Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
An Updated Screensaver Example (Matt Gertz)
I’ve just completed a task that I set out to do about five years ago, and I am pretty proud (and tired)! I have just finished scanning in every single photo that I’ve acquired over my 40+ years of life, fixing up their dates to reflect the date when the picture was taken, not when it was scanned. Furthermore, I have tagged every photo on the disk drive (scanned or originally digital) with metadata saying who was in the photo and where it was taken. All of my family videos have been scanned in as well, and all of that work (plus all of my music tracks and personal documents) is now backed up weekly ont...
New WPF "How Do I" Video on Formatting Data Entry (Beth Massi)
Today we released a new How Do I Video onto the VB Dev Center on how to format controls on data entry forms using the IValueConverter like I showed on my blog here. The IValueConverter allows you full control over the display of the data as well as the editing of that data by users in the controls. Check out all the WPF Forms over Data videos here.Enjoy!
Happy New Year! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
On behalf of the Microsoft Visual Basic team, I'd like to wish all of our readers a happy & healthy new year. We truly enjoy getting to know you through your comments and emails, so here's an opportunity to say "thanks"! As we move forward to 2009, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at "the best of 2008". Here's a list of the most popular posts each month (based on the # of aggregate views): January: VB2008 Outperforms VB2005! (Lisa Feigenbaum) February: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 9: Full Outer Join (Bill H...
VB Developer? Read MSDN Magazine? You're in luck! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
MSDN Magazine Editor in Chief, Howard Dierking, announced a number of changes to the magazine in the January 2009 Editor's Note. Among that list of changes was the following excerpt: "Furthermore, we recently began moving all of our article code samples to MSDN Code Gallery. This will allow our team to be much more agile in managing and updating code samples as needed. In that agility, we are now also able to translate all C# code samples into Visual Basic." * GOING FORWARD, ALL MSDN MAGAZINE ARTICLES WRITTEN IN C# WILL ALSO INCLUDE CODE DOWNLOADS FOR VB.NET ONLINE! * So, where can you find the VB code? First c...
System.Diagnostics.Process: avoid deadlocks in RedirectStandardInput/Output (Lucian Wischik)
It's common that you want to launch an external process but supply input and capture the output. Here's one attempt: ' BAD CODE Using p As New System.Diagnostics.Process p.StartInfo.FileName = "cat" p.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = False p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = True p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardInput = True p.Start() p.StandardInput.Write("world" & vbCrLf & "hello") p.StandardInput.Close() Dim op = p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd()...
10-4 Episode 2: Welcome to Visual Studio 2010 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
It's a new week, and the 10-4 video podcast series continues! The topics for this week include an overview of VS 2010, and a special focus on the Start Page. Here's a description of the episode, from the creators:10-4 Episode 2: Welcome to Visual Studio 2010In this second episode of 10-4, we’ll take a very high-level look at Visual Studio 2010. We’ll discuss what types of features you can expect to see in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 depending on what type of developer you are. And lastly we’ll go ahead and dive into a revised area of Visual Studio: the Start Page. The Start Page in...
Video: Downloading and Using the Visual Studio 2010 September CTP (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The first episode of the 10-4 podcast series is about downloading the VS 2010 CTP. We had blogged the instructions before, but this video will take you through the process. Download now, and start trying out all the new features! :)Episode 1: Downloading and Using the Visual Studio 2010 September CTPFor this first episode of 10-4, we’ll look at how to download and use the Virtual PC image of the Visual Studio 2010 September CTP. We’ll give you tips on how to download this massive (7GB+ compressed) VPC, show you how to get past some pesky expiration issues, and get you started with the CTP walkthroughs...
Sshhh… it’s a secret (Matt Gertz)
Back in seventh grade, I had a pretty heavy crush on a girl named Melissa. She was a good friend of mine, and so I had no problems talking to her. However, being painfully shy back then, I was far too nervous to ever ask her to “go with” me. (For those not steeped in American traditions, to “go with” a girl or boy in junior high school meant that you were publicly asserting that the two of you were somehow romantically involved, whatever that actually meant when you were only twelve years old. It was always unclear to me why the term “go with” was used, since, being seventh graders, you ne...
Announcing 10-4! Weekly video podcasts on Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The Visual Studio and .NET Framework evangelism team has announced 10-4, a new video podcast. 10-4 will feature different capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 every week! To get the episodes, visit the show's new home on Channel9: https://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/ There you will also have the option to subscribe to the RSS feed of your choice, depending on the media format you’re interested in.