Showing archive results for 2008

In the last two XML cookbook entries, we talked about the technique of using the ReplaceWith method to perform an identity transform. While this technique may meet your needs, it can introduce a problem in your code commonly referred to as the “Halloween” problem. Let’s take a look at what the problem is, and how to solve it. (For details on the “...

This post assumes you’ve read my previous Converting SQL to LINQ posts. I haven’t had much in the way of specific requests for more LINQ posts, so I’d still welcome any suggestions that people want to offer.  I did get one request about how to mimic the LIKE keyword functionality in VB LINQ. In SQL, the LIKE keyword...

I will be presenting on the VB IDE in Southern California this week at a series of user group meetings. The events will be held in the San Diego and the Los Angeles area. Charlie Calvert from the C# team will be flying down from Redmond to speak as well. The schedule is as follows:  I will be speaking on Visual Basic 2008 IDE Ti...

Recipe 3 showed one way to work with mixed XML content using the XML Descendant axis property and the ReplaceWith method. This is one way to do an identity transform and we’ll look at another method in a later post. There is a key capability not mentioned in Recipe 3 that you will need for fully-functioning identity transforms. That is the co...

An identity transform in XSLT does just what the name implies: replace the identity of an element or attribute with a new identity. Identity transforms are especially critical when dealing with XML markup that is less rigid in its structure. Consider a documentation structure for news articles. Whenever a title is referred to within an article, it ...

On Wednesday we released onto the VB Developer Center the second part of Maurice de Beijer's article on Windows Workflow. In this second article about developing custom Workflow Activities, Maurice takes a look at some of the more advanced aspects of Workflow Activity development.Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community

Supporting the “pajama programmer”Telecommuting is a great thing, and as the environmentally-conscious person that I strive to be, is something I wholeheartedly endorse when it can be done practically.  My current job involves a lot of face-to-face meetings with people, so I don’t actually do a lot of it.  However, I do ...

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

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 know abo...

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 query:...