I recently received this letter from the Visual Studio Extensibility team, that I thought would be interesting to readers of this blog. Whether you're building Visual Studio extensions or downloading them from others, there's news here for you.   News from the Visual Studio Extensibility team…   Are you build...

The public availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1 was announced today on Jason Zander's blog:http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/05/20/general-download-of-vs2010-net-framework-4-0-beta-1.aspxBelow are some resources to use as you download and start using the Beta. Cheers, Lisa Feigenbaum | Program Manager | VS Languag...

There was a great Channel9 video posted last week on the future directions of VB.NET and C# and how they are related. Charles Torre interviewed Luca Bolognese, who is currently the Group Program Manager for VB.NET, C#, and F#. Please see below for more details. Luca Bolognese: C# and VB.NET Co-Evolution - The Twain Shall Meet by Charles Torre For m...

CodeRush Xpress is a FREE Visual Studio 2008 add-in containing 60+ refactorings, 7 editing features, and full support for C# and Visual Basic. Download hereCodeRush Xpress includes the following features. In addition, you receive the following refactorings.Add Parameter Create Overload Create With Statement Enc...

MEF stands for Managed Extensibility Framework. MEF is a new .NET library that enables greater reuse of applications and components. Using MEF, .NET applications can be dynamically composed. Kathleen has a great article on MEF in last month's edition of Visual Studio Magazine. She explains what it is, how to use it, and outlines the application sce...

Very exciting news! Developer Express is coming out with a new version of the FREE add-in we all know today as Refactor!. The new product, CodeRush XPress, builds on Refactor! by increasing the refactoring count to 59! It also includes a host of other editing functionality, making it a much richer tool for all-around IDE productivity. Consume-first...

I recently recorded a CodeCast interview with Ken Levy. We discussed the VS2010 Editor, VB.NET line continuation removal, interop with dynamic languages, the Microsoft languages strategy, and the upcoming VS2010 Beta1 release. Recording: CodeCast Episode 17: Visual Basic 2010 Preview with Lisa Feigenbaum This episode includes Ken Levy with a part...

Steele wrote a great article in last month's issue of Visual Studio Magazine on XML Literals, WCF and LINQ. He shows how to use these three technologies together to produce more responsive ASP.NET pages, and more readable code. Lots of great tips for VB 2008.VSM's "On VB" Column: XML Literals, WCF and LINQ by Steele Price

TechEd North America 2009 is right around the corner. For those of you attending, we look forward to spending time with you at the VB.NET sessions and Technical Learning Center (a.k.a. booth). I've pasted the VB.NET session list below. See you in LA!

You may know Luca Bolognese from his well-known work on C# LINQ. Luca is now the Group Program Manager for VB.NET, C#, and F#. You can check out his blog here. Luca recently blogged his first VB.NET post. It is about asynchronous HTML caching, and is part of a longer series in which he is converting a financial VBA Excel add-in to .NET. The code us...