Showing archive results for 2008

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 long ...

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 handles ...

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 uplo...

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 mockups of ...

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:•  ...

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 you c...

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-elem...

Do you use code snippets (introduced in VB 2005)? If you do, then you've probably noticed the green highlighting that stays around for the lifetime of the file. We've heard *a lot* of feedback that once you are done customizing the snippet, it is distracting to see this highlighting stay around. To address this, VB 2008 has improved the heuristics ...

You probably didn’t notice it, but we made some important and beneficial changes to the Support Statement for Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 just a few weeks ago, and I want to share the good news. First, just like Vista, the Visual Basic 6 runtime is officially supported on Windows Server 2008.Second, we have expan...

Jared here again.  I very excited to announce we recently released a tool I've been working on to MSDN that will greatly help with using PInvoke in managed code.  The tool is called the "PInvoke Interop Assistant" and is included as part of a MSDN article on marshalling data for PInvoke and Reverse PInvoke scenarios.  Here is a lin...