Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Using Entity Framework in Silverlight with Visual Basic
If you’re looking for ways to get started with Entity Framework 4.0 in Visual Basic then be sure to check out this month’s issue of CODE Magazine. In it the Entity Framework team has put together a walkthrough that shows how to use EF4 in Silverlight, and best of all the entire article’s in VB! Using Entity Framework in Silverlight with Visual Basic The walkthrough covers the end-to-end experience: writing the WCF service, using EF’s Self-Tracking Entities to send data over the wire, and writing the Silverlight UI in XAML. Finally, it also shows how new VB10 f...
VB Goes Mobile: Announcing “Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools – RTW”
With the release of Windows Phone Developer Tools in September, and the availability of Windows Phone 7 devices in stores, the Windows Phone platform is growing. Today marks another milestone in the progression of Windows Phone. Today we are announcing Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools - RTW. This release doubles the developer audience for Windows Phone, by enabling Visual Basic developers to create applications for Windows Phone, as well as C#. Please stay tuned for the following announcements and walkthroughs going live today: We released a preview of this VB support in Sep...
Microsoft Help Viewer 1.1 – Updates Planned for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (Kathleen McGrath)
Paul O’Rear, a Program Manager on the Library Experience team, describes the changes to the Microsoft Help Viewer planned for Visual Studio 2010 SP1. He demonstrates the new functionality of the viewer in an early build of Help Viewer 1.1. See Microsoft Help Viewer – Updates Planned for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 You can learn more in The Story of Help in Visual Studio 2010 --Kathleen
Announcing the Async CTP for Visual Basic (and also Iterators!)
We're very happy to announce today the Async CTP for Visual Basic and C#. Asynchronous programming is something that helps make your UI more responsive, especially in applications that interact with databases or network or disk. It's also used to make ASP servers scale better. And it's the natural way to program in Silverlight. Until now, asynchronous programming has also been prohibitively hard, "not worth the investment"-hard. But with the Async CTP we've made asynchronous programming easy enough that developers should routinely consider asynchrony for most of their applications. Async is a true "parity" f...
Announcing Microsoft Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools
Today we announced availability of the Microsoft Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools. You can download the release here: This CTP is to be used with the Windows Phone Developer Tools, in order to do Windows Phone 7 development with Visual Basic. We have heard a lot of customer requests for this capability and are all very excited about today’s announcement. Here are some Microsoft blog posts regarding this announcement: Please find below a walkthrough with screenshots of the experience creating a Windows Phone 7 application with Visual Basic, using the new CTP. WALKTHR...
Channel 9 Interview: Multi-Targeting Deep Dive (Beth Massi, Spotty Bowles)
I’m back with Spotty Bowles, a tester on the VB compiler team, shows us the ins and outs of how multi-targeting works in Visual Basic projects in Visual Studio 2010 in this Channel 9 interview: Channel 9 Interview: Multi-Targeting Deep Dive with Visual Basic 2010What's tricky in Visual Studio 2010 is that there are now two supported versions of the CLR. Spotty shows us how to work with client and full framework profiles in Visual Studio, as well as what happens at runtime when referenced class libraries target a different profile. He also shows us how to use some of the new VB10 language features when down ...
Productivity Improvements for the Entity Framework
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 yourself. With all that said, there are still a number of things we can do to simplify the process of writing data access code with the Entity Framework. We’ve been paying attention to the most common patterns that we see developers using with the EF and have bee...
Troubleshooting Errors When Embedding Type Information (Doug Rothaus)
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 published versions is the version of the PIA (to match different Office versions), then this feature is for you.You enable type embedding when you reference an assembly. In Visual Studio, you set the Embed Interop Types property to true (the default). The command-line compi...