Last week I went on a user group tour around Southern California. I've uploaded the materials from my talk: You can find these all posted together on the following Code Gallery page.The demo requires installation of Refactor!, which is a 3rd party tool available for free on MSDN. I also pointed out a number of resources at the end of the tal...

I will be presenting on the VB IDE in Southern California this week at a series of user group meetings. The events will be held in the San Diego and the Los Angeles area. Charlie Calvert from the C# team will be flying down from Redmond to speak as well. The schedule is as follows:  I will be speaking on Visual Basic 2008 IDE Ti...

Do you use code snippets (introduced in VB 2005)? If you do, then you've probably noticed the green highlighting that stays around for the lifetime of the file. We've heard *a lot* of feedback that once you are done customizing the snippet, it is distracting to see this highlighting stay around. To address this, VB 2008 has improved the heuristics ...

Our goal in designing VB2008 IntelliSense was to make users of the feature the most productive that they could be. One problem we found in watching people use the feature, is that sometimes intelliSense displays so many items that it is hard to know whether or not you're close to the item you're looking for. You basically have to read them all of t...

There's a lot of cool functionality built into VS debugger datatips that often goes unnoticed... For example, did you know that not only can you *see* values in the expanded datatips, but you can also edit them? Watch the following walk-through... While debugging, hover over a variable to view its debugger datatip: Next press the '+' to expand the...

Just like Alt+Tab for Windows you can use Ctrl+Tab for Visual Studio. Ctrl+Tab will show you the active tool windows *and* the active files, so it is a good navigation tool for both. VS2008 has even added a cool miniature-sized visualization to this view, so that you can better determine which item you're after. Windows: Visual Studio:  

With the help of one little hotkey, you can now make the VS2008 IntelliSense list transparent! Just press CTRL. This is especially convenient when you need to see the code underneath the list. Watch it in action :)  

I've decided to start a "Did you know?" series with tips & tricks. First off is my favorite IDE feature in VB2008: IntelliSense Everywhere! Did you know about all the new places where you can now find intelliSense in VB2008? If you're like me, once you try 2008 IntelliSense you won't be able to go back to 2005. VB's mission statement is to be t...

Looking for another reason to upgrade to 2008? How about performance! In addition to making tasks easier for you from release to release, another way we can save you time and make you more productive is by making the product faster! This is a goal we are very commited to on the VB team, and for which we have dedicated an entire virtual te...

Have you downloaded the latest Refactoring tools from Developer Express? There is a free version available on the Visual Basic Developer Center. Once you download, you will discover a number of cool capabilities you can now do in the Visual Basic IDE. When used to the fullest, it can really change the way you code!VB super-user Kim has created...