March 2008 | Visual Basic Blog

VSLive San Francisco Content (Amanda Silver)

VBTeamMarch 31, 2008Mar 31, 200803/31/08

All - I'm about to go on for my LINQ Deep Dive and Tips &Tricks session at VSLive in San Francisco. I posted all demos & slides here:https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=LaunchVB&ReleaseId=805

Milestone Quality & Dogfooding (Matt Gertz)

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]March 28, 2008Mar 28, 200803/28/08

After some hard but fruitful work, we’ve just finished our “milestone quality” (MQ) efforts, the goal of which was to get ourselves ready for developing the next versions of Visual Studio, Team System, and .NET. Although not specific to Visual Basic, I’ve opted to use this “bully pulpit” to let you kno

LINQ to SQL (and LINQ to Entities) performance improvements (Tim Ng)

VBTeamMarch 28, 2008Mar 28, 200803/28/08

Over the last few months, the VB and Data Programmability teams were working on fixing a performance problem with LINQ to SQL (which also manifested in LINQ to Entities). The issue was that LINQ to SQL was generating sub optimal T-SQL queries when the VB LINQ queries included filters over nullable columns. For example, consider the following q

Recap of European Launch Events for Visual Studio 2008 (Amanda Silver)

VBTeamMarch 24, 2008Mar 24, 200803/24/08

Last week I had the privilege of speaking in Lisbon, Portugal & Birmingham, England at launch events for Visual Studio 2008. There seemed to be a lot of buzz and excitement in the air at both events -- no doubt due to the recent release of Visual Studio. TechDays, Portugal The TechDays event is similar to TechEd in that it's a four-day

STAThread vs. MTAThread (WHorst)

VBTeamMarch 24, 2008Mar 24, 200803/24/08

I recently ran into an interesting threading problem that I wanted to share, so that perhaps I can save some people from the same confusion I had. I started with a C# application someone else had written. I’ll call it “DeltaEngine” for the purpose of this post. DeltaEngine calls into a native assembly and han

New "How Do I" Videos Available on the Visual Basic Developer Center (Beth Massi)

Beth Massi - MicrosoftMarch 24, 2008Mar 24, 200803/24/08

If you missed it, last week 48 new How Do I videos (Forms over data, Windows development, Office development and Security) were added to the Visual Basic Developer Center in addition to adding new download formats for 12 others. Many thanks to Rob Windsor, Pat Tormey and Steve Hansen for doing these videos.In addition to these I also

Silverlight Ux Musings: New Control Skin Set [Corrina Barber]

VBTeamMarch 23, 2008Mar 23, 200803/23/08

One more set of control skins is up and ready for use. I had hoped to have two ready, but one set needed some additional tweaking work that I can't get to until I return to Seattle on 4/14.This new set is very rough and organic in appearance and maybe even a bit esoteric, but it can still work on various sites or it can be used in early mockup

Hotfix available for VB performance issue in VS2008 (DJ Park)

VBTeamMarch 23, 2008Mar 23, 200803/23/08

I wanted to let you know about a hotfix we recently released that may help solve some performance issues you may have run into using Visual Studio 2008. DetailsThe hotfix is a 3.98MB download and can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946344 It addresses performance issues in the following scenarios:•

New Community Article – The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 1) (Beth Massi)

Beth Massi - MicrosoftMarch 20, 2008Mar 20, 200803/20/08

MVP Maurice de Beijer is at it again with another great article on Workflow Foundation (WF), this time showing us how to create custom workflow activities in "The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 1)". This is the first of a two part series on how to create custom activities but if you need to get started with an intro first

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 2: Descendants and Ancestors (Doug Rothaus)

VBTeamMarch 19, 2008Mar 19, 200803/19/08

This entry in the cookbook shows how you can access descendant and ancestor elements in an XML document using Visual Basic, XML Axis properties, and LINQ to XML objects.DescendantsVisual Basic provides XML Axis properties that enable you to easily refer to child nodes and attributes. As is often the case with XML, you may need to reference sub

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