Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Visual Basic support planned for .NET 5.0
We’ve heard your feedback that you want Visual Basic on .NET Core. Visual Basic in .NET 5 will support additional application types.
Visual Basic in .NET Core 3.0
Visual Basic in .NET Core 3 Update: March 12, 2020 This strategy described in this 2018 post has been replaced with the one in this post. Update: Oct 8, 2019 .NET Core 3.0 contains portions of the Visual Basic.NET Runtime (microsoft.visualbasic.dll) that do not depend on WinForms. Visual Basic.NET support for WinForms, WPF, and other application types in .NET Core 3.0 is similar to C#. Special features of the Visual Basic.NET Runtime (microsoft.visualbasic.dll) are not in .NET Core 3.0. As an example, application startup using application models are not supported. Visual Basic.NET desktop templates...
Combining Angular, Visual Basic and .NET Core for developing modern web apps
Visual Basic supports .NET Core starting in Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 (15.3). This opens new possibilities for new applications and modernizing existing applications. Preserving domain-specific code when modernizing applications allows step-wise conversions, decreases cost, and avoids disruptions. This post covers using Visual Basic ASP.NET Core WebAPI for the back end, along with a new TypeScript and Angular front end. Working in Visual Basic lets you work in your favorite language and reuse existing business logic. The TypeScript/Angular front end provides a responsive SPA (single-page-application) user inter...
Roslyn Primer – Part I: Anatomy of a Compiler
![Anthony D. Green [MSFT]](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/eb6b2bca8f98b35298f2041865b4cce5?s=96&r=g){kind=avatar}
So, you’ve heard that VB (and C#) are open source now and you want to dive in and contribute. If you haven’t spent your life building compilers, you probably don’t know where to start. No worries, I’ll walk you through it. This post is the first of a series of blog posts focused on the Roslyn codebase. They’re intended as a primer for prototyping language features proposed on the VB Language Design repo; and contributing compiler and IDE features, and bug fixes on the Roslyn repo, both on GitHub. Despite the topic, these posts are written from the perspective of someone who’s never taken a course in compilers (I ...
Dependency Injection with Visual Basic .NET – Part 2 – IoC Containers
This post was authored by guest blogger André Obelink, a Visual Basic MVP, and published by the VBTeam on his behalf. In my previous post, I wrote about the basics of dependency injection. I explained the technique to define an interface and injecting the dependencies to a client object. These dependencies contain the real implementation of that specific interface. Applying dependency injection makes your code more loosely coupled, which helps you in maintaining, extending, and testing your codebase. The example we ended up with works fine, but it can still be improved for some scenarios. In this post I will sho...
Dependency Injection with Visual Basic .NET – Part 1
This post was authored by guest blogger André Obelink, a Visual Basic MVP, and published by the VBTeam on his behalf. In this first blog post of a series of two, I explain what dependency injection (DI) is and why you might want to use this design principle in your software. The target audience of this post is the junior / medium experienced software developer, with no knowledge of dependency injection or related techniques. In the second post, I’ll describe the use of Inversion of Control Containers (IoC containers), to use dependency injection in a much more flexible way. What is dependency injection? Dependenc...
New for Visual Basic: .NET Standard Class Libraries and the dotnet CLI!
Visual Studio 2017 15.3 Preview 1 included templates for VB class libraries targeting .NET Standard class libraries and for .NET Core console apps. With the release of .NET Core 2.0 today those templates go-live. The .NET Standard You can use the built-in templates to create cross-platform command-line apps, as well as creating and testing cross-platform VB libraries targeting the new .NET Standard. When you target a version of the .NET Standard you get access to all the APIs included in that version of the standard. You can then use that single library in any app targeting a platform that supports that version...
Visual Basic and Cross-Platform: Mobile Apps with VB, Xamarin, and .NET Standard!
How would you like it if you could create a Console App in Visual Basic and run it on Linux? Or running the same Xamarin.Forms-App written in Visual Basic on an iPhone, and Android and a Windows Tablet? Welcome to the world of cross-platform development, which from Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 on – thanks to .NET Standard and .NET Core – is now also available for Visual Basic! Well, currently the preview of Visual Studio 2017 lets you use this, and it is the best set of features that Update 3 (aka VS 15.3) will bring for us VBs: We are getting Visual Basic .NET Core and .NET Standard templates. Note though, that t...
Introduction to (Live) Unit Testing in Visual Basic… [updated for VS 2017 Update 3 Preview 3]
...and Why My Grandma Invented the Concept! Meet late Grandma Grete Schindler. I'd like to introduce you to my grandma, because this post will be about the essence and purpose of unit testing in Visual Basic, and Granny Grete basically invented the concept of unit testing. Yes, she really did, I kid you not – she was a very wise woman! When she saw someone in our family doing their work in a hectic rather than a thoughtful way, she always quoted her most favorite Silesian proverb: “Kinder, schmeißt nicht mit dem Hintern um, was ihr mühsam mit den Händen aufgebaut habt” – which roughly translates to “Kids, ...
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
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...
How “Roslyn” Finally Unshackled Visual Basic From The Tyranny of the Pretty-Lister
UPDATE 2015-04-02: After reading this post be sure to read the follow-up post! I was chatting with an old Microsoftie a while ago and he let me in on the real story behind Visual Basic’s at times aggressive reformatting of code. It turns out that it didn’t actually start out as a feature but as a consequence of how the IDE was implemented. You see, older computers had significantly more limited memory available to them by modern standards. Every byte was precious. If you were to look at the way the VB IDE works today there are separate layers and data structures for representing the syntax of the lan...
Edit & Continue and Make Object ID Improvements in CTP 6
It's the beginning of a new year! According to Back to the Future Part II, everyone will be riding hoverboards in a couple months (and, let's be honest, Doc would love the HoloLens). In the meantime, let's explore the enhancements we've made to the Visual Studio debugging experience. In CTP 6, we improved the edits supported by Edit & Continue and now support Make Object ID in the new 2015 VB and C# expression evaluators. Before you read more about our improvements in CTP 6, make sure you have read Anthony's post on debugging improvements in Visual Studio 2015 Preview. Edit & Continue is reaching its pote...
We're moving to GitHub!
It’s official. We’re moving to GitHub! We are moving the Roslyn OSS code from CodePlex to GitHub. GitHub has a vibrant open source community that we want to actively be a part of and contribute to. We are also going to take this time to modify our pull request process. Please see below for more details: WHEN: This upcoming Wednesday or Thursday, depending on whether we encounter any problems. WHERE: Under the .NET Foundation. More details coming soon. HERE! (Edit: 1/16/15) WHY: We are moving our code to GitHub as well as switching to use git internally. This means we wi...
