Talking back to the interface using Delegates and Events in VB.NET

I love using Async and Await. It makes asynchronous programming so much easier. One area I have never really liked though is the functionality for talking back to the main thread (like the UI thread) when you are doing asynchronous things though. Something I have started doing recently (and for some...

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Eventing for VB.NET on the .NET Compact Framework

I don't know why I enjoy programming devices like this but I used to write stock management software for supermarkets using devices like this and I still sometimes have a hankering to go back to the Compact Framework and VB.NET days. It's been a while since I did any work on the Compact Framework,...

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Split String Function for Excel

I couldn't seem to find a reasonable string splitting function in excel and I hate the foulness of using the LEFT() and FIND() function for such things. This function below gives you the ability to split a string and return a value from it's split array. ...

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Generics in VB.NET

Saw these cups knocking about recently. I like the implementation of Generics in VB.NET. When you describe a generic type in C# or Java, and you have a type Database<T> you say a "database of T". VB.NET takes this further, the syntax is just Database(of T). Generics allow you to resuse...

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XML Literals

I love XML Literals in VB.NET. They're a great way of generating valid XML instead of dealing with giant concatenated strings. After discussing testing an XML Processing type class with a colleague this morning I thought I'd show him how this could be achieved quite nicely using XML literals....

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Anonymous Types

Anonymous Types are classes that you don't have to explicitly create whilst coding. They're a bit of syntactic sugar that means you can concentrate on a specific task (such as transforming and transferring data from one place to another, or filtering and totaling sets of data) instead of having to...

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VB.NET 14 Features

I read this article about some of the best features coming for VB.NET 14 in the next Visual Studio Release. Some of these features have been a given in C# for many years but have annoyingly been left out of VB.NET projects (The references folder for crying out loud!!!) https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn890368.aspx Probably...

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