Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

2010 - Page 2 of 3 - Visual Basic Blog

Using HTML entities in XML Literals (Avner Aharoni)

May 24, 2010 May 24, 2010 05/24/10
VBTeam
One of the common use-cases of XML literals is creating HTML. However, HTML entities cannot be used in XML literals since LINQ to XML directly supports only the Data type definitions (DTD) defined in the XML 1.0 spec. You can read more about it here. The workaround is to use the Unicode representation of the entity, although it’s not as ...

Visual Basic 2010 is here!

April 15, 2010 Apr 15, 2010 04/15/10
Lisa Feigenbaum
It was a very exciting time this week, with the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. On April 12th, 5 launch events took place around the world in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, London and Las Vegas. The video from Bob Muglia’s VS 2010 Launch keynote is now available on-demand. (image) The agenda for day was VS 2010 sessions, ...

Back to the future! – New version of the VB6 InteropForms toolkit is released!!

April 13, 2010 Apr 13, 2010 04/13/10
VBTeam
Along with all the new goodies that we released yesterday as part of Visual Studio 2010, one additional thing we did yesterday as well is release an update to the popular interopforms toolkit.   This update brings VS 2010 (and VS 2008!) support to the toolkit and fixes a smattering of reported bugs.    As many of you ...

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010

April 8, 2010 Apr 8, 2010 04/8/10
VBTeam
Crystal Reports has been a part of Visual Basic since 1993, and a part of Visual Studio since its first release in 2002. Crystal Reports has been a very successful component of these products. With the release of Visual Studio 2010, SAP and Microsoft have mutually decided to change how we deliver this important component to the .NET developer...

Editing XML Literals Embedded Expressions in Visual Basic 2010 (Avner Aharoni)

March 26, 2010 Mar 26, 2010 03/26/10
VBTeam
The implicit line continuation feature in Visual Basic 2010 provided an opportunity to improve the code editing experience in XML literals embedded expressions. In Visual Studio 2008, pressing Enter inside an embedded expression would result in the cursor being positioned to the left of the end embedded expression tag. In Visual Studio 2010, ...

On The Blink (Matt Gertz)

February 26, 2010 Feb 26, 2010 02/26/10
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
One of the really fun things about being associated with the Visual Basic team is getting to see all of the varied usages to which our customers put it.  From enterprise software to games, our customer base covers a wide range.  The most fun to see, however, are the hobby applications, because the writers of that code come up with ...

New Learning Resources on the Visual Basic Developer Center (Beth Massi)

February 1, 2010 Feb 1, 2010 02/1/10
Beth Massi
Today we revamped some of the Visual Basic Developer Center Learn pages with more content that allows you to pivot on more fine-grained topics and tasks related to Visual Basic programming. We’ve started with the Introductory Topics and Language Syntax pages. To get there, head to http://msdn.com/vbasic and then click the Learn tab. There ...

What didn't get into VB10: a wish-list for future versions of VB

January 28, 2010 Jan 28, 2010 01/28/10
VBTeam
Visual Studio 2010 is almost out the door. Now is a good time to look back at what we didn't get into the language in this release, but would have wanted to, and so will consider for future releases.Over the coming weeks, each day, I'll blog on blogs.msdn.com/lucian about the ideas on our wish-list, along with our evaluation of ...

The many cases of ByRef

January 26, 2010 Jan 26, 2010 01/26/10
VBTeam
One of the overlooked or simply misunderstood features of the VB language is calling a function which has a ByRef parameter.  Most languages support only a single method of passing parameters by reference [1], that is the scenarios directly supported by the CLR.  The CLR has a lot of restrictions on the type of values it supports for...