April 2009 | Visual Basic Blog

TechEd North America, here we come! (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Lisa FeigenbaumApril 30, 2009Apr 30, 200904/30/09

TechEd North America 2009 is right around the corner. For those of you attending, we look forward to spending time with you at the VB.NET sessions and Technical Learning Center (a.k.a. booth). I've pasted the VB.NET session list below. See you in LA...

When using LINQ to XML why don’t I get results if I don’t import a XML namespace (Daniel Walzenbach)?

VBTeamApril 29, 2009Apr 29, 200904/29/09

Hi,I posted a bit of code the other day which I used to get a list of all Code Snippets we ship in Visual Studio. In a nutshell, I used XElement.Load to create a new XML document from a filename from which I then read elements from (There are way to many ‘”from” in this sentence ;-) ). Unfortunately, I forgot to import the ...

Luca Bolognese on Asynchronous HTML caching in VB.NET (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Lisa FeigenbaumApril 29, 2009Apr 29, 200904/29/09

You may know Luca Bolognese from his well-known work on C# LINQ. Luca is now the Group Program Manager for VB.NET, C#, and F#. You can check out his blog here. Luca recently blogged his first VB.NET post. It is about asynchronous HTML caching, and is part of a longer series in which he is converting a financial VBA Excel add-in to .NET. The ...

How to get a list of all files of a directory (subdirectories included) (Daniel Walzenbach)?

VBTeamApril 23, 2009Apr 23, 200904/23/09

I needed to create a list of all Code Snippets we ship in Visual Studio the other day containing their title, description and path on disc and size. As you might know, Code Snippets are stored in multiple directories below "%ProgramFiles%Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0" so I had to traverse all the subdirectories of the aforementioned path to ...

Two free e-books available till April 22th to celebrate MS Press’s 25th b-day (Daniel Walzenbach)

VBTeamApril 16, 2009Apr 16, 200904/16/09

2009 is the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Press! To celebrate their b-bay they’re giving away two free e-books, namely Before opening one of the links make sure that you disable your Pop-Up blocker as the window containing the book will be opened in a new window. Additionally, when the new window gets opened give it some time to show ...

Keep the Customer Satisfied (Matt Gertz)

Anthony D. Green [MSFT]April 13, 2009Apr 13, 200904/13/09

As I’ve written elsewhere, the toughest critics for any work you do can always be found in your own family. Pleased at the immense work that I’d done in scanning in and tagging all of my photos and media (as noted in this post), and with my ego sufficiently boosted by writing a screensaver in VB that would display not only ...

Negative delays: not in VB (Lucian Wischik)

VBTeamApril 6, 2009Apr 6, 200904/6/09

Our recent post on "negative sleeps in VB" was an April Fool's joke. VB doesn't have negative sleeps, and isn't going to. But the joke's on me! Several readers wrote back to say that other languages do have negative sleeps. Tony Hoare, inventor of "Quicksort" amongst other things, wrote: Did you know that negative delays have long been ...

Using "negative sleeps" to improve responsiveness in VB web apps

VBTeamApril 1, 2009Apr 1, 200904/1/09

[NOTE: please also read the followup to this article] .NET 4.0 will introduce many new threading and concurrency classes -- SpinLock, Parallel Linq, and ConcurrentDictionary to name but a few.The new feature that excites me the most is the ability to pass a negative argument to Thread.Sleep. This article describes how...

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