This blog post will walk through the process of adding the additional "My" functionality added in InTheHand.VisualBasic. To start off, open Visual Studio 2008 and create a new Visual Basic device project (or open an existing one). At this point you'll end up with a solution window which looks a bit like this. Note the inspired project name in this example:-
The next step is to right-click the project and select Add > New Item... from the menu:-
This will bring up the Add New Item window from which you should see MyExtensions among the list. Select this (you can change the default name if required) and click Add.
The new code file is added to the project. You don't need to edit this and you won't be interacting with it directly from your code. Your solution window will now look like this:-
You can now get on with building your application. Any time you start to type My you'll see a much longer list of options:-
Application, Computer and User are new items added by this library and provide additional functionality, all remaining a direct subset of the desktop experience. For example I added a button and in the Click handler added this simple code snippet:-
MessageBox.Show(
My.Application.Info.ProductName)
On running the code the Product Name is retrieved from the assembly information:-
In a future post I'll run through the various items available through the "My" syntax. For more information about the library see the product page.