Better together: Visual Basic 14 and the Visual Studio 2015 Debugger
"Lambdas! Lambdas! Lambdas! Lambdas! ..." If you hadn't heard, Visual Studio 2015 will support the use of lambda expressions in the debugger windows. We're all very excited to deliver on this longstanding TOP customer request. When LINQ was introduced in 2008 it was a game changer for the way .NET developers think about and code with data. So, to finally be able to use these powerful coding constructs with the Visual Studio debugger is a match made in Redmond. But wait. There's more! The new expression evaluators (the language-specific components that enable you to run snippets of code in various debugger contex...
New Language Features in Visual Basic 14
"Visual Basic 14" is the version of Visual Basic that will ship with Visual Studio 2015. In this blog post I'll talk specifically about the VB language improvements in this release. (Separately, there are a whole host of IDE and project-system improvements as well). There are two overall themes to the language improvements: (1) Make common coding patterns a little cleaner, with easy-to-grasp syntax (2) Fix up some irritating corners of the language that you probably already expected to work. This release will be easier to digest than was Visual Basic 12, with its introduction of async! (The version number of Visu...
New Language Features in Visual Basic 14 (animated)
"Visual Basic 14" is the version of Visual Basic that will ship with Visual Studio 2015. In this blog post I'll talk specifically about the VB language improvements in this release. (Separately, there are a whole host of IDE and project-system improvements as well). There are two overall themes to the language improvements: (1) Make common coding patterns a little cleaner, with easy-to-grasp syntax (2) Fix up some irritating corners of the language that you probably already expected to work. This release will be easier to digest than was Visual Basic 12, with its introduction of async! (The version number of Visu...
Post-Release Goodies
The Rosetta lander Philae wasn't the only thing in space last week. Our launch of Visual Studio 2015 Preview and our announcement to open source the full .NET server stack were out of this world. After all, it’s not every day that you can say your work trended higher than Kim Kardashian on Twitter. After an overwhelmingly positive reception to the news of .NET going open source, we want to make sure you know how and where to contribute. The .NET Core repository already has closed about 80 pull-requests (with the majority being merged) and there are some great community efforts going on right now. Here are...
Short Videos Demonstrating What’s New in Visual Studio 2015 Preview for C#, VB, and F#
Our team has put together a set of short videos to highlight some of our work in Visual Studio 2015 Preview. Check them out to learn more about what’s new in C# and VB, how F# can be good for enterprise, and how to improve your code quality with “analyzers”. To learn more about our team’s work in Visual Studio 2015 Preview, check out our overview post. Over 'n' out Kasey Uhlenhuth, Program Manager, Managed Languages Team
Introducing the Visual Studio 2015 Preview for VB and C#
Download Visual Studio 2015 Preview and review the release notes. Over the past several years, our team has been hard at work re-implementing the full language stacks for Visual Basic and C#. While this was a long investment, we knew that an improved stack with a cleaner architecture would allow our team to work faster, empower others to build "code smart" tools and applications, and create a richer and smarter IDE experience in Visual Studio. Today, we are pleased to announce that this work has culminated with the release of Visual Studio 2015 Preview. Visual Studio 2015 Preview showcases many improvements&mdash...
.NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") for the Rest of Us
WOW! It’s been a while -- almost exactly 4 years since yours truly, Beth Massi, last posted on the VB Team blog (although it’s cool to see I’m still in the tag cloud ;-)). I’m honored to be a special guest post today. If you’ve been reading this team blog I’m sure you know by now that the .NET Compiler Platform (code named "Roslyn") is the next generation of the Visual Basic and C# .NET compilers. But what does that mean? I was up in Redmond a couple weeks ago and I caught up with Dustin Campbell (Program Manager on the Managed Languages Team) and sat him down to explain Roslyn to me, a .NET dev...
VB Universal Windows App: downloads
Here are download links for the "VB Universal Windows App" series: App1.vb This is the minimal VB universal app that we'll build in this blog series. Breakout Universal This is a complete game, based upon all the principles that were covered in the blog series. How Do I video series -- Lucian
VB Universal Windows App Part 5: calling into platform-specific APIs from PCL
This is Part 5 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: So far we've been able to re-use all our code and XAML by placing them in the PCL. Actually, PCLs can only ever contain calls to APIs that are common to the platforms they target. This generally isn't a problem, because most APIs on Windows also exist on Windows Phone, and vice versa. Today we'll explore how to call platform--specific APIs from Common code. In particular, we'll make it so our common main page can hide the Windows Phone statusbar (with connection quality, battery, clock) - when it's running on Windows Phone, of course. Ther...
VB Universal Windows App Part 4: using SharpDX for sound effects
This is Part 4 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: So far we've built a solid app, sharing as much code and XAML as possible by placing it in our PCL. For today's post we'll continue the process, adding game-quality sound effects to our app. SharpDX is the best way to do this. Please bear with me. This is a long technical post, because playing game-like audio is a technically involved low-level task. The video lasts 3 minutes, and you should watch it first before returning to read the rest of this post, in which I’ll explain the why as well as the how. I wish audio wer...
VB Universal Windows App Part 3 (for the end-user): roaming settings, and in-app purchases
This is Part 3 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: In the first two parts we set up a VS Solution that helped us to share between our two app projects. In this post, we're going to code in the user-facing benefits of universal Windows apps. From an end-user perspective, the benefit of universal Windows apps is that (1) if you buy the app in one store then it counts as bought in both, (2) if you buy a durable in-app purchase on one device then it counts as bought on both, (3) settings will roam between the Windows and Windows Phone versions of an app. The first part (buy the app in one sto...
VB Universal Windows App Part 2 (for the developer): sharing XAML, Assets and Code
This is Part 2 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: In Part 1 we set ourselves up by registering the app in the two Dev Centers, and by creating the basic structure in Solution Explorer. In Part 2 today, we're going to share! From a developer perspective, the benefit of universal Windows apps is in sharing as much as possible between the two projects you have to build. Let's step back and see what can be re-used... Sharing XAML For our simple game, we're going to re-use a single XAML page and code-behind between Windows and Windows Phone versions of the app. That's...
VB Universal Windows App Part 1: Getting Started
This is Part 1 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: Recently in April 2014, Microsoft announced Universal Windows Apps. I thought I'd take an old Silverlight paddle game and turn it into a VB Universal Windows App. Here's how the finished game looks, on devices and in the stores: What is a Universal Windows App? A "universal Windows app" is a great end-user experience. It means the user of your app can buy the app on Phone, say, and it counts as purchased on Store as well. The user can make an in-app purchase on one device and it counts as purchased on the other. The user...
