I. M. Wright (catchy pseudonym), consummate Microsoft insider, has published the secrets he shared only with his co-conspirators in the company!

Wellll ... That's a little over the top. Actually, Eric Brechner - consummate Microsoft insider - has published his most popular columns. But it's a great read. I review Eric's book at:

Hard Code - Management Insights From Inside Microsoft

LINQ - Language INtegrated Query - is probably the most successful innovation in .NET since ... well ... since .NET. There have been lots of others ... MVC, Entity Frameworks, WPF. But they just haven't hit a home run like LINQ has. There's an old saying that success has many fathers but failure is an orphan. LINQ has lots of "homes" these days. It's being included in more and more data technologies. So this week, I'm starting a new series about LINQ.

Although the About Visual Basic site already contains several articles explaining various parts of  LINQ, it's not complete and it's not organized as well as it could be. I plan to reorganize some of the existing content as well as writing new content to fill in blank holes. Wish me luck!

The first installment is an introduction to the overall LINQ technology - what it covers and what you can do with it - with a new example showing how LINQ could be used to start web pages using selections made with CheckBox controls.

The first LINQ article can be found here: LINQ - An Example Driven Introduction

I love programming!

You can apply it to all kinds of personal situations. For example, I have all of my liquor cataloged in a SQL Server Database, along with drink recipes and places for reviews. My wife was working a newspaper puzzle and wanted all of the words that could be formed from eight letters. A simple combination calculating program gave it to her.

Today, I decided to write a simulation program to see exactly how wealth increased (or not) using different assumptions in a pure capitalism kind of situation. After I finished the program, it occurred to me that it might make a good article about how a simulation program works.

Anything that you can describe with data and math can be simulated on a computer. But real world simulations (such as a weather prediction program) are typically not written in VB.NET. But if you're interested in becoming "real world", you can interface with VB.NET or VBA. For example, the Basic Simul8 software starts at less than $1000. (simul8.com).

One final note: This is a programming site, not a political one, so I feel compelled to establish some ground rules for this article. There are some obvious political conclusions that you might draw from this article but any comments that are specifically political will be deleted. On the other hand, if you would like to write a simulation of your own, and you're willing to let it be posted strictly as a programming example, I'd love to see it.

You can find the article at: An Introduction to Models and Simulation

A few years ago, a reader asked how to delete just the top line of text in a RichTextBox. He was using ASCII style code that tested for the vbCrLf characters that have been used since teletype days. RTF, the formatting used by RichTextBox, isn't like that and the article shows what it is like.

More recently, another reader asked the next obvious question (which I should have anticipated at the time but didn't): How do you delete any selected line?

It's answered now!

RichTextBox - Selecting, Deleting, and Moving Lines