Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Community Interview with Sophia Salim (Beth Massi)

This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole. This time we have Sophia Salim, a Tester on the VB Compiler. I'm very happy to see Sophia reach out to the community and am looking forward to more interesting posts from her here. I'm always interested in what really goes on ...

Reflection on COM objects (Lucian Wischik)

Reflection on .Net objects is done through System.Type and is very easy. For instance, "Dim type = GetType(System.String)" and now you can look at all the members and inheritance hierarchy of the System.String class.Reflection on COM types is also easy if they have an interop assembly. For instance, add a project reference to the COM ...

Looking for Setup and Deployment Project Templates? (Mary Lee)

Let's say that you've developed an application using the free Visual Studio Express Edition. Now, you want to deploy your application to the masses, and you read documentation about How to: Create or Add Deployment Projects. Here's how the topic starts: To create a new deployment project In this example, I'm using Visual Basic 2008 ...

Malay Mail coverage of TechEd SouthEast Asia (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Here's a brief addition to my Visual Basic Around the World post... This one's for the folks in SouthEast Asia. The TechEd MVP and Speaker dinner made it into the local Malaysian paper. You can see a copy of the article below. The theme was "Bling-tastic!". I'm at the bottom left with other international speakers: David Tesar, Steve Riley...

Co- and contra-variance (Lucian Wischik)

How do I convert an IEnumerable(Of CheckingAccount) into an IEnumerable(Of Account) ? (where CheckingAccount inherits from Account).Currently this conversion isn't allowed, but we're considering a VB language feature to support it. The topic is called "co- and contravariance", and has been in the CLR since 2005 or so, but no one's yet released...

PInvoke Interop Assistant on CodePlex (Jared Parsons)

I'm happy to announce that the PInvoke Interop Assistant tool is now available on CodePlex.  This includes the binaries, source code and the dev authored unit tests.  It is hosted on the more general CLR Interop Tools page.  http://www.codeplex.com/clrinterop I will be actively maintaining this tool in the future and (hopefully...

VSLive San Francisco Content (Amanda Silver)

All - I'm about to go on for my LINQ Deep Dive and Tips &Tricks session at VSLive in San Francisco. I posted all demos & slides here:https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=LaunchVB&ReleaseId=805...

Recap of European Launch Events for Visual Studio 2008 (Amanda Silver)

Last week I had the privilege of speaking in Lisbon, Portugal & Birmingham, England at launch events for Visual Studio 2008. There seemed to be a lot of buzz and excitement in the air at both events -- no doubt due to the recent release of Visual Studio. TechDays, Portugal The TechDays event is similar to TechEd in that it's a four-day ...

Making PInvoke Easy

Jared here again.  I very excited to announce we recently released a tool I've been working on to MSDN that will greatly help with using PInvoke in managed code.  The tool is called the "PInvoke Interop Assistant" and is included as part of a MSDN article on marshalling data for PInvoke and Reverse PInvoke scenarios.  Here is ...

Launch events in Portugal & England!

All -- I'm very excited to be speaking at launch events in Lisbon, Portugal and Birmingham, England within the next week. After a 17 hour journey, with much jet-lagged-sleepiness in my eyes, I'll be speaking tomorrow morning at 9:30am in room A3 of the Centro de Congressos de Lisboa. DEV10 - Expert VB.NET 2008: Past, Present, and FutureDo you ...