Visual Studio “14” CTP Now Available
As announced today by Soma, we've just released the first CTP (Community Technology Preview) of the next version of Visual Studio. This is doubly-exciting as this is the first public release of a version of Visual Studio powered by "Roslyn" by default. At BUILD we released the "Roslyn" End User Preview which extends Visual Studio 2013 by replacing some components with their "Roslyn" equivalents but this version of Visual Studio is built from the ground up on "Roslyn" with "Roslyn". The Visual Studio "14" CTP includes new and improved language and IDE features for Visual Basic such as multiline strings and a fu...
Edit and Continue survey results
Thanks everybody for all the great feedback! We've received hundreds of replies since last week with detailed information and concrete examples for us to review. We are closing the survey today and have started to process the tons of data you have provided. The overwhelming majority of you have told us that Edit and Continue is important and you'd like us to make it even better. We asked of the scenarios we'd identified where Edit and Continue is disallowed today how many of you were impacted by which restrictions and here's what you said: As you can see the most frequently reported ...
TechEd: "The Future of Visual Basic and C#" Video Now Available Online!
If you didn't get a change to make it to TechEd this year, fret not, we got it all on video for your viewing pleasure. Join Principal Program Managers Dustin Campbell and Mads Torgersen as they give you the inside scoop on the future of VB and C#. You'll learn about: And better than just showing off all of these cool features you can get your hands on many of them today with today with the "Roslyn" End-User Preview. This preview includes the new code editing experience we're building for VB and C# as well as a smattering of new language features and a preview of the "Roslyn" APIs. If you haven't had a ch...
Help make Edit and Continue better!
UPDATE 2014-05-20: We've received enough responses and the survey is now closed. Thanks everyone! Hey VB developers! Do you get tired of seeing this box (I know I do)? Tell us about it! The Visual Studio team would like your anonymous feedback on improving Edit and Continue (E&C) when developing .NET applications. This survey can take as little as 3 minutes to complete (I’ve saved you some time already by copying all the words on that page to this page so you don’t have to read it twice) and will guide ongoing support and making it work in more places. If you consider yourself a regular E&am...
*New* video series on Windows Store App development using Visual Basic on Microsoft Virtual Academy
Hey VB hackers, Microsoft Virtual Academy recently published a six-part series all about building modern apps for the Windows Store using your favorite language and staring Visual Basic MVP Bill Burrows and yours truly :) Microsoft Virtual Academy is a free service available to anyone to sharpen their skills and learn the latest and greatest technologies. In this series we talk about some of the fundamentals of making applications which take full advantage of all Windows 8 and 8.1 have to offer to create “fast and fluid” experiences for your users as well as how to use new language features added to ...
QuickVB Goes Open Source!
Yesterday we published a copy of a fun “Roslyn”-powered retro editor for Visual Basic called QuickVB in honor of the 50th birthday of BASIC. We thought this was a neat application to showcase our love of BASIC but since then we’ve realized that it’s also a great example of how to put the power of the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”) APIs to use.In the spirit of openness we’ve decided to open source QuickVB as a sample project on CodePlex so that others may tinker with it and learn from it.Have fun!Alex Turner, Ian Halliday, Anthony D. Green on behalf of the Managed Langu...
Happy 50th Birthday, BASIC!
UPDATE: QuickVB is now open source! The Visual Basic team joins Dartmouth and developers worldwide whose lives have been touched by this amazing language in wishing Dartmouth BASIC (and indeed the whole BASIC family of languages) a very happy 50th birthday (and many more) today! So many of us here on the Managed Languages team got our start with one dialect of BASIC or another we couldn’t help but put together something to show our nostalgia and affection for our roots. In homage to grandpa BASIC’s 50th we give you: QuickVB. QuickVB is powered by the .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") NuGet packages...
Visualizing Roslyn Syntax Trees
Hello everyone! I hope you had a chance to catch the recent announcements around the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”). If not, I encourage you to view Anders’s presentation at Build 2014 (skip to 1:10:28). If you haven’t already, download the previews and take them for a spin! What’s included? The Roslyn compiler codebase is now open source. Check out Matt’s recent post for details around how to enlist in the open source project and modify the compiler. In addition to the End User Preview that Matt discussed at the beginning of his post, we are also releasing an SDK Preview. The End User Preview allows you to ...
Taking a tour of Roslyn
It’s a big day for us on the Managed Languages team! As announced at the //BUILD conference earlier today, and as posted by Soma on his blog, we are not just delivering a new preview of Roslyn to all of you, but are in fact moving all of the compiler code to open source! The code will be released and maintained by MS Open Tech, who are our partners in this endeavor. The goal of open-sourcing the compilers is something that we’ve been working towards for just over a year, and we’re really excited that it’s finally time to make the “big reveal.” (Best of all, we no longer have to try to keep a poker face every tim...
Roslyn performance (Matt Gertz)
(For the next few posts, I’m going to introduce readers to the different feature teams in the Managed Languages org. Today, I’m starting this with a focus on the performance team.)Back in 2000, I found myself assigned to be the performance lead of the Visual Basic team, and my first assigned goal was to drive the performance marks of the (then) forthcoming Visual Basic .NET to be in line with the numbers for Visual Basic 6.0. The primary focus was on the VB runtime APIs at first. That was a relatively simple task; APIs are nicely discrete bits of code, easy to measure and easy to eva...
Updated license for September 2012 Roslyn preview available (MattGe)
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, we ended up with a little too much time between previews, to our subsequent embarrassment. In fact, it came to our attention recently that the licensing for the most “recent” CTP (and admittedly I use the term “recent” loosely, given that it was released in September 2012) is set to expire on January 1st, 2014. We don’t really want to reopen a 15-month-old deliverable to update the license, particularly when the code involved is completely out-of-date and we’re working on a plan to resume previews anyway (as I also menti...
Throwing the Big Switch on Roslyn (Matt Gertz, VS Managed Languages Development Manager)
So, the entryway to my house has eight light switches along the wall. Two of them control the porch lights, and another two work the same entryway light (despite the switches being only a couple of feet apart). I haven’t the foggiest idea what the rest of the switches do. I’ve been scared to try them out, actually. (I worry that one day I’ll accidentally throw one of them and find out later that my couch is missing or something odd like that.) However, I am pleased to announce that we’ve turned on quite a different switch here on the Managed Languages team, with ve...
No new VB and C# Language Features in VS 2013
As you can see in the VS2013 Preview, we have not added new language features to Visual Basic and C# in the next version of Visual Studio. I’d like to share our thinking on this. There are essentially two main reasons why we chose not to evolve the languages this time around.The most important is that we just shipped new versions of these two languages less than a year ago, with support for asynchrony being a major new and impactful language feature in both. Developers are still learning how to integrate and benefit from the asynchrony shift in languages and APIs. We are very excited about the quicker pace ...
Roslyn September 2012 CTP Available for Download!
