VB Magic

Hi,

I’m at last coding in VB.net with the .net Microframework thanks to the hard work of the people at GHI converting libraries over to use .netmf 4.2

There are a couple of gotcha’s I’ve come across so far converting my Tyrannt game over to VB.

Firstly there is a small problem with the Auto-generated code for resouces which I expect will be fixed by the time the release comes out of Beta.

Inside the code-behind Resources.Designer.vb

Namespace TyranntVB
    Partial Friend Class Resources
        Private Shared manager As System.Resources.ResourceManager
        Friend Shared ReadOnly Property ResourceManager() As System.Resources.ResourceManager
            Get
                If (Resources.manager Is Nothing) Then
                    Resources.manager = New System.Resources.ResourceManager("TyranntVB.Resources", GetType(Resources).Assembly)
                End If
                Return Resources.manager
            End Get
        End Property

You’ll notice there is a Namespace being used. This is what is required in C# but not in Visual Basic. If you remove the Namespace commands

Partial Friend Class Resources
    Private Shared manager As System.Resources.ResourceManager
    Friend Shared ReadOnly Property ResourceManager() As System.Resources.ResourceManager
        Get
            If (Resources.manager Is Nothing) Then
                Resources.manager = New System.Resources.ResourceManager("TyranntVB.Resources", GetType(Resources).Assembly)
            End If
            Return Resources.manager
        End Get
    End Property

Code like this

Resources.GetFont(Resources.FontResources.tyrannt)

Will compile successfully.

Secondly, by default, the project will not know about constants like vbCr and vbLf. I used “\n” quite a bit inside the C# code and when I came to use vbLf the equivalent in VB.net, it caused a compilation error. This is simple to fix. Add the following Imports statement to the top of your code and away you go.

Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic.Constants

I’ll hopefully post again when I have the code ported and running on the Spider.