Anthony D. Green

So, you’ve heard that VB (and C#) are open source now and you want to dive in and contribute. If you haven’t spent your life building compilers, you probably don’t know where to start. No worries, I’ll walk you through it.

Visual Studio 2017 15.3 Preview 1 included templates for VB class libraries targeting .NET Standard class libraries and for .NET Core console apps. With the release of .NET Core 2.0 today those templates go-live.

The .NET Standard
You can use the built-in templates to create cross-platform command-line apps,

Hi VBers,
Last week Klaus wrote an amazing post detailing a number of improvements made to the Visual Basic IDE and language in Visual Studio 2017 (and he even forgot one, stay tuned for awesome). Regarding the new ref-return feature Jonathan Allen inquired as to why the design was so different from the one in C#.

Today Mads made an excellent post about our overall .NET Language Strategy. As I know this will raise a lot of questions in the VB community I wanted to take an entire post on the VB team blog to dive deeper into how VB fits into that strategy and why and what that means in practical terms for us as a community.

Last year we decided to retire this blog and consolidate content on the .NET team blog instead. The thinking at the time was that we weren’t really posting a lot of content to it and that there was so much overlap in content between the VB team blog and the C# FAQ that it would be simpler to just focus on the .NET blog.

[Update: You can get these cool T-Shirts @ the .NET Swag Store – get yours today!]
Mads and Dustin showed off their cool VB and C# team t-shirts at BUILD and tons of people liked them and asked where they could get one.

For the last six years you’ve heard us go on and on about this Roslyn thing and how it’s the platform for the future and would change everything and that we were all-in on it and “it’s going to be great just wait and see”.

“I am looking for someone to share in an adventure.”
— Gandalf, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

On April 3, 2014, Anders Hejlsberg set us on our open source journey when he made the .NET Compiler Platform (aka “Roslyn”) source code public live on stage in San Francisco.

Hey all,
I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s April Fools’ Day post. I thought it was a fun way to kick off an experiment I’d like to conduct and in this post I’ll tell you how you can actually try out lowercase keywords for VB on your machine right now no matter what version of VS you’re using (no joke).

UPDATE 2015-04-02: After reading this post be sure to read the follow-up post!
I was chatting with an old Microsoftie a while ago and he let me in on the real story behind Visual Basic’s at times aggressive reformatting of code.