Visual Basic Blog

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Productivity Improvements for the Entity Framework

June 21, 2010 Jun 21, 2010 06/21/10
VBTeam
BackgroundWe’ve been hearing a lot of good feedback on the recently released update to the Entity Framework in .NET 4. This release marks a significant advancement from the first release that shipped with .NET 3.5 SP1.  I’m not going to spend time here talking about what’s new, but you can check here to see for ...

Troubleshooting Errors When Embedding Type Information (Doug Rothaus)

June 11, 2010 Jun 11, 2010 06/11/10
VBTeam
Visual Studio 2010 has a new feature, Embed Interop Types, that can simplify application deployment and solve those pesky issues that can arise when using COM Interop and Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). If you’ve ever had to ship multiple versions of an application that automates Microsoft Office where the only difference between your...

Removing duplicate namespaces in XML Literals (Shyam Namboodiripad)

June 9, 2010 Jun 9, 2010 06/9/10
VBTeam
A common problem that one often runs into with XML literals and the LINQ to XML API is duplicate XML namespaces. Consider the following example. The code imports a default XML namespace - “hello”.Code: Imports <xmlns="hello"> Module Module1     Sub Main()         Dim x = <A...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus)

June 7, 2010 Jun 7, 2010 06/7/10
VBTeam
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus)It’s been a while since I wrote one of these XML cookbook entries. Here’s some info on a common problem: Really big XML files.I’m going to show you two things in this recipe. The first is a tip on reading very large XML files while still being able to use ...

Using HTML entities in XML Literals (Avner Aharoni)

May 24, 2010 May 24, 2010 05/24/10
VBTeam
One of the common use-cases of XML literals is creating HTML. However, HTML entities cannot be used in XML literals since LINQ to XML directly supports only the Data type definitions (DTD) defined in the XML 1.0 spec. You can read more about it here. The workaround is to use the Unicode representation of the entity, although it’s not as ...

Visual Basic 2010 is here!

April 15, 2010 Apr 15, 2010 04/15/10
Lisa Feigenbaum
It was a very exciting time this week, with the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. On April 12th, 5 launch events took place around the world in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, London and Las Vegas. The video from Bob Muglia’s VS 2010 Launch keynote is now available on-demand. The agenda for day was VS 2010 sessions, including ...

Back to the future! – New version of the VB6 InteropForms toolkit is released!!

April 13, 2010 Apr 13, 2010 04/13/10
VBTeam
Along with all the new goodies that we released yesterday as part of Visual Studio 2010, one additional thing we did yesterday as well is release an update to the popular interopforms toolkit.   This update brings VS 2010 (and VS 2008!) support to the toolkit and fixes a smattering of reported bugs.    As many of you ...

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010

April 8, 2010 Apr 8, 2010 04/8/10
VBTeam
Crystal Reports has been a part of Visual Basic since 1993, and a part of Visual Studio since its first release in 2002. Crystal Reports has been a very successful component of these products. With the release of Visual Studio 2010, SAP and Microsoft have mutually decided to change how we deliver this important component to the .NET developer...

Editing XML Literals Embedded Expressions in Visual Basic 2010 (Avner Aharoni)

March 26, 2010 Mar 26, 2010 03/26/10
VBTeam
The implicit line continuation feature in Visual Basic 2010 provided an opportunity to improve the code editing experience in XML literals embedded expressions. In Visual Studio 2008, pressing Enter inside an embedded expression would result in the cursor being positioned to the left of the end embedded expression tag. In Visual Studio 2010, ...

New Learning Resources on the Visual Basic Developer Center (Beth Massi)

February 1, 2010 Feb 1, 2010 02/1/10
Beth Massi
Today we revamped some of the Visual Basic Developer Center Learn pages with more content that allows you to pivot on more fine-grained topics and tasks related to Visual Basic programming. We’ve started with the Introductory Topics and Language Syntax pages. To get there, head to http://msdn.com/vbasic and then click the Learn tab. There ...