10 Quick Tips for VB Developers !

Generics. The Generics class in .NET 2.0 gives developers the flexibility to write methods once and let the .NET Framework handle type issues. There is no boxing of objects or casting of exceptions, which improves performance, and compile errors show up earlier in the coding process.

Debugger ToolTips. Debugging in Visual Basic 2003 was "pretty vanilla," as developers had to go to the Watch window to find it and it didn't say much. In VB 2005, users can expand the box, to see the properties of a particular type, or hold down Ctrl to male the box transparent.

Edit and Continue. Speaking of debugging, this feature lets developers edit code while they're debugging it. "You don't have to keep stop-starting all the time. That can be a very laborious process".

The My namespace. Along with giving developers a place to find and store "the stuff you're going to do 90% of the time," the My namespace lets developers do things like retrieve information with a single line of code -- My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllText(filename.txt) --

Templates. These are stored as zip files containing an XML file, a VB file set to transport, a designer file and all other files related to the template. To add a template, just go to "Add New Item" and the appropriate file from the template will appear there.

Snap lines. This graphical form-building tool, likely familiar to designers, gives developers granular control, such as alignment to the top left of a form or to existing controls.

Application settings. With this feature, a developer can name a pointer variable, indicating the location of a stored form. Thus the values of a property, set up once, can be used in many places.

Renaming. By right-clicking on a code identifier like a class name, field or type, a developer can rename it and update all calls and references to that identifier.

Refactoring. This functionality is not available from Microsoft, but third-party vendors like Developer Express.

Snippets. Visual Basic 2005 comes with 500 pre-installed code snippets, categorized by task. They are accessible by right-clicking, by the keyboard shortcut "Tab+?" or by typing the individual snippet's shortcut. Developers can also create snippets for the custom code they use regularly.