We recently announced the availability of Windows Home Server. Here's an interview on Channel 9 with Dev Lead, Chris Gray, where he talks about the extensibility model and then walks through how to create an add-in for the Home Server console using Visual Basic Express. A couple people on the thread have also posted VB templates t...

I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Bill Horst, a member of the Visual Basic QA team. Bill shows us the ins and outs type inference in the newest version of Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008. He shows us how the new Option Infer works and how various types are inferred by the compiler without having to explicitly declare them.&n...

There's a new article up on the VB Dev Center by Rob Windsor, a follow up from his first Getting Started with WCF article, called Using Custom Business Objects with Windows Communication Foundation. Rob explains how to serialize your own custom business objects using WCF DataContracts and what issues you may run into in Visual Studio 2005. Check it...

We just released a new set of How-Do-I videos in our LINQ series on LINQ to XML in Visual Basic. These 4 new videos will help get you up to speed on using this new language feature in Visual Basic 2008. They walk you through the basics of LINQ to XML, creating, querying and transforming documents as well as how to import XML namespaces and inf...

I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Matt Gertz, Development Manager on the Visual Basic team (well former Dev Manager, I'll let him explain <g>) where he shows off a Euchre game he's developed in Visual Basic that includes speech and sound. Matt is one of our best bloggers on the VB Team and he loves game programming as well as ...

The Beta 2 version of the Visual Basic Language specification has been released onto the download center. This language specification corresponds to the version of Visual Basic that will ship in Visual Studio 2008. The spec covers the following major new features:• Friend assemblies (InternalsVisibleTo)• Relaxed delegates•&...

The documentation team has just released a survey aimed at gathering feedback on Visual Studio content. Are you dying to tell us what you think about the Visual Studio content in the MSDN library? Please share your perspective by taking part in the Visual Studio Content Survey. The survey is completely anonymous and doesn't require that you fi...

I just posted a Channel 9 interview with Milind Lele showing us his favorite VS 2008 features - the new Data Synchronization designer and how the sync services for ADO.NET work to support occasionally connected scenarios. He shows us how to set up a local database cache using SQL Compact Edition and how to use it to store read-only data caches...

I'm happy to announce the redesign of the Visual Basic Developer Center! This is the first step in a series of community-focused and dynamic content changes you'll be seeing on the Developer Center. Many thanks to the people over at MSDN, (especially Kerby) that made this a reality. Besides the new UI and fresh headlines and downloads, check out th...

The Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Team released the Visual Basic Pack for Visual Studio 2005 SDK on Friday! This download provides the SDK samples in Visual Basic and a new wizard that is used for generating Visual Basic-based integration packages for Visual Studio. Head on over to the VSX team blog for more info.It's important t...