Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

September 2007 - Visual Basic Blog

Customizing Displays in the Debugger for System Types

September 28, 2007 Sep 28, 2007 09/28/07
VBTeam
We've heard feedback from several customers regarding the way certain types are displayed in the Debugger.  Many of the displays exist to maintain the user experience between versions of Visual Studio.  We constantly evaluate if this is the correct choice for a given version of the product.  Starting with VS2008, you don't have ...

Option Strict [On|Off|SortOf]

September 25, 2007 Sep 25, 2007 09/25/07
VBTeam
Yesterday I got a question from a developer asking whether or not we could add something called "Option Strict Warn" to the language.  This would give a developer a warning when using something like late binding or an implicit conversion, rather than disabling it altogether (through an error).As it turns out the ability to set custom ...

Small Business Developers Unite!

September 23, 2007 Sep 23, 2007 09/23/07
VBTeam
I can't believe it's already Sunday.  I've been spending all weekend (and the last few weeks) as a returning member of the VB team emersing myself in the product, specifically getting my head around how I would use VB today to build the types of solutoins when I was writing departmental applications, or applications for small businesses. ...

VB expression trees – string comparisons

September 19, 2007 Sep 19, 2007 09/19/07
VBTeam
Hey there! Last time, I talked a little bit about expression trees and what they are useful for. Expression trees are really interesting to those who want to write LINQ providers and have the ability to reason about the lambda expressions coming into their LINQ provider. However, in general, anyone that want's to reason about a lambda ...

Visual Basic Developer Center Gets a Facelift (Beth Massi)

September 18, 2007 Sep 18, 2007 09/18/07
Beth Massi
I'm happy to announce the redesign of the Visual Basic Developer Center! This is the first step in a series of community-focused and dynamic content changes you'll be seeing on the Developer Center. Many thanks to the people over at MSDN, (especially Kerby) that made this a reality. Besides the new UI and fresh headlines and downloads, check ...

Visual Basic Pack for Visual Studio 2005 SDK Released! (Beth Massi)

September 17, 2007 Sep 17, 2007 09/17/07
Beth Massi
The Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Team released the Visual Basic Pack for Visual Studio 2005 SDK on Friday! This download provides the SDK samples in Visual Basic and a new wizard that is used for generating Visual Basic-based integration packages for Visual Studio. Head on over to the VSX team blog for more info.It's ...

XML to Schema Tool for Visual Basic 2008 (Beth Massi)

September 14, 2007 Sep 14, 2007 09/14/07
Beth Massi
This week we posted a new tool called the XML to Schema Tool that allows you to easily import XML and infer schemas. The tool runs when when you add a new item to your VB 9 project and select the XML to Schema new item template (look under My Templates after you install). This allows you to work with XML much easier in Visual Basic 9 by ...

Lambda Expressions and Expression Trees

September 11, 2007 Sep 11, 2007 09/11/07
VBTeam
Hi there! My name is Tim, and I'm the dev lead for the VB compiler team. Recently Amanda convinced me to blog on the VB team blog rather then my own blog for a variety of reasons, and so here I am. My current plan is that I'll post VB related postings here, and more compiler implementation/technology/fun facts on my own blog (ie, things that ...

Back home again!

September 7, 2007 Sep 7, 2007 09/7/07
VBTeam
I can't tell you how excited I am to return to the Visual Basic team after almost eight years of absence!  I spent much time working in groups around Microsoft including games, office and business solutions.  But in each of these areas I focussed primarily on enabling developer scenarios.  And now I am back! And what am I here ...