Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Channel9 series: Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 Week! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
There's a great Channel9 series that was recently released, with lots of videos on what to look forward to in VS 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0! The landing page is here; full lineup is below.Intro (Monday, November 10th): - Visual Studio 2010 Overview, Jason Zander - Key Themes for Visual Studio 2010, Soma - Lab Management in Visual Studio Team System 2010 Languages Day (Tuesday, November 11th): - C# 4.0 Implementation and Design Questions, Anders Hejlsberg - VB 10, Lucian Wischik - C++ 10: 10 is the new 6, Amit Mohindra The IDE (Wednesday, November 12th): - Being Code-Focused with Visual Studio 2010, Karen Liu - T...
Did you know there's a VB user group meeting each month at Microsoft Redmond? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
That's right... Just downstairs from our offices there is a VB user group that meets the fourth Monday each month. It's let by Robert Green, a former Microsoft employee, who used to work on the VB team! There are a lot of Microsoft speakers at this user group, so if you live in the area it's a great way to meet some folks on the team, and tell us what you think about Visual Basic!The user group website is here: http://www.dotnetda.com/Usual agenda is below...website for other Monday night events, which cover different .NET topics.
Code Focused Development in Visual Studio 2010 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Do you spend a lot of your day in code? (Writing code, navigating code, modifying code, understanding code, testing code, debugging code, etc.) If so, then the Visual Studio 2010 IDE has got a lot in store for you! In this release we're focusing on optimizing for code-focused development, which covers each of these tasks. There are a number of new features being added, designed to make your day easier. Here's the list: The VS 2010 Editor has also been rewritten using WPF and MEF (Microsoft Extensibility Framework) which allow us to create features with better visuali...
VS 2010 Announcements at TechEd EMEA (Lisa Feigenbaum)
TechEd EMEA kicked off on November 10th with an announcement-packed keynote by Visual Studio General Manager, Jason Zander! The 82min video has been made available for public viewing here. Below are some minute markers as well, in case you don't have time to watch the whole thing. Here's some other coverage you may want to check out, as well: Minute markers for the video: ...
Channel 9 Interview: WPF Drag-Drop Data Binding in Visual Studio 2010 (Beth Massi)
I just posted a new Channel 9 video with Milind Lele, Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team. In this interview Milind shows one of the new RAD improvements I was talking about that is coming to WPF in Visual Studio 2010 -- Drag-Drop Data Binding. Also check out his blog post on this topic for more information. His team is looking for feedback on this feature so visit the Visual Studio 2010 CTP page to download the CTP and visit the feedback forums. See it in action for yourself on Channel 9.Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
Panel: Developers moving to VB.Net for projects using XML (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Visual Basic 9.0 introduces a feature called XML Literals, which makes programming against XML a lot more natural, and dramatically decreases the number of lines of code you need to write. In fact, it makes working with XML in Visual Basic *so* much easier that many C# developers are moving to VB.Net for their XML work! To learn more about this phenomenon, watch the following panel from TechEd US, entitled: "VB XML Literals for C# developers or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Dim"
Spain User Group Tour: All Good Things Must Come to An End (Lisa Feigenbaum)
After three and a half days visiting user groups through Spain, Jon and I have flown back to the US. We got to meet some great people and had lots of fun talking about VB. The slide decks that we used on the trip are attached at the end of this post. PPT: Deep Dive on VB 9.0 (link to be added shortly)PPT: Visual Basic IDE Tips and Tricks User group meeting in Valencia: User group meeting in Alicante: Final pic with our host Pep Lluis after the user group meeting in Madrid: Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks.zip
Tutorial: Functional Programming with Visual Basic 9.0 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Using Visual Basic, and thinking about Functional Programming? Here's an excerpt from Eric White's blog, explaining why you should: Functional Programming (FP) has the potential to reduce program line count by 20% to 50%, reduce bugs and increase robustness, and move us in the direction of taking advantage of multiple core CPUs.He believes that the reasons many developers don't take advantage of functional programming are the learning curve and the unfamiliarity. If that's what's been holding you back, check out Eric's step-by-step tutorial on functional programming using VB 9.0. VB ...
Drag-drop data binding for WPF in Visual Studio 2010 (Milind Lele)
One of the improvements in VS2010 (CTP available for download here) is drag and drop data binding for WPF. Drag-drop data binding has been available for WinForms since Visual Studio 2005. So those of you that are familiar with that will find the WPF experience quite similar and readily usable. In VS2010 we've brought that to WPF.VS2008 SP1 brought the ability to add an Entity Data Model (EDM) to your projects. In VS2010 we've added support for EDM in the data sources window. Thus when you add an EDM to your project, the entities show up in the data sources window. You can simply drag the entit...