Ged Mead
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 Ged Mead (XTab) is a Microsoft Visual Basic MVP who has been working on computer software and design for more than 25 years. His journey has taken him through many different facets of IT. These include training as a Systems Analyst, working in a mainframe software development environment, creating financial management systems and a short time spent on military laptop systems in the days when it took two strong men to carry a 'mobile' system.
Based in an idyllic lochside location in the West of Scotland, he is currently involved in an ever-widening range of VB.NET, WPF and Silverlight development projects. Now working in a consultancy environment, his passion however still remains helping students and professional developers to take advantage of the ever increasing range of sophisticated tools available to them.
Ged is a regular contributor to forums on vbCity and authors articles for DevCity. He is a moderator on VBCity and the MSDN Tech Forums and spends a lot of time answering technical questions there and in several other VB forum sites. Senior Editor for DevCity.NET, vbCity Developer Community Leader and Admin, and DevCity.NET Newsletter Editor. He has written and continues to tutor a number of free online courses for VB.NET developers.
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Articles by this Author
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Object Oriented Programming Basics - Methods
In the previous articles in this series, we covered basic Constructors, Fields and Properties.
In this article, we will look at the ToString method, introduce the concept of Inheritance, use the Object Browser and learn about Overrides and Overridable.
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Object Oriented Programming (OOP) - The Basics
This is the first article in a series that will cover the very basics of OOP. It is based on a course I used to run. When I first wrote this I wanted to create something that I would have found useful in my very early VB.NET days. A really from-the-bottom explanation that assumed I knew nothing about OOP which would walk me through the basics.
I hope I have managed to achieve this in this series.
Part 1 covers Properties and Fields
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How To Use The Visual State Manager(VSM) In Silverlight 2
This article walks you through the steps involved in using The Visual State Manager in Silverlight 2.
Most articles seem to use the button as the demonstration element - probably because that makes things very easy. But as soon as you move away from the small core set of elements such as button that have States preset for you, you will find that you need a slightly different approach.
In this article, I will cover both situations.
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CodeSMART 2009 For .NET
CodeSMART 2009 for .NET is a developer tool that saves you time, helps you write better code and generally become more productive.
Ged Mead reviews this latest version from AxTools.
[read article...]
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Windows Presentation Foundation: Flow Documents (Part 2)
In Part 1, you saw how easy it is to populate a WPF RichTextBox with a XAML FlowDocument. If you've ever previously struggled with trying to force a RichTextBox to accept an image - and place it exactly where you want it - in Windows Forms, then you'll welcome this new tool.
However, for legacy reasons you might want to populate the RichTextBox with content that has been saved in RTF format. In this part we will look at how that can be achieved.
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WinForms and WPF Interop - The Best of Both Worlds
Whenever I see a question along the lines of "How can I include an image alongside each item in a list of items or use more than one font, or varying background colors?" I usually find myself muttering "WPF!". This is a lot more sociable and positive than many of the things I mutter as I sit here each day, but finally I've realised that I need to do something about it.
The result is this article, which works through the steps needed to harness the rich UI features of WPF to the more familiar paradigm of Windows Forms.
The example used will show you how easy it can be to use a WPF control in a Windows Forms application and you can use this article as the stepping stone to creating your own. The ListBox layout shown below will be created in WPF and ported over to be used in a Windows Forms application.
[read article...]
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Multithreading The Easy Way: The BackgroundWorker
Sometimes you may need your application to work on a slow or time- consuming task in such a way that your user isn't kept waiting unnecessarily while this is happening.
The answer to this problem is to use multithreading. Having seen many forum questions about multithreading, I know that many people are a bit apprehensive about tackling it. However, as it turns out, the BackgroundWorker component is versatile and easy to use, providing a painless solution to this requirement.
In this article I will show you how you can incorporate the BackgroundWorker into your projects to give your users a more professional and less frustrating experience.
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Windows Presentation Foundation: FlowDocuments (Part 1)
When WPF first came on the scene, one of the features that got a lot of air time was the display of documents. Leading edge projects like the NY Times Reader and the British Library manuscript display raised a lot of awareness of the possibilities. Strangely though, since VS 2008 shipped there doesn't seem to have been a lot of mention of this part of the package. So I thought I'd take a look at how easy (or not) document handling really is in WPF.
[read article...]
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OOP: Create, Collect, Sort, Save and Retrieve Objects
Several recent posts in the VBCity Forums made me realise that it might be useful to have an article that dealt with some of the basic requirements when it comes to creating your own classes and objects.
Many beginners start by creating a simple game and this is often a good learning project so we will use this approach in this article. Two key elements of a game application like this will probably be a way of creating Players and keeping a record of their High Scores . Users can log in to the game using their Player name and see their last score.
As they play again in this session they might increase this score or start over from zero. They might even want to see how their score rates against other Players. So we would need a way of creating a collection of Players and their Scores. And as we usually want to see the Scores listed from highest to lowest, there will have to be a way to sort those Score values that are stored in the collection.
Finally, it wouldn't be much use if the Scores were all lost each time the application ends, so we should also build in a way of saving the latest data to the hard drive and of course a means of retrieving them when you need them.
This article for beginners uses VB 2005 and shows you how to meet all these requirements.
[read article...]
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Professional Visual Studio 2005
The average VB.NET developers' book starts with the language and uses the IDE to help along the way. This book takes a different approach. It starts with the IDE and radiates out from there. (IDE-centric I think they call it in the publisher's blurb). It's an interesting approach, but does it work?