VB Enthusiasts,Following last Wednesday’s official launch of Visual Studio 2012, we’re excited to announce that the Roslyn September 2012 CTP is now available for download and provides support for VS 2012 RTM. Please note that Visual Studio 2010 is no longer supported by this CTP.We’ve been hard at work since the first public release of Roslyn adding support for new language features and improving our APIs. In addition, we’ve also updated our NuGet packages to match the September 2012 CTP.As always, your feedback is critical! Please get involved in the discussion on the Roslyn forum, file ...
Install Published Samples with Visual Studio
You can use Visual Studio 2012 RC to download and install samples from the MSDN Code Gallery. You can download only the samples you need, or you can download one or more Sample Packs, which group several samples that relate to a technology or topic. You'll receive a notification if source code changes are published for any sample that you download.To locate the samples, open the New Project dialog, and then expand the Online tab, and then the Samples node.To locate the sample packs, choose Tools, Extensions and Updates on the menu bar. In the Extensions and Updates dialog box, expand the Online tab, a...
More VB Metro Samples available
With the recent release of the Windows 8 Release Preview and the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate we also have more of the Metro samples available for VB developers.Although not all the samples are available for VB, there is a good selection of samples showing you how utilize much of the important functionality now available. More samples will be made available as the all the products move towards their final RTM relase.Spotty ResourcesWindows 8 Release Preview - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/release-previewVisual Studio 2012 RC - http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/...
Announcing Microsoft “Roslyn” June 2012 CTP
Hey, fellow VBs,Today, we're excited to announce that the Roslyn June 2012 CTP is now available for download!Since the first public release of Roslyn, we’ve been hard at work implementing new language features, addressing top customer feedback from the October CTP, iterating on our API design and improving performance across our IDE and compiler scenarios. With the recent release of Visual Studio 2012 RC, we have updated the Roslyn CTP to work with Visual Studio 2012 RC. There’s never been a better time to grab the VS 2012 RC and the Roslyn CTP!You can find an in-depth look at what’s...
Kinect SDK v1.5 – Now with VB Samples !!!
As developers start to realize the full potential of Microsoft Kinect and new hardware is made available for the PC it’s really great to see the Kinect team provide some sample support for VB developers. For a while the Compilers team (who handle both VB and C# compilers) have been hearing VB developers asking for content on new technologies and have been working with other product teams to ensure VB developers get some content in a timely manner. The Kinect team has included a “Basics” series of samples with language coverage in C++, C# and Visual Basic. Kud...
Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11, now available for .NET 4 and Silverlight 5
If you’ve held off trying Visual Studio 11 Beta because your .NET 4 or Silverlight 5 app uses the Async CTP, your wait is over!Today we’ve published the Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11, a NuGet package that lets your Visual Studio 11 projects target .NET 4 and Silverlight 5 while taking advantage of VB11's new Await keyword. While Visual Studio 11 provides built-in support for Await in projects that target .NET 4.5 or .NET for Metro style apps, this targeting pack provides the API support to expand the set of target platforms to include .NET 4 and Silverlight 5 as well.Check out o...
Visual Basic 11 Beta Available for Download!
As you may have read in Jason’s announcement, today we announced that Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download. This is a huge release for Visual Basic as it provides full platform support for building Windows 8 Metro style apps, a first-class asynchronous programming experience, and also the long-awaited Iterators feature. And in the true spirit of VB, you’ll see a ton of other improvements that will make you more productive every day. AsyncAs the world moves to mobile phones and tablets, the demand for responsiveness in today’s applications is higher than ever...
New VB XNA Sample – showing Xbox, Windows and Phone targetting
For all those who have started venturing into developing windows phone applications, there are quite a few samples utilizing Silverlight, but the XNA content has been a little bit light. (We are working on getting some more XNA VB samples online). But for those wanting to see a nice VB example of XNA development, the Blackjack sample written in VB is now online. This sample shows a single application which has been written to target all three of the XNA platforms (windows, XBox 360 and windows Phone) with a simple game that is easy to follow the code.http://crea...
VB Support for Microsoft Surface 2.0
Touch screen are great and we’ve seen their use on phone and slates but sometimes these screens still just are not big enough. For those who desire bigger touch screens, Microsoft surface may be the answer. Microsoft surface has been around a while and there have been significant changes with version 2.0. Version 2.0 introduces new functionality and support for more compact hardware. A glance at the Microsoft Surface team web site reveals some incredibly interesting uses for the technology.The samples provided are a great introduc...
Roslyn Syntax Visualizers
Hi All! A few weeks ago, we announced the Microsoft "Roslyn" CTP. I hope many of you have had a chance to download the CTP and take it for a spin :) If you haven’t, do give it a try. To recap – in the Roslyn CTP, we are previewing a powerful set of language services APIs that you can use within your apps to reason about VB and C# code. We are also previewing IDE extensibility points for VB and C# that will allow you to build rich code refactorings, quick fixes etc. that run inside Visual Studio. In this post, I just wanted to point out a couple of tools that you may be interested in if you are worki...
Putting back functionality left out of VB Core – ( If you can't live without Mid when writing WP7 apps ;-) )
For development of windows phone applications a new feature was added to the Visual Basic compiler known as VB Core. This is a reduced version of the runtime designed to allow development for a broader variety of platforms without incurring the larger penalty of having a full VB runtime containing non-supported or older VB6 legacy functionality which are now implemented as part of the framework itself. However this results in some features not being supported on this platform such as Late binding, My functionality and somelegacy VB functions. You may not be targeting WP7 yet but this reduced runtime is also being...
Halloween: VB Style!
Imagine this. It’s Halloween. You’ve got a costume party to go to at 7 but there’s one small hiccup – you’ve got no costume. As a VB programmer you’re used to coming up with nick-of-time solutions to all manner of complex business problems but all your coding skills won’t help you now. After all, you can’t just code up a costume – or can you? Here’s a little number I cooked up two years ago (before I joined the Developer Ghouls division at Microsoft) called the Opensourus Hex costume. First, make up a short but interesting VB program and write it out (i...
Introducing the Microsoft "Roslyn" CTP
(Begin dramatic movie trailer music, slow PowerPoint slide show with cliché sound effects) OK, maybe I have a flair for the dramatic but that’s because today is such a dramatically exciting day. After years of foreshadowing, and mentioning, and updating on our part I’m thrilled to announce on behalf of the united Visual Basic & C# Languages Team the availability of the Microsoft “Roslyn” CTP. This early preview represents an incredible milestone for us in a years-long process of bootstrapping both languages and providing a rich set of APIs exposing a host of compiler anal...
Announcement: Namespace Global
There’s a new feature coming to VB, and already included in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. The feature is called Namespace Global and it’ll make your life easier… The MSDN reference on namespaces (including Namespace Global) is here: Namespaces in Visual Basic. As an aside, I’d like to thank Shimmy Wietzhandler for requesting this feature in Microsoft Connect, and also the people who emailed or who wrote in with comments to Lucian Wischik’s VB language-design blog. It’s from user feedback like these that we decide which features to prioritize. For the future...
Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: Visual Basic (VB) Call Hierarchy
By Zain Naboulsi (Blog) Default: CTRL + ALT + K Menu: View | Call Hierarchy Command: View.CallHierarchy; EditorContextMenus.CodeWindow.ViewCallHierarchy Versions: Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview Languages: VB With the announcement of the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview it’s time to take a look at some of the features you can start using with our latest version of the IDE right away. If you are already familiar with the C++/C# Call Hierarchy feature from my previous blog post then you are already familiar with the features and may just want to start playing with this on your own. Fo...
Dynamics CRM 2011 Developer Training Kit – Updated with VB Source
An update to the training kit has been made providing Visual Basic developers with sample code for the development features of Dynamics CRM and help them build applications using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and CRM Online.Download available athttp://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=23416
Updated Samples for WP7 Developers
For those VB developers who are developing (or keen to start developing) for WIndows Phone 7. The samples have been updated and as you'll notice virtually all of them are in both C# and VB.http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431744(VS.92).aspx
New Async Programming Video's
Some great new video's on MSDN showing how to do async programming using the Async CTP. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh378091.aspx There are different versions of video's for both VB and C#. This is a great opportunity to see the power of the new Async languages featuresand follow through a series of examples showing how easy it is to use the new feature. Also, the MSDN forums have one specifically dedicated to the Async CTP which compilers team member are monitoring to help answer any questions. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/async/threads [Update] Code Samples ...
Temperature Monitoring using VB.Net, Micro-framework and a Netduino
Introduction As a bit of a geek, I like to tinker with basic gadgets. I often think of little ideas that would be great to implement but the device involves some hardware and very little software. As a software engineer I tend to think in terms of simple programs to but in order to implement something tangible would involve electronics and the interface between embedded electronics and high level languages such as VB or C# is somewhat disconnected. For a long time much of the embedded devices was coded using low level languages such as assembler and the prospect of going back to write assembler or getting...
Kinect SDK For PC – VB Samples available.
Today, Microsoft announced the Kinect SDK for PC http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/download.aspx VB Samples are there at launch and available for downloading http://files.ch9.ms/coding4fun/KinectSDKSamplesVB.zip
Micro-framework v4.2 Support for Visual Basic
The release of .NET Micro framework v4.2 Beta brings Visual Basic support for the .NET Micro-framework. For those that have not heard of the Micro framework before “The .NET Micro Framework is .NET for small and resource constrained devices. It offers a complete and innovative development and execution environment that brings the productivity of modern computing tools to this class of devices.For current .NET developers, this means that they can now create applications that run on a range of devices from targeted devices like remote controls to PCs and Servers and on to the cloud &nd...
VB Support for the XNA platform
With the release of the Mango Toolset, Visual Basic support for XNA and Windows Phone has now been added. VB resources include VB XNA documentation and VB WP7 code samples and starter kits and this post is intended to walk you through some of the steps in creating a simple XNA application for Windows Phone 7 using VB. What is XNA? Microsoft XNA is the development framework and tools used to create application for the Xbox 360 / Desktop PC and also the windows Phone 7. It provides access to build managed game type applications. The goal as with any framework is to avoid the developer having to ...
Happy 20th Birthday Visual Basic!
Twenty years ago, May 20th, 1991 at Windows World, in Atlanta, Microsoft founder Bill Gates demoed Visual Basic 1.0. Twenty years later, the 10th version of this latest in an unbroken line of Microsoft BASIC languages stretching back to Microsoft’s founding is still going strong. When you look back over the history of a tool that’s been around that long you start to see some familiar experiences from Wetware products (commonly called children :P ): The cute and cuddly days of its youth, in the 16-bit era; the awkward teen years and the transition to .NET; sibling rivalry with the new baby (C...
Simultaneous Async Tasks (Alan Berman)
The new Async feature in the Visual Studio Async CTP (SP1 Refresh) provides an elegantly simple technique to make code asynchronous.Our writing team uses an internal app that would benefit from asynchronous calls. For each URL contained in the MSDN documentation that we publish, the app lists the title from the link, and the title parsed from HTML in the downloaded web page. We use the app to verify that URL links are valid.The following example is a very simplified version of the relevant code, which does synchronous reads of multiple web pages. Imports System.Net Imports System.Threading.TasksM...
The Temple of VB (Matt Gertz)
Hi, all!It's been a while since I've posted to this blog, and a lot has happened in my world since then. Though I've been pretty busy on our engineering systems team, I took a little time off last summer to do some traveling and, more importantly, some long overdue writing. Although I'd always enjoyed writing the "here's how you build this application" blog posts, I always felt that I could do a bit more with them, and so I took my favorite posts, cleaned them up, added a lot more text and pictures, and turned them into a Kindle e-book. The posts I've included and expanded on are: the Euchr...
WebMatrix Series #1: How to Create Visual Basic Websites Using WebMatrix
Microsoft WebMatrix is an exciting new product that makes the creation of custom ASP.NET Web sites possible without all the complexity of the full Visual Studio environment. WebMatrix supports web site development in both C# and Visual Basic. In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to create VB websites using Webmatrix. Before you begin, you need to have the following settings configured on your machine: You can create the Visual Basic websites using WebMatrix in the four simple steps as follows: Step 1: Select a Template Step 2: Create a Website using the Calendar Visual Basic Template Step ...
Silverlight 4 Firestarter Series #3: How to work with Panels, XAML, and Controls in Silverlight
I am back with details on how to work with Panels, XAML, and Controls in Silverlight. In this walkthrough, we will see how to work with Panels, XAML, and Controls to create a Data-Driven Silverlight Interface. During this walkthrough we will cover the following topics: Before you begin, you need to download the offline kit from the Firestarter Labs to use the existing applications. To work with Panels, XAML, and Controls follow these three simple steps: Step 1: Create a Data-Driven Interface Step 2: Create a Form Entry to edit the Interface Details Step 3: Add a Menu using the StackPanel Step 1: Create a...
Silverlight 4 Firestarter Series #2: How to migrate an ASP.NET Web Forms Application to Silverlight
In this walkthrough, I will demonstrate how to convert an existing ASP.NET/jQuery application that consumes data from a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service to Silverlight. Here are some topics that we will cover: Before you begin you need to download the offline kit from the Firestarter Labs, to use the existing applications. You can migrate an ASP.NET Web Forms application to Silverlight in three simple steps as follows: Step 1: Explore the ASP.NET Web Forms application Step 2: Migrate the ASP.NET application to Silverlight Step 3: Call a WCF Service and Bind data Step 1: Explore the ASP.NE...
