write better readable and structured code.

Topics covered:

• Naming Guidelines
• Class Member Usage Guidelines
• Guidelines for Exposing Functionality to COM
• Error Raising & Handling Guidelines
• Array Usage Guidelines
• Operator Overloading Usage Guidelines
• Guidelines for Casting Types
• Common Design Patterns
• Callback Function Usage
• Time-Out Usage
• Security in Class Libraries
• Threading Design Guidelines
• Formatting Standards
• Commenting Code
• Code Reviews
• Additional Notes for VB .NET Developers

 Downloadpage C#/VB.NET Coding Guidelines ebook

Yesterday Microsoft released the long awaited Service Pack for Visual Studio 2005. Many bugs are fixed and there is also new support for processors or for for example SQL Server Compact Edition.

• Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite SP1 (Standard, Professional, and Team Editions of Visual Studio 2005);
• Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1;
• Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions SP1;

It is currently installing on my machine... Unfortunately, the service pack which fixes issues with Windows Vista is still in beta and isn't available yet. Expected 2007Q1...

Two days ago Microsoft released to the web the Microsoft Printer Compatibility Library 1.0. The Printer Compatibility library is a new Visual Basic 2005 PowerPack and will help you with migrating your Visual Basic 6.0 projects to Visual Basic 2005. By simply adding a reference to the Library, declaring a Printer, and making a few minor syntax changes, your project will be able to print using the Printers collection and Printer object as it did in Visual Basic 6.0. This will give you more time to focus on enhancing your project with Visual Basic 2005.

 Get it now

Maurice de Beijer (also a Visual Basic MVP) wrote a review of my book: Visual Basic 2005 - De basis. It will published in the upcoming Software Developer Network Magazine (SDN Magazine). Not a member of the SDN? No problem, he published it also on his website (Dutch) 

 Review Visual Basic 2005 - De basis

If (VB6.Importance > VS2003.Importance) Then
    Me.Eat(Devices.Mouse)
End if

Wow... Today's blog post of Soma Somasegar was suprising. Visual Studio.NET 2002 and Visual Studio.NET 2003 will not supported under Windows Vista! That's bad news for many and many developers who needs to support their product under this new OS.. Okay, your .NET 1.1 programs can run, but developing on this platform is not possible.
Good news.. The Visual Basic 6 runtime, as well the Visual Basic 6 IDE will supported.

Some guys suggested to develop in an Virtual Machine like Virtual PC, but I think that will not be an option for most developers. Visual Studio 2005 is already slow, don't even speak about using it in a VM... Why does MS skipped the support? I can imagine that things like debugging can give some troubles, but as even MSFT developers cann't get it working.......?