Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

August 2008 - Visual Basic Blog

Nice to meet you! A Nine Question Interview (Lisa Feigenbaum)

August 29, 2008 Aug 29, 2008 08/29/08
Lisa Feigenbaum
Chris Williams (VB MVP) started an interview series on his blog. In the series, he interviews various members in the technical community by asking them 9 questions. If you've read my blog posts and are interested to get to know me a little better, check out my 9 answers to Chris' questions!http://www.ninequestions.net/If you want to ...

How Do I: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks? (Kathleen McGrath)

August 28, 2008 Aug 28, 2008 08/28/08
VBTeam
With the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you can now add smart tags to Excel by using an add-in.  In this video, I show you how to add them to both a document-level customization and an add-in project. How Do I: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks? This video is based on the topic: How to: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks, where you ...

Channel 9 Interview: New Editor Features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Beth Massi)

August 22, 2008 Aug 22, 2008 08/22/08
Beth Massi
Today I posted another Channel 9 interview on SP1. This time, Yang Xiao, a tester on the VB IDE team is back demonstrating new improvements to the "Go To Definition", "Find All References" and Rename capabilities in the editor when flipping between code and XAML in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. New Editor Features in Visual Studio ...

VB 2008 Language Deep Dive – Presentation Materials (Jonathan Aneja)

August 21, 2008 Aug 21, 2008 08/21/08
VBTeam
Last week I got the chance to visit the Toronto .NET User Group and give a talk on all the great new language features in VB2008.  It was great to see so much excitement around LINQ and especially XML Literals!   The slides and demo code are posted at the link below; here’s the session abstract (with links inserted so you can find ...

Channel 9 Interview: XML Schema Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Beth Massi)

August 15, 2008 Aug 15, 2008 08/15/08
Beth Massi
Today I posted an interview on Channel 9 with Yang Xiao, a tester on the VB IDE. In this interview Yang shows us the new XML Schema Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. This new window is invoked when you right-click on an XML literal element or namespace and select "Show in XML Schema Explorer" in Visual Basic programs. It's a nice ...

VS2008 SP1 and NetFX3.5 SP1 Released (Adam Braden)

August 11, 2008 Aug 11, 2008 08/11/08
VBTeam
Today we shipped Service Pack 1 (SP1) for both Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5.  This is the first time we’ve release both a VS SP and a .NetFramework SP at the same time!  Additionally, we released ENU, JPN and 8 additional languages that ship with SQL 2008 at the same time!  See the announcement on Soma&...

Co- and contra-variance (Lucian Wischik)

August 7, 2008 Aug 7, 2008 08/7/08
VBTeam
How do I convert an IEnumerable(Of CheckingAccount) into an IEnumerable(Of Account) ? (where CheckingAccount inherits from Account).Currently this conversion isn't allowed, but we're considering a VB language feature to support it. The topic is called "co- and contravariance", and has been in the CLR since 2005 or so, but no one's yet released...