November 2007 | Visual Basic Blog

Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT (Bill Horst)

VBTeamNovember 28, 2007Nov 28, 200711/28/07

This post assumes you’ve read Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics. I’ve made the following name changes since the last post, which I hope will make the code examples clearer: · Customers -> CustomerTable · Orders -> OrderTable · cust -> Contact · ...

Launching External Tools from inside Visual Studio (Jonathan Aneja)

VBTeamNovember 27, 2007Nov 27, 200711/27/07

Visual Studio has a small but extremely useful feature that allows you to hook external tools directly into the IDE’s Tools menu. All you have to do is click Tools->External Tools… and then you can add your own custom menu items that will launch a specified program. On a typical day I’ll probably fire up Reflector and/or ...

Drawing Maps with Visual Basic (Scott Wisniewski)

VBTeamNovember 26, 2007Nov 26, 200711/26/07

If you find yourself looking for something to do with your awesome new copy of Visual Studio 2008, you should check out the December 2007 edition of MSDN magazine. It features an article, written by me, that provides a walk through on how to visualize data on a map using VB 9, WPF and LINQ. To give you a sneak preview of what the app ...

Petzold WPF Book Sample Conversion Update (Young Joo)

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]November 24, 2007Nov 24, 200711/24/07

Been a while since I posted Chapter 3 of Petzold's WPF book converted to VB. In case you missed it, Patrick started working on this project which I took over early this month. Anyway, I am very excited to tell you about progress we've been able to make so far.First, we now have a separate article page, Applications = ...

Applications = Code + Markup (Charles Petzold) Visual Basic Code Sample

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]November 24, 2007Nov 24, 200711/24/07

Charles Petzold's latest book, Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, is the best WPF book available right now. Unfortuantely, all code samples in the book are written in C#. In order to help VB developers trying to learn about WPF, we are working with a couple of VB experts to ...

Awesome VB9 Blog Series by Bart De Smet (Amanda Silver)

VBTeamNovember 21, 2007Nov 21, 200711/21/07

I guess I've been working too hard on getting the product ready to ship to notice that Bart has put together an awesome blog series on VB9. It includes discussion of a feature called runtime agility or compiler agility that we haven't taken up on this blog. We introduced this feature to make it much easier for new .NET platforms (think ...

Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 and Visual Studio 2008 Shell released (Beth Massi)

Beth MassiNovember 21, 2007Nov 21, 200711/21/07

Today the VS Ecosystem team released the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 and the Visual Studio 2008 shell. The VS 2008 SDK contains full native Visual Basic support and contains many VB samples. What was in the VB Pack for the VS 2005 SDK is now included in the VS 2008 SDK, plus more. I've started playing with building Visual Studio AddIns in ...

Hidden Gems in Visual Basic 2008 (Amanda Silver)

VBTeamNovember 21, 2007Nov 21, 200711/21/07

Yesterday I promised to post about the hidden gems in Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2008 that you haven’t read about in blog posts or seen at conferences. I forgot that I mentioned a few of my favorite features in the Beta1 announcement where I showed off the improvements in the Intellisense experience – statement completion for ...

Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics (Bill Horst)

VBTeamNovember 19, 2007Nov 19, 200711/19/07

As you may already know, VB LINQ statements enable SQL-like syntax for queries in the VB language. LINQ syntax doesn't match SQL syntax exactly, so if you are already working with SQL or familiar with SQL queries, you may find yourself wanting to convert an existing SQL query to LINQ.This will be the first in a series of posts about ...

Visual Basic 2008 Ships!!! (Amanda Silver)