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What didn't get into VB10: a wish-list for future versions of VB

January 28, 2010 Jan 28, 2010 01/28/10
VBTeam
Visual Studio 2010 is almost out the door. Now is a good time to look back at what we didn't get into the language in this release, but would have wanted to, and so will consider for future releases.Over the coming weeks, each day, I'll blog on blogs.msdn.com/lucian about the ideas on our wish-list, along with our evaluation of ...

The many cases of ByRef

January 26, 2010 Jan 26, 2010 01/26/10
VBTeam
One of the overlooked or simply misunderstood features of the VB language is calling a function which has a ByRef parameter.  Most languages support only a single method of passing parameters by reference [1], that is the scenarios directly supported by the CLR.  The CLR has a lot of restrictions on the type of values it supports for...

Fun With Dynamic Objects (Doug Rothaus)

January 20, 2010 Jan 20, 2010 01/20/10
VBTeam
A while back, I remember being asked if there was a simple way to expose a source XML document as an object with properties. That is, if the root XML element had a child element <Name>Doug</Name>, then the object would have a Name property that was a string and returned “Doug”. The catch was that the XML document did ...

Hidden Gems in VB2010 – Serializing Objects that Raise Events (Jonathan Aneja)

December 14, 2009 Dec 14, 2009 12/14/09
VBTeam
By now you've likely heard about the major new features coming in VB 2010, but there's also a number of smaller additions in the language and IDE that might not be as readily noticeable.  "Hidden Gems" will be a multi-part series where we'll explore some of these smaller enhancements.  First up - serialization! Let’s say ...

Spot the Bug! – The Key to using Anonymous Types (Jonathan Aneja)

November 16, 2009 Nov 16, 2009 11/16/09
VBTeam
This one’s going to be long, but for those of you who’ve felt the first 3 in this series were too easy I promise this one’s tougher J. Let’s say you want to list all the customers from a table in a ComboBox, and update the UI based on which one is selected.  To do this we’ll need to bring back two fields...

Spot the Bug! – Is it in VB or XAML? (Jonathan Aneja)

November 12, 2009 Nov 12, 2009 11/12/09
VBTeam
What’s wrong with the following WPF code? Class Window1    Sub OK_Click(sender As Object, e As RoutedEventArgs) Handles OK.Click      MsgBox("Button Clicked")  End Sub End Class <Window x:Class="Window1"    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/...

Spot the Bug! – Much Ado about Nothing… (Jonathan Aneja)

November 3, 2009 Nov 3, 2009 11/3/09
VBTeam
Microsoft has this neat mailing list called “Spot the Bug” where developers can send interesting snippets of code that look correct but actually have subtle bugs in them.  The puzzles are a lot of fun and I’ve always thought it’d be a fun thing to try here on the team blog.  Over the past year or so I’ve been keeping a list...

Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2!

October 20, 2009 Oct 20, 2009 10/20/09
Lisa Feigenbaum
There were a lot of Microsoft announcements that happened yesterday! Many of these happened during Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the SharePoint Developers Conference (Video, Twitter). Here is the list:MSDN subscribers can download Beta 2 now!  We will be opening up Beta 2 for everyone to download starting this Wednesday. In honor...