Silverlight 4 Firestarter Series #1: How to migrate a Visual Basic Windows Form Application to Silverlight
In this walkthrough, I will demonstrate how to convert an existing Windows Forms application that consumes data from a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service to Silverlight. Also in the process of conversion we will ensure that the existing functionality is preserved. Here are some topics that we will cover: Before you begin you need to download the offline kit from the Firestarter Labs, to use the existing applications. You can migrate the Windows Forms application to Silverlight in three simple steps as follows: Step 1: Explore the Windows Forms Application Let’s take a look at the...
Async Feature Control Flow (Alan Berman)
What is asynchronous programming? Let's say you send out an email, then wait and do nothing for the two minutes it takes to get a response back. You do nothing while you're waiting. It's worth waiting because it'll be back fast. When that happens, sending the email and getting a response is synchronous. But another time you send an email and then forget about it and do something completely different. Three and a half hours later--while you're engrossed in activity B, Outlook pops up a message that you got your response. That's asynchronous. You don't know when the response will be received, and you don't hang aro...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #11. How to create an accelerometer for Windows Phone 7
Previously, I explained how to create a panorama and pivot effect for Windows Phone 7. In this blog post, I want to share a sample that will help you to create an accelerometer for Windows Phone 7. An accelerometer is a device that measures the proper acceleration of the device. It is a sensor that measures acceleration forces caused by moving the sensor. In this application the accelerometer feature will allow you to determine the orientation and the motion of the phone. Now I will demonstrate how to create an accelerometer for Windows Phone 7, using Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. Sounds intere...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #10. How to create a panorama and pivot effect for Windows Phone 7
Previously, I explained how to create a keyboard input scope application for Windows Phone 7. In this blog post, I want to share a sample that will help you to create a panorama and pivot effect in Windows Phone 7. A Panorama is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, or a three-dimensional model. This feature allows you to view controls, data, and services by using a long horizontal canvas that extends beyond the confines of the screen. A Pivot is a page orientation in which a rectangular page is oriented for normal viewing. It helps you to easily man...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #9. How to create a keyboard input scope application for Windows Phone 7
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #8. How to create a settings page for Windows Phone 7
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #7. How to create a Bing Maps application for Windows Phone 7
In our previous post, I explained how to create an application bar for Windows Phone 7. Bing Maps is one of the applications that is commonly used on phones these days. In this blog post, I want to share a sample that will help you to create a Bing Maps application for Windows Phone 7. This application will provide the feature to view maps in road view and aerial view. This application will also provide the zooming in and zooming out features. I will now demonstrate how easy it is to create a Bing Maps application for Windows Phone 7, using Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. The Bing Maps application...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #6. How to create an application bar for Windows Phone 7
In our last post, I explained how to create a control tilt effect application for Windows Phone 7. In this blog post, I want to share a sample that will help you to create an application bar for Windows Phone 7. This application will allow you to add the menu functionality. It also will allow you to adjust the visibility and opacity of the application bar. I will now demonstrate how easy it is to create an application bar for Windows Phone 7, using Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. The application bar can be created in 4 simple steps as follows: Prerequisites: To create the appl...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #5. How to create a control tilt effect application for Windows Phone 7
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #4. How to implement a model-view-viewmodel pattern in a Windows Phone application
In our last post, I explained how to create a custom indeterminate progress bar application for Windows Phone 7. In this blog, I want to share a sample that will help you to implement a model-view-viewmodel pattern in a Windows Phone application. A model-view-viewmodel pattern is used to separate data from the user interface. This pattern allows the developers to code data models and the designers to create user interfaces. In this sample, I will demonstrate how to create a game tracker application by implementing the model-view-viewmodel pattern. I will now demonstrate how easy it is to implement the model-view-...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #3. How to create a custom indeterminate progress bar application for Windows Phone 7
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #2. How to create a microphone application for Windows Phone 7
In our last post, I explained how to create a mini browser for Windows Phone 7. In this blog, I want to share a sample that will help you to create a microphone application for Windows Phone 7. This application will have the feature to capture audio from a microphone and then play back the captured audio. I will now demonstrate how easy it is to create a microphone application for Windows Phone 7, using Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. The microphone application can be created in 4 simple steps as follows: Prerequisites: To create the microphone application, let’s follow the 4...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #1. How to create a mini browser application for Windows Phone 7
I have experienced a lot of fun writing Windows Phone 7 applications in Visual Basic. Web browser is one of the applications that is commonly used on phones these days. In this blog post, I want to share some sample source code that will help you to create a mini browser application for Windows Phone 7. I will now demonstrate how easy it is to develop a mini browser application for Windows Phone 7, using Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. The mini browser application can be created in 3 simple steps: Before you create a mini browser application, you need to install the following applications: ...
Visual Studio is Hiring
Do you want to work on a product used by millions of developers around the world? I do! Come join me to deliver Visual Studio, the set of developer tools used across Microsoft and around the world. We have open positions available across Test, Dev and PM at varying levels on many projects across Visual Studio Professional. We’re looking for the most talented folks around to help us deliver the core parts of Visual Studio, from the Shell & IDE, languages (VB/C#/F#), packaging & setup, to our future investments in C# & VB. Here are a list of our open positions.&...
VB Core – New compilation mode in Visual Studio 2010 SP1
While most servicing releases do not include new functionality, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 introduced an important new compiler feature that enables Visual Basic to target new platforms that were not previously supported. This was mentioned in some of the initial SP1 blog posts such as Jasonz blog. This is a strategic investment by Microsoft in the future of VB. This provides VB with an increased agility in the future for new platforms to support Visual Basic. This blog provides more information about the feature; let me know if you have more questions. &nbs...
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...
Removing duplicate namespaces in XML Literals (Shyam Namboodiripad)
A common problem that one often runs into with XML literals and the LINQ to XML API is duplicate XML namespaces. Consider the following example. The code imports a default XML namespace - “hello”.Code: Imports <xmlns="hello"> Module Module1 Sub Main() Dim x = <A> <%= <B></B> %> </A> &n...
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus)
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus)It’s been a while since I wrote one of these XML cookbook entries. Here’s some info on a common problem: Really big XML files.I’m going to show you two things in this recipe. The first is a tip on reading very large XML files while still being able to use XML Axis Properties. The second is how to do make it available to LINQ queries by exposing it as IEnumerable.Reading a Large XML FileIf you’re new to working with XML, there’s something important that you need to know. That is, when you load an XML file into an in-...
