Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Easy Async and Await for VBs Part 1, or…
...letting your code do absolutely nothing! We’ve all been there, one way or the other. Either as users of an app or as the developer to whom users complained to: When a typical Win32 app is waiting for an operation to complete, we often get to see something like this: In discussions about how to get a handle on such scenarios there are all kinds of suggestions, one of the most frequent ones being “You need to do this asynchronously: Just start a new thread! You can do that with Tasks.” And this is when people start introducing patterns like the following into their code which in most cases is not only unnecessa...
Why VB2017 only supports consuming ref returning methods
![Anthony D. Green [MSFT]](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/letter-avatar/7c5b09a72c1d6e6f2a21258b8cf078b8.svg){kind=avatar}
Hi VBers, Last week Klaus wrote an amazing post detailing a number of improvements made to the Visual Basic IDE and language in Visual Studio 2017 (and he even forgot one, stay tuned for awesome). Regarding the new ref-return feature Jonathan Allen inquired as to why the design was so different from the one in C#. It's not uncommon for considerations in one language to be different in the other or for the styles of the languages to yield different design decisions, even from the same people. But it's a great question so I thought I'd write up a longer explanation for the VB design. To put it bluntly, the capabili...
What's New in Visual Basic 2017
Visual Studio 2017 just shipped, and with it shipped a new version of Visual Basic. With the new language strategy of the .NET Languages, the focus is again on Visual Basic’s original virtue: Provide editor, debugging and refactoring tools as well as language feature to ease complex tasks and boost every VB’s developer productivity without distracting them from their domain specific excellence. After all, it always was first Visual Basic which put the ‘Visual’ into Visual Studio, and let developers get the work done efficiently, yet without compromises in quality! 😎 Speed up Solution Loading times with Enable Lig...
Digging Deeper into the Visual Basic Language Strategy
Today Mads made an excellent post about our overall .NET Language Strategy. As I know this will raise a lot of questions in the VB community I wanted to take an entire post on the VB team blog to dive deeper into how VB fits into that strategy and why and what that means in practical terms for us as a community. Looking Back Six and half years ago, the Visual Studio Languages team laid out the motivations for our then-new co-evolution strategy. Mainly the significant overlap in adoption between VB and C# in adoption and use cases and four "powerful unifying forces" they shared: What's Changed? ...
Relaunching the Visual Basic Team Blog
Last year we decided to retire this blog and consolidate content on the .NET team blog instead. The thinking at the time was that we weren’t really posting a lot of content to it and that there was so much overlap in content between the VB team blog and the C# FAQ that it would be simpler to just focus on the .NET blog. Since then my experience has been that the Visual Basic community still needs a place of its own to discuss topics uniquely relevant to VB developers so we’re relaunching this blog. The .NET team blog will continue to be the source for the latest information on the .NET platform; which is of cours...
New VB T-Shirt Designs on the .NET Blog – Tell Us What You Think
[Update: You can get these cool T-Shirts @ the .NET Swag Store - get yours today!] Mads and Dustin showed off their cool VB and C# team t-shirts at BUILD and tons of people liked them and asked where they could get one. So, we're thinking about making them available for purchase online. I've been working on some new designs and would love to know what you think. See the designs and leave your feedback on the full post over on the .NET team blog. Regards, -ADG
Roslyn ships v1.0-rc2 with "Go-Live" license
For the last six years you've heard us go on and on about this Roslyn thing and how it's the platform for the future and would change everything and that we were all-in on it and "it's going to be great just wait and see". Well, the wait is over. This morning, at BUILD, Principal Program Managers of the Managed Languages Team Mads Torgersen and Dustin Campbell showed during their "What's New in C# 6 and Visual Basic 14" talk that Roslyn is here and Roslyn is ready. As of yesterday Roslyn has a "Go-Live" license. This is the culmination of over half a decade of design and investment from some of the brightest min...
A Journey Through Open Source: The Trials & Triumphs in Roslyn's First Year of Open Source
"I am looking for someone to share in an adventure." — Gandalf, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien On April 3, 2014, Anders Hejlsberg set us on our open source journey when he made the .NET Compiler Platform (aka “Roslyn”) source code public live on stage in San Francisco. Without much open source experience to guide us (or a Grey Wizard), we anxiously yet excitedly hit the open roads. This post details the real and true story of the trials and triumphs we’ve experienced in Roslyn’s first year of open source. The Call to Adventure Previously, in order for developers to build a code-...
Lowercase Keywords Revisited (not an April Fools’ Day joke this time, I promise)
Hey all, I hope you enjoyed yesterday's April Fools' Day post. I thought it was a fun way to kick off an experiment I'd like to conduct and in this post I'll tell you how you can actually try out lowercase keywords for VB on your machine right now no matter what version of VS you're using (no joke). You see, a few years back Architect-emeritus Paul Vick asked a question, "Do PascalCased keywords make VB look more verbose than it really is?" At the time I didn't really give the question enough thought but a lot of commenters responded positively about the look (both then and yesterday) and recently I got to thin...