Showing results for May 2007 - Visual Basic Blog

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. &nb...

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 and a...

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 & I ...

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 the solution ...

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 Applicati...

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 certain to...

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 doubt, the ...

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 sub.&n...

  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 referred...

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.  By ...