Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Veni, MIDI, Vici: Generating a simple MIDI file using VB, part 2 (Matt Gertz)
In part 1 of this series, I constructed a pair of classes to supporting persisting MIDI data to files. In this entry, I’ll now leverage that code to support an (admittedly limited) music editor experience. Caveat: As I mentioned in the first post, I’m sure many readers will be far more knowledgeable about MIDI than I am, and will justifiably roll their eyes at this code due to its limited scope. I will only be generating simple type-1 MIDI files that only use the Note On and Note Off events, and which don’t use metadata, targeting a “Save” scenario only. The idea of this exercise was to u...
Visual Studio 2008 Voted Best IDE! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The results from InfoWorld's 2009 Technology of the Year Awards are in. Visual Studio 2008 was voted Best IDE, with the following commentary:Microsoft Visual Studio 2008Visual Studio stands alone as the preferred development environment for applications using Microsoft's .Net Framework, and it's peerless among IDEs for any language. The 2008 version expands the development targets to include SOA, Web 2.0, Windows Presentation Framework, and Silverlight applications, and extends the data-handling capabilities to include language-integrated queries (LINQ). You can find the awards slideshow here. Also note the InfoW...
Veni, MIDI, Vici: Generating a simple MIDI file using VB, part 1 (Matt Gertz)
As I’ve alluded to in previous blogs, music has always been a big part of my life, particularly performance music. I’ve been a clarinet and saxophone player for many years, am an avid singer, and (with the help of friends) I’ve done my best to teach myself piano and drums. Composition of music, however, has always been a problem for me. I’ve written a few small pieces, but any attempt to write something larger has always ended up with me giving up after fifty or so measures. Programs to help a person create their own compositions have certainly come a long way, but ...
Concurrent Basic on Channel 9 (Lucian Wischik, Lisa Feigenbaum)
Concurrency is an important topic on everyone's mind, when considering future trends for computing and programming languages. Concurrent Basic is a variant of the Visual Basic language, with new constructs baked in to help handle concurrency and parallelism, in a very natural way. Watch this high-energy video with language guru Erik Meijer, VB spec lead Lucian Wischik, and MS researcher Claudio Russo, to learn more about what Concurrent Basic is all about!Expert to Expert: Inside Concurrent Basic (CB)NOTE: CB is a research project and therefore a research language. It has no ship vehicle and is not available for ...
VB XML Literals with ASP.NET MVC (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Have you been following the buzz on VB XML Literals with ASP.NET MVC?! Last week, Beth Massi posted a Channel 9 video with ASP.NET Product Unit Manager Dmitry Robsman. You can find a written description of the topic on Dmitry's blog:ASP.NET MVC View Engine using VB.NET XML LiteralsThere has been an interesting discussion about this technique on ASP.NET Program Manager Phil Haack's blog:Interesting use of XML Literals as a View EngineFinally, check out the InfoQ article that was published on this topic:VB May Get a Big Push from ASP.NET MVC
Visual Basic at MIX ’09 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
For the Visual Basic web developers, be sure to check out MIX this year! The conference will be taking place March 18-20, at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas.https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/locations/eventsThe list of sessions is posted here. Included in the agenda will be the following Visual Basic session.Making XML Really, Really Easy with Microsoft Visual Basic 9 By Alex Turner See how Visual Basic 9 makes generating rich XML orders of magnitude easier than using text concatenation or an object model. Come learn how XML literals, embedded expressions, LINQ integration, automatic schema generation...
Visual Basic 10 on the 10-4 Channel9 Series! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Check out the latest video in the 10-4 Channel 9 series, on Visual Basic 10: Episode 9: Visual Basic 10 In this ninth episode of 10-4, we introduce some of the new features and functionality coming to the Visual Basic language with the release of Visual Basic 10. We'll cover a whole range of features from Auto-Properties, to Multiline Lambdas, Statement Lambdas, Collection Initializers, Array Literals, and Implicit Line Continuation. In future episodes, we'll look at diving into features like No-PIA (No-Primary Interop Assembly) and Generic Variance.
Web-scraping using Visual Basic's XML support
We've just had a fascinating article about using VB's XML literals to produce web pages.I've been interested in the other side of the process: using VB's XML support to scrape web-pages for data. Here's the essential bit of code, which looks for something like <div class="content"><h2>Title</h2> <table><tr><td><p>Data1</p></td></tr></table></div>, and extracts the title and the data.Dim fn = Fetch(url)Dim xml = XElement.Load(fn)Dim yui = (From i In xml...<xhtml:div> Where i.GetAttr("class") = "content").FirstOrDefaultDim title...
Channel 9 Interview: ASP.NET MVC using Visual Basic XML Literals (Beth Massi)
Today I posted an interview on Channel 9 with Dmitry Robsman, the Product Unit Manager for ASP.NET. In this interview he shows us how he implemented ASP.NET MVC views using Visual Basic's XML Literals instead of .aspx pages. Dmitry shows us how this makes coding the views much cleaner using standard OOP principals. He also makes some very interesting observations about DSLs and Visual Basic XML literals. You can download the code Dmitry shows in the interview from his blog here.Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community