Ged Mead decided to find out.
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Application Settings in VB 2005
There may be times when you would like to give your users the opportunity to save various settings (and they would probably appreciate having the facility too!). In the past, the SaveSettings and GetSettings methods were the usual avenue, but in VB 2005 you have some more flexible choices at your disposal.
Ged Mead looks at these new tools.
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Book Review: Murach's Visual Basic 2005
Murach have been producing technical books for more than 20 years and have developed their own special style and a quite substantial, loyal readership . Their latest offering is "Murach's Visual Basic 2005".
Ged Mead offers an overview of this book. 
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Book Review: Mastering Visual Basic 2005
Sybex have published two versions of this book: "Mastering Visual Basic 2005" by Evangelos Petroutsos and "Mastering Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition" by Evangelos Petroutsos and Acey J. Bunch.
Ged Mead takes a look at what they offer .
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Review: The Book of Visual Basic 2005
Matthew MacDonald is a well-known and respected technical book author. I already own and regularly use several of his previous .NET books, so when this one came out I was particularly interested to see if it came up to his usual high standard.
Overall, I was impressed with the detail and clarity of this book which was firmly targeted at Classic VB developers who are ready to move on to .NET now that the promised improvements in VB2005 are finally here.
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Chart Success Part 5 - Line Graph
In previous articles, we have looked ways of creating various Pie Charts and Bar Charts. In this Part of the series, we are going to take a first look at another common type of chart, the Line Graph.

As is often the case in VB.NET, there are several ways of achieving the end result. Although I haven't chosen the easiest route this time, the journey takes us into some interesting GDI+ territory.
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Book Review: Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition For Dummies
"Visual Web Developer 2005 Expression Edition For Dummies" by Alan Simpson is a recent publication in this ever-popular, long running series of books.
Although not the usual 600+ page coder's book, don't be too quick to write this one off as of no use, advises DevCity reviewer Ged Mead. It may be more useful than you think.