Using HTML entities in XML Literals (Avner Aharoni)
One of the common use-cases of XML literals is creating HTML. However, HTML entities cannot be used in XML literals since LINQ to XML directly supports only the Data type definitions (DTD) defined in the XML 1.0 spec. You can read more about it here. The workaround is to use the Unicode representation of the entity, although it’s not as readable as the HTML entities, the output is the same. Here are two examples of HTML entities from the XHTML spec : And here is a small test program to show you can substitute the HTML entity with the Unicode representation: The output looks like this:
Channel 9 Interview: Array and Collection Initializers in Visual Basic 2010 (Beth Massi, Spotty Bowles)
I’ve written about collection initializers on my blog before, but I thought I’d catch up with the VB Team to tell me more about how they really work.In this interview Spotty Bowles, a tester on the VB Compiler team, shows us a couple of new language features: Array and Collection Initializers. He gives us insight into how they are implemented in the compiler and best practices on how to use them in our code. Additionally, he discusses how to extend Collection Initializers with your own extension methods. Channel 9 Interview: Array and Collection Initializers in Visual Basic 2010For more new Visual Bas...
Visual Basic 2010 is here!
It was a very exciting time this week, with the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. On April 12th, 5 launch events took place around the world in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, London and Las Vegas. The video from Bob Muglia’s VS 2010 Launch keynote is now available on-demand. The agenda for day was VS 2010 sessions, including Windows Development, SharePoint and Office, Dev & Test Collaboration, and Project Management. Follow the “Visual Studio 2010 Launch” tag on Channel9 for more… There are also a number of session recordings available now on The Code Project. Tim, Alexandra, and I recorded a li...
Back to the future! – New version of the VB6 InteropForms toolkit is released!!
Along with all the new goodies that we released yesterday as part of Visual Studio 2010, one additional thing we did yesterday as well is release an update to the popular interopforms toolkit. This update brings VS 2010 (and VS 2008!) support to the toolkit and fixes a smattering of reported bugs. As many of you are aware, VB6 applications are alive and well in the community and this toolkit has proven to be quite successful in helping developers evolve these apps with .net functionality. It works by allowing developers to create ActiveX controls in .net that can be...
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010
Crystal Reports has been a part of Visual Basic since 1993, and a part of Visual Studio since its first release in 2002. Crystal Reports has been a very successful component of these products. With the release of Visual Studio 2010, SAP and Microsoft have mutually decided to change how we deliver this important component to the .NET developer community going forward. Starting on Friday, April 16th, the beta version of Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 will be available as a separate download from this site. Just like when Crystal Reports was integrated into the Visual Studio installation,...
Editing XML Literals Embedded Expressions in Visual Basic 2010 (Avner Aharoni)
The implicit line continuation feature in Visual Basic 2010 provided an opportunity to improve the code editing experience in XML literals embedded expressions. In Visual Studio 2008, pressing Enter inside an embedded expression would result in the cursor being positioned to the left of the end embedded expression tag. In Visual Studio 2010, pressing Enter inserts a newline for the cursor, and the end embedded expression tag moves to the line below. This minimizes the number of key strokes needed to nicely format an embedded expression. Example 1: Pressing Enter in an empty embedded expression 1) Starting poin...
On The Blink (Matt Gertz)
One of the really fun things about being associated with the Visual Basic team is getting to see all of the varied usages to which our customers put it. From enterprise software to games, our customer base covers a wide range. The most fun to see, however, are the hobby applications, because the writers of that code come up with some pretty off-the-wall (but very cool) uses for it.Case in point: I was contacted two weeks ago by a gentleman named David Swoboda (name used with permission), who was working on a magic trick that required him to blink the LED on an old iPac smart device. He&rsq...
New Learning Resources on the Visual Basic Developer Center (Beth Massi)
Today we revamped some of the Visual Basic Developer Center Learn pages with more content that allows you to pivot on more fine-grained topics and tasks related to Visual Basic programming. We’ve started with the Introductory Topics and Language Syntax pages. To get there, head to http://msdn.com/vbasic and then click the Learn tab. There you will see a set of general topic areas to explore. If you select Introductory Topics or Language Syntax you will be taken to a new set of pages that lets you browse on more sub-topics and tasks. Select a topic from the list on the left and the content will change on...
What didn't get into VB10: a wish-list for future versions of VB
Visual Studio 2010 is almost out the door. Now is a good time to look back at what we didn't get into the language in this release, but would have wanted to, and so will consider for future releases.Over the coming weeks, each day, I'll blog on blogs.msdn.com/lucian about the ideas on our wish-list, along with our evaluation of them. We have our own thoughts about what are the priorities for the VB language. You'll have your own thoughts - please tell us!The series starts here:The Wish-List Introduction...Req0: Don't add to (or change) the languageCore1: IteratorsCore2: Inline and multi-l...
The many cases of ByRef
One of the overlooked or simply misunderstood features of the VB language is calling a function which has a ByRef parameter. Most languages support only a single method of passing parameters by reference [1], that is the scenarios directly supported by the CLR. The CLR has a lot of restrictions on the type of values it supports for ByRef parameters and these restrictions get in the way of VB’s goal to be a flexible language that strives to get out of the way of the user. Hence the compiler goes to great lengths to be flexible and support multiple avenues of ByRef passing, much beyond what the CL...
Fun With Dynamic Objects (Doug Rothaus)
A while back, I remember being asked if there was a simple way to expose a source XML document as an object with properties. That is, if the root XML element had a child element <Name>Doug</Name>, then the object would have a Name property that was a string and returned “Doug”. The catch was that the XML document did not conform to a specific schema. Hence, you could not simply create an object with a Name property, because you did not know if the source document had a <Name> element. While there are ways to expose the XML data dynamically, you couldn’t quite do what was being ...
There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Euchre! (Matt Gertz)
“Oh, no!” I hear you cry, “not another blog about Euchre!”Well, I do like the game, to be sure. But, more importantly, the Euchre scenario enables me to try out any new technologies on a reasonably complex problem (using Visual Basic, of course). It’s my way of checking out our product to make sure that it works before we ship it out to you guys. For my app building this time around, I chose to focus my energies in two areas – WPF, and Windows Mobile. Porting my Euchre game to these platforms was challenging in several different ways, and I thought that ...
Hidden Gems in VB2010 – Serializing Objects that Raise Events (Jonathan Aneja)
By now you've likely heard about the major new features coming in VB 2010, but there's also a number of smaller additions in the language and IDE that might not be as readily noticeable. "Hidden Gems" will be a multi-part series where we'll explore some of these smaller enhancements. First up - serialization! Let’s say you have a simple entity class that you need to serialize and send over the wire. This class implements INotifyPropertyChanged which contains an event. When attempting to serialize an instance of this class, if the delegate which backs the event has its Target property ...
Spot the Bug! – The Key to using Anonymous Types (Jonathan Aneja)
This one’s going to be long, but for those of you who’ve felt the first 3 in this series were too easy I promise this one’s tougher J. Let’s say you want to list all the customers from a table in a ComboBox, and update the UI based on which one is selected. To do this we’ll need to bring back two fields from the database – the customer’s name and the customer’s ID. When a customer is selected we want the ComboBox’s SelectedValue property to equal the customer’s ID. Here’s some quick code that gets us up and running (using Nort...
