I’m learning more stuff in Visual Studio every day, but the best part is that I’m proficient enough with most of it now that I can actually get a lot done each day.

Today I learned how to instantiate new controls in code, add them to my form or container, and add event handlers to them. Not something I needed to do yet, but I’ll need it soon, and it’s even fairly easy, thanks to a helpful tutorial I found through the help system. (I still don’t care much for the help system, but we’re getting along better now.) This is easy enough that I don’t miss control arrays for this purpose, and the flexibility is better, but I still miss them for other things.

Unfortunately, I still have lots to learn once I get outside of the basic VB language features. For example, there are so many different types of collections now, and I need to learn the basics of them so that I know which one to use for what purpose. And then I need to implement custom versions of them, as necessary (which actually doesn’t appear hard at all).

There’s so much more for me to learn, but at least I know enough to generally work around what I haven’t figured out yet. Which is a lot. And which is sometimes incredibly frustrating. But I’m getting there.