VB.NET For Everyone! - All Comments

re: First Blog Post

qprna — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 14:10:25 GMT

hello, good site.

re: MSDN: Contest for free MSDN Subscription for 1 year.

CodedFire — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:32:13 GMT

Congrats Rob!

re: MSDN: Contest for free MSDN Subscription for 1 year.

demotivater — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:28:08 GMT

Awesome news, Matt. I can't thank you enough for the opportunity. You the man!!

re: MSDN: Contest for free MSDN Subscription for 1 year.

Matthew Kleinwaks — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:35:14 GMT

I want to congratulate demotivater (Rob) on winning the MSDN subscription with his essay. Hopefully he will be REmotivating people to learn and work with VB. I actually got fewer entries that I thought I would based on the prize and what was required to enter, but all the entries I did get were pretty good. If I had an MSDN subscription card for everyone who entered, they would get it.

re: MSDN: Contest for free MSDN Subscription for 1 year.

CodedFire — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:53:27 GMT

Hey mat, dont worry il be submitting my easy in the next couple of days! PS. Like the site, its the first time i have actually seen it.

re: .NET : Install your app and the .NET framework using INNO Setup

Matthew Kleinwaks — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:42:35 GMT

There is a plugin for INNO Setup that allows you to perform downloads during install time. This can be useful when doing things like downloading the latest version of your program when the user goes to install it from an old version installer, or even doing something like using my example code above and only downloading and running the .NET framework setup if the user doesn't have it, which means there is no need to package the framework with the setup.

That being said though, I don't really think INNO or any installer is really the right tool for doing "after installed" update checks. This is something that would be better for your own app to do. It can be as easy as keeping a text file on the server that just has the latest version number listed, and your app reading that text file to compare against its own version, and downloading update files if needed. This generally requires 2 exe files. Your main application, and also an updater exe that can replace your applications file with the new downloaded ones, and then restart the main application. This is the method I use for my apps, and it works rather well for the most part.

I am actually writing up an article I plan to publish in the next few days on a downloader class I wrote for downloading files from the web using VB.NET which is more robust than any of the built in file download methods of the framework.

re: .NET : Install your app and the .NET framework using INNO Setup

xancholy — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:39:46 GMT

kleinma, I am a great fan of innosetup and have used it extensively for deployment in the past.

How can I use innosetup to check for website based program updates like clickonce does ?

re: MSDN: Contest for free MSDN Subscription for 1 year.

Matthew Kleinwaks — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:29:08 GMT

Dan,

Only a few so far.

re: MSDN: Contest for free MSDN Subscription for 1 year.

dan — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 05:01:01 GMT

how many entries have you received so far?

re: VB.NET : Extended Combobox to better visually handle being disabled

Matthew Kleinwaks — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:08:31 GMT

gw,

after reading your comment again, i realized you were talking about the dropdown button to drop down the list (I should have read it more clearly the first time).

Yeah that was one of the drawbacks to this workaround. I never really looked too hard at a solution for that, but there may or may not be an easy one to implement.

I was able to at least mimic the behavior of the VB example in C# though. What was your specific issue with using new versus shadows?

re: MSDN: Contest for free MSDN Subscription for 1 year.

Matthew Kleinwaks — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:04:22 GMT

MSDN Users as in members of the MSDN community, or MSDN Forums is not quite the same thing as the MSDN subscription, which is a product of Microsoft's.

Anyway, go ahead and submit me an entry and it will be considered for the contest.

Thanks!

re: MSDN: Contest for free MSDN Subscription for 1 year.

Luka — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:06:54 GMT

I hope it isn't because there is a lot of MSDN users less than 18... But I could still put the name on my dad IF i would win, couldn't I?

re: MSDN: Contest for free MSDN Subscription for 1 year.

Matthew Kleinwaks — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:07:14 GMT

Luka,

I would have to check on that, but I feel there may be an age requirement of at least 18.

re: VB.NET : Extended Combobox to better visually handle being disabled

Matthew Kleinwaks — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:06:27 GMT

For any methods you want to handle the disabled functionality, you would just override them to act how you want in the case where the control should be disabled.

As for the C# New versus the VB shadows, I think this may be one of those cases where VB has an upper hand with the way it works and the shadows keyword. I will mess around with it in C# and see about getting this example working.

re: MSDN: Contest for free MSDN Subscription for 1 year.

Luka — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:41:27 GMT

Oh, thats big! But im only 15 years old, am i allowed to participate? It would be really nice to have all that :P.