The following is my response to the VS blog post about the design for all caps in top level menus: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-design-with-all-caps.aspx First off, why would you want to add *EMPHASIS* to menus when the design philosophy stated for the new look of VS was it didn’t distract from the content we are creating? Second, the […]

Today I has having some discussions over the right roof pitch for a car port, so I grabbed my phone, rotated it and did some quick trigonometry.  Ten minutes later I tried to do the same and I could only see HEX and BIN, not Sin and Tan et al.  I’d forgotten it all depends […]

The beta of Visual Studio 11 is causing a lot of feedback around the grey shade icons.  The use of colour or not has also brought to the forefront the UI for colour-blind people.  So I thought I’d post a picture of my toolbar, along with some links to see the page as seen by […]

There’s a lot to like in windows 8 preview: it’s easy to see how windows 8 will be a hit on tablet devices; there’s massive synergy with windows phone; the built in windows live experience combined with your settings in the cloud, make it smooth to go from one device to another. But there’s other […]

Hopefully you already know VB has full support for Optional parameters, both declaring them and calling them, but did you know you can use Dates as Optional parameters ?    Public Sub AddNewCustomer(customer As Customer,                               Optional dateAdded As Date = Nothing)       If dateAdded = Nothing Then dateAdded = Now   VB has had this support for Optional […]

From time to time there’s discussion about the way dates are displayed in the Visual Studio IDE for Visual Basic. Typically dates are shown using VB’s date literal syntax of #MM/dd/yyyy# which is the standard US format.  For people outside of the USA this can be confusing or ambiguous at times.  The good news is […]

The DateTime structure in .NET includes custom operators for Date comparisons such as less than, greater than, equal and not equal; but did you know it also includes addition and subtraction operators ?  There’s two subtraction operators and one addition operator defined inside DateTime: date = date – timespan timespan = date – date date […]

Can you pick the problem with this code ? :       Dim currentChar As Char       For i = 0 To largenumber          currentChar = getChar(i)          If currentChar = "a" Then             count += 1          End If       Next   The answer of course is the literal “a” is of type string, not of type Char. […]

Do you know why you can’t write this code in VB:    Dim x = 123456789.0123456789 Answer: The IDE won’t let you If you try to write that code the IDE will truncate the number, giving :    Dim x = 123456789.01234567 To include all the decimal places you need to be using the Decimal […]

Can you spot the problem with this code:    <Extension()>    Public Function ToColor(argb As UInteger) As Color       Return Color.FromArgb( _                       CType((argb & &HFF000000) >> &H18, Byte), _                       CType((argb & &HFF0000) >> &H10, Byte), _                       CType((argb & &HFF00) >> 8, Byte), _                       CType(argb & &HFF, Byte))    End Function   If you said it should […]