[read article...]
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Book Review- "Visual Basic 2005 Express: Now Playing"
If you are a complete newcomer to programming, you should seriously consider getting a copy of this book. It never loses sight of the fact that beginners don’t always “get it” first time, every time and it uses non-technical explanations and good learning reinforcement techniques to show you the skills in the easiest, least complicated way possible.
In the Preface to the book, author Wallace Wang sets out his philosophy:
“This book is dedicated to everyone who didn’t have the “right” education, test scores or job skills, but wound up succeeding at their chosen goal anyway. If you want to learn or do anything in your life, such as learn to program a computer, go ahead and do it and don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”

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Book Review: ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming
Marco Bellinaso's latest book takes an approach that is unlike many other ASP.NET books. Instead of showing fragmented examples for individual pages or features, the example in this book is an integrated end-to-end site (written in C#). The entire book and site has been written specifically for ASP.NET 2.0, to use the ASP.NET 2.0 features wherever they make sense.
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ComponentOne Studio Enterprise 2006
The ComponentOne team have been producing good quality components for several years, covering the needs of developers in both Classic VB and .NET. The latest edition of their comprehensive components package is Studio Enterprise 2006 v1, now been updated for the 2005 version of .NET
Ged Mead took a tour of the overall package and trial tested some of the components in detail
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Chart Success : GDI+ Graphics At Work Part 4
Back in Part 2 of this series we created a basic Bar Chart. It did the job, but - let’s face it - it isn’t likely to win any prizes in the “GUI of the Year “ competition.
So, in this article we will use the same basic approach, but will build a better 3D bar chart to give the display more depth, color and hopefully, as a result, more impact.

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Text Techniques (1)
Sometimes plain old standard horizontal text just won’t do the job.Maybe you need vertical text...

... of one kind or the other. The DrawString method of the Graphics Class holds the answers to both of these little problems.Read on to see how it can be done.
[read article...]
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Chart Success: Second Helpings of Pie. Part 3
The first two articles in this series introduced some basic graphics skills which were used to create a Pie Chart in Part 1 and a Bar Chart in Part 2. Both charts were elementary, but served their purpose. As the series progresses we will look at ways of building on these early steps and creating more challenging displays. In both of those articles the data was created in advance at design time and hard coded into the project. In this article, data will be taken from the user and used to create a pie chart. This project also introduces HatchStyles - a range of predefined patterns - to replace the solid colors used in the first Pie Chart example.
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Chart Success: GDI+ Graphics At Work. Part 2
In this series of articles, designed for newcomers to graphics in VB.NET, you will see how to create various kinds of charts. Charts are a great way of displaying data in a way that is easy to understand, as well as being a useful way to become familiar with many of the core drawing methods which are available in the Graphics Class. In this article, we will build a Bar Chart from the ground up using double buffering to create a chart to display in a PictureBox control.
[read article...]
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Chart Success: GDI+ Graphics at work. Part 1
Charts are a great way of displaying data in a format that is easy to understand. A chart is a pictorial representation of your data. If it is true that a picture is really worth a thousand words, then a chart must surely be worth a thousand lines in a DataGrid. In this series of articles, we will look at various ways you can use the GDI+ tools in .NET to create a range of charts for a wide variety of uses. In Part 1, we will look at one of the easier options, the Pie Chart.
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CodeSMART 2003 for VS.NET
Ged Mead (vbCity Leader XTab): "There are so many features that there isn't space to list them all. What I would say for sure is that there just has to be something in this package for everyone."
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Multiple Forms in VB.NET. Part 1
This article by vbCity Leader XTab is particularly aimed at VB6 Upgraders, although complete beginners will find it useful. It explains a variety of ways in which you can open and deal with multiple forms in VB.NET; techniques which are quite different from the VB.OLD ways. A downloadable Solution is included, which shows working examples of each of the seven methods covered in the article, plus an additional two methods not documented in the article.
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Total .NET SourceBook
Total .NET SourceBook from FMS Software is a code library which works both as a standalone library (accessible from the Start Menu) or as a Visual Studio Add-In (accessed from the VS Tools menu or as a dockable window in the IDE). Reade more…
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Simple Steps in VB.NET. Building a Custom Control
In this article in the 'Simple Steps in VB.Net' series vbCity Leader XTab shows you how to create a simple custom control. You are taken through the procedures needed to enhance the functionality of the VB.Net standard Button control by incorporating features which will make your button more eye-catching. The article shows you how to create the user control by adding customised properties and events. The attached solution includes additional enhancements not covered in the step by step guide and also demonstrates how you can take the basic idea much further.
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