Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

A Walkthrough of WCF Support in Visual Studio 2008

One feature in Visual Studio 2008 I would like to highlight is our support of Windows Communication Foundation. WCF was introduced with .NET Fx3.0 as a next generation communications API. Previously if you wanted apps to talk you needed to make a lot of up-front decisions: o How important is transmission speed?o How will apps talk? Over the...

Implementing Dynamic Searching Using LINQ

A common requirement in forms-over-data applications is that users be able to search by any combination of fields to construct a dynamic query at run time.  For example, the search feature in this application allows the user to find all records that meet criteria defined on multiple columns:    (image)   LINQ makes it ...

Channel 9 Interview – LINQ to SQL and the O/R Designer in VS 2008 (Beth Massi)

I just posted another great interview on Channel 9 with Young Joo talking about LINQ to SQL and the new O/R Designer in Visual Studio 2008. He demos a typical business client-server scenario and shows how LINQ to SQL classes make it much easier to work with relational data in SQL Server 2005. Young also talks about architectures ...

Endgame (Matt Gertz)

Well, I’m back from vacation, pleasantly tired and yet relaxed at the same time.  I’m busy trying to dig out of e-mail, things are going well, Beta2 has been in your hands for several weeks, and I’ve got lots of great ideas to try out on this site.(That’s the theory, anyway.  In reality, I’m writing this...

Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs 2.0 now available

In case you didn't see the links go live on the Visual Basic Developer Center the VB Off-Cycle team has shipped the latest edition of the Power Pack controls.  You can download them from here.In this update we've added the much anticipated Line and Shape controls.  (image) The line and shape controls give you drag and drop ease ...

Channel 9 Interview – Amanda Silver on LINQ (Beth Massi)

I just posted an interview with Amanda on Channel 9 where she walks us through the new LINQ syntax available in VS 2008 Beta 2. I also posted some How Do I videos on LINQ to help get you started -- look for more of these beginning of next week!In this interview, Amanda Silver, a Lead Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, ...

LINQ to XML Videos (Beth Massi)

Bill Burrows has created a series of videos to help get the community started with LINQ to XML in Visual Basic! These videos were created in conjunction with his upcoming MSDN article that will be published soon. Bill takes an easy to follow, step-by-step approach to explaining the details in this exciting new technology in Visual Basic 9...