Showing archive results for 2009

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 used i...

[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 you ...

Be sure to check out the latest episode of CodeCast with two VB interviews, including myself and VB program manager Dustin Campbell!Thursday, February 19, 2009 CodeCast Episode 12: Visual Basic and the VB CommunityIn this episode of CodeCast, Ken Levy, Markus Egger, and Gary Short discuss Internet Explorer 8, Windows 7 beta, Kindle and Sony eBoo...

Things are always changing.  I was at the Washington State History Museum with my daughter a couple weeks ago.  One of the exhibits features pictures of various sites that were taken many years ago.  Then it contrasts them with contemporary pictures taken of the same locations.  It was really interesting how much things changed ...

I just posted a new Channel 9 interview. This time it's with Tyler Whitney, a developer on the Visual Basic compiler team. Here he demonstrates how line termination has changed in the Visual Basic 10 compiler making underscores unnecessary as line continuation indicators. This makes your code more readable especially when writing multi-line LINQ qu...

The Silverlight Toolkit March 2009 release is enhanced with Visual Basic source code. Please follow the links to view these samples for both Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3. Silverlight 2: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html Silverlight 3: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl3/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.ht...

Today the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team released a download aimed to help Visual Basic developers use the Composite Application Library. It includes VB versions of the QuickStarts, Hands-On-Labs, and How-To topics: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=537da1cd-43e1-4799-88e7-a1da9166fb46 I've include...

Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on WPF Improvements in Visual Studio 2010 for Building Business Apps.At the MVP Summit a few weeks ago, Italian MVP Alessandro del Sole was so excited about the new WPF features in Visual Studio 2010 that he asked me if he could interview Milind Lele himself to get the low-down -- I said sure! Milind is a...

Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on using the Touchless SDK. The Touchless SDK enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. "Touch without touching." It's actually pretty cool! In this interview I meet up with Touchless SDK creator, Mike Wasserman and Visual Basic Spec Lead, Lucian Wischik. They e...

Alex Turner presented VB XML yesterday here at MIX 09. Check out the video from his session! Video link: https://channel9.msdn.com/events/mix(The powerpoint slides are attached.) Making XML Really, Really Easy with Microsoft Visual Basic 9 MIX09-T72M Wednesday March 18 |11:55 AM-12:15 PM | San Polo 3401 By: Alex Turner Tags: Languages See how Vi...