Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

May 2007 - Visual Basic Blog

Bill & Steve (Jobs!) reminisce about floating point BASIC

May 31, 2007 May 31, 2007 05/31/07
VBTeam
Another entry in the annals of BASIC history today…. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sat down for an interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital for the D5 conference. One of the highlights of the video is recalling the agreement Apple struck with Microsoft for a version of BASIC which supported floating point numbers...

Closures in VB Part 3: Scope

May 25, 2007 May 25, 2007 05/25/07
VBTeam
Jared here again.  For previous articles in this series please see Thus far in the series we've only lifted variables that are declared in the same block/scope. What happens if we lift variables in different scope?  The answer is that one closure class will be created for every unique scope where a lifted variable is declared ...

Error correction (Matt Gertz)

May 21, 2007 May 21, 2007 05/21/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
It’s funny how we come up with a VB feature sometimes. I remember one case pretty well.  I was the new dev lead of the VB editor at the time, and I was talking about possible features for “Whidbey” (i.e. Visual Studio 2005) with my program manager, Sam.  We’d been talking about snippets, a feature that Sam &...

Visual Basic & Smart Devices (Matt Gertz)

May 14, 2007 May 14, 2007 05/14/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Last week I talked a bit about operator overloading, and used the concept to support a library of matrix functions.  This week, we’ll use those functions in a Smart Device application to create a matrix calculator. Smart Device applications It’s extremely easy to create an application for your Smart Device.  Let’s start from ...

Visual Basic Forms over Data "How-to" video series (Beth Massi)

May 8, 2007 May 8, 2007 05/8/07
Beth Massi
Friday we posted the first 8 videos of the Visual Basic Forms over Data "How-to" video series on MSDN. If you don't have the Visual Basic Dev Center as your homepage you might have missed the headline. ;-) This how-to video series is dedicated to getting Visual Basic developers productive on areas of data-based Windows ...

AmandaS' LINQ talk at VSLive Orlando

May 8, 2007 May 8, 2007 05/8/07
VBTeam
I escaped from Redmond this week to present at VSLive Orlando on LINQ in Visual Studio Orcas. As promised, please find the slides and demos included as an attachment below. As mentioned during the talk – that was intended to be an overview. If you want really want to understand the nitty-gritty details behind what make LINQ possible, be ...

Operator Overloading: A demonstration using matrices (Matt Gertz)

May 7, 2007 May 7, 2007 05/7/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Over a decade ago, before I joined Microsoft, I was a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon studying robotics.  One of the things that you had to do to get into the doctoral program was pass a qualifier test (“the qual”), which was a three-hour oral examination at the conclusion of the Master’s program.  My qual was, without a ...

Closures in VB Part 2: Method Calls

May 3, 2007 May 3, 2007 05/3/07
VBTeam
For previous articles in this series, please see Jared here again.  This part of the series will focus on how method calls are handled in closures.  As stated in the previous article, the purpose of closures is to allow all operations inside a lambda or query expression that would normally be available inside the function or ...

Closures in VB: Part 1

May 2, 2007 May 2, 2007 05/2/07
VBTeam
  My name is Jared Parsons and I am a developer on the VB Compiler and Debugger.  One of the features I implemented for VB 9.0 is lexical closure support.  This a great addition to the VB language and I wanted to do a series of blog posts to describe this feature and how it will impact your code. Lexical Closures (more often ...

Just Released – Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0!

May 2, 2007 May 2, 2007 05/2/07
VBTeam
Today we launched the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0, which makes it easier than ever to upgrade VB6 applications to .NET.  This new release builds on version 1.0 by adding support for the following features: In the picture below you can see we've got a VB6 Form hosting a .NET UserControl which contains a MenuStrip and a ToolStrip. ...