CTP: Data and Language coming together in VB

Since delivering Visual Basic 8.0 in VS 2005, the VB team has been working on the next generation language extensions and enhancements – Visual Basic 9.0. VB 9.0 offers language extensions to support data-intensive programming in a unified way i.e. creating, updating, and querying relational databases, XML documents, and object graphs.  The relationship between database programming and Visual Basic has always been a powerful one, but Visual Basic 9.0 takes it to a new level by unifying access to data independent of its source.

 

This week, the Visual Basic team released the CTP for Visual Basic 9.0. Please note that this is an additive release to the one that came out in the PDC05 timeframe. It expands on support editor and language support for XML integration, provides Intellisense support for the query syntax, and enables DLinq which allows you to query over relational stores such as SQL Server.

 

The team would love to hear your input and feedback once you have had a chance to play around with these bits.

 

Namaste!