Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Small Business Developers Unite!

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

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)

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)

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)

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

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!

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 ...

Fun with VB !!!

Who says you can't obfuscate VB code? For fun, I tried writing some VB code which was shaped in the letters 'vb' (that's right, the code itself forms the shape of the letters), where the 'v' and the 'b' are formed from the Visual Studio inifinity logo. In case you're having trouble visualizing that, here's a picture. Because I'm forming the ...

Programming With XML Using Visual Basic 9 (Beth Massi)

We just published an article by Bill Burrows on Programming With XML Using Visual Basic 9. Bill has also created a series of video tutorials that walk you through the details of how to use the new XML features in Visual Basic 9. Bill takes an easy to follow, step-by-step approach to explaining the details in this ...