Spot the Bug! – Is it in VB or XAML? (Jonathan Aneja)
What’s wrong with the following WPF code? Class Window1 Sub OK_Click(sender As Object, e As RoutedEventArgs) Handles OK.Click MsgBox("Button Clicked") End Sub End Class <Window x:Class="Window1" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300"> <Grid> <Button Name="OK" Click="OK_Click">OK</Bu...
Linking Zune media items with LinQ, Part 2 (Matt Gertz)
In this post, I’ll continue on with coding the new playlist shuffler. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, I highly recommend it so that this post will make more sense. JCode for the controls (continued)The Title TextBoxWhen the title changes, we’ll want to indicate that the playlist has changed, and we’ll want to cache the change and update the menus. This is pretty simple: Private Sub edtTitle_TextChanged(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles edtTitle.TextChanged playlistTitle = edtTitle.Text...
Linking Zune media items with LinQ, Part 1 (Matt Gertz)
Way back in October 2007, I wrote up a few posts (here and here) on my experiments with the Windows Media Player object model. The problem I was trying to solve was that, when I had a playlist set to “shuffle,” WMP would break up songs that should always play together (for example, Jackson Browne’s “The Load-Out” and “Stay”, or Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” and “Total Eclipse”). In those posts, I worked around this by building my own shuffler which would emit a new randomized playlist which preserved those links, and then playing th...
Spot the Bug! – Much ado about Nothing… Part 2! (Jonathan Aneja)
In yesterday’s post we saw that the use of the wrong comparison operator with Nothing in an If block can lead to surprising results. Let’s look at a slightly different case today: Dim x As Integer = Nothing If x = Nothing Then MsgBox("A true statement - we land here") Else MsgBox("The statement is a lie - we land here")  ...
Spot the Bug! – Much Ado about Nothing… (Jonathan Aneja)
Microsoft has this neat mailing list called “Spot the Bug” where developers can send interesting snippets of code that look correct but actually have subtle bugs in them. The puzzles are a lot of fun and I’ve always thought it’d be a fun thing to try here on the team blog. Over the past year or so I’ve been keeping a list of interesting bug reports and emails where people have been tripped up by some of VB’s hidden subtleties (though admittedly many of these could apply to C# as well). The format’s gonna be a bit of an experiment – let me know if you prefer to see the answer in the same post or...
Visual Basic “How Do I” Videos
We’ve started two new “How Do I” videos series on the Visual Basic Developer Center. More to come, but here’s the latest!
Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2!
There were a lot of Microsoft announcements that happened yesterday! Many of these happened during Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the SharePoint Developers Conference (Video, Twitter). Here is the list: MSDN subscribers can download Beta 2 now! We will be opening up Beta 2 for everyone to download starting this Wednesday. In honor of VS 2010 Beta 2, we have a lot of great content prepared. The following MSDN page aggregates our VB 2010 content. We hope you will enjoy trying out the next release! We definitely look forward to hearing your feedback. Here are some places where you can contact us: Than...
I'm A VB: Lluis Franco
Website: http://geeks.ms/blogs/lfranco · How long have you been using VB?Visual Basic? Since VB 3.0, but I have been using other Basic in the 80's ;-) · What industry do you work in?Currently I work in a Financial company · How big is your development team?We're only 5 in the team, but we're a big team! · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Finantial, portfoli...
I'm A VB: Jorge Serrano, Visual Basic MVP
Website: http://geeks.ms/blogs/jorge/ · How long have you been using VB?In the University had the opportunity of use VB 1 (one floppy disk of 3 1/2 1.44 Mb). It was a little bit odd in a first moment, but a few time later I used VB 3 (7 or 8 floppy disks, I don't remember now how many) and it was a fantastic experience. In my University nobody were using VB, only Cobol, Fortran and a little bit of C and C++, but nothing of VB or Turbo Pascal or Delphi. Since then, I have been using Visual Basic always... forever. · &nbs...
I'm A VB: Earl Vella
· How long have you been using VB?9 years, hah saying it makes it look like it was yesterday. started with Basic on my father's massive ... well you cant really call something that big a 'PC'. was introduced to Visual basic 6 by a friend and was addicted to it. Just as a modern console or an addictive FPS i was cought by VB6 Then when starting Uni .net came out. Coding was now becoming easier and more powerfull than ever. · What industry do you work in?System development a...
I'm A VB: Bob Swan
· How long have you been using VB?12 years · How big is your development team?4 · Please tell us about an app that you’re working on at the moment.App used to track REO property services · What other technologies do you most commonly use?SQL Server · What do you like most about VB as a programming l...
I'm A VB: Naveed Iqbal
· How long have you been using VB?Since 1998 (VB6), its the first language I learnt. I took a free 'learn VB in 24 hours' course online during my free time in highschool · What industry do you work in?I'm a software engineer/Applied Mathematician in the relocation industry · How big is your development team?There are 6 of us, we're all VBs! · What kind of apps do you most commonly...
I'm A VB: Abbass El-Outa
Website: http://www.abbass.tk · How long have you been using VB?I have been using VB for 7 years. I started with Visual Basic 6, and 3 years later I learnt VB.net. · What industry do you work in?-Computer hardware and software maintenance. -Web Design and Windows-based software development. · How big is your development team?Only me. · What kind of apps do y...
I'm A VB: Anders Borg
Website: http://www.abiro.com · How long have you been using VB?Since 1998 I think (starting with VB6). · What industry do you work in?None in particular · How big is your development team?1 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Applications controlling hardware or doing calculations or both. · What’s the mo...
I'm A VB: Mohamed Jbeli
Website: http://www.tunisia-sat.com · How long have you been using VB?2 years · What industry do you work in?electronics · How big is your development team?6 devs · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?telecommunication monitoring · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Pix Upload...
I'm A VB: Besnik Belegu
· How long have you been using VB?Since vb 4 · What industry do you work in?Banking and Finance · How big is your development team?2 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I developed a lot of apps and solutions. I have an SMS banking solution that's currently working made on VB9. I am working on an Internet Banking solution also on VB9. · &nbs...
I'm A VB: Daniel Rolfe
· How long have you been using VB?I have been using VB since version 4.. too long ago to remember. I started out building basic form widgets, familiarizing myself with all the controls. · What industry do you work in?I am a solutions developer at a Collection Agency. · How big is your development team?Three, me myself and I ;) · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I...
I'm A VB: Gaurav Khanna
Website: http://gauravkhanna.blog.co.in · How long have you been using VB?My first language was VB6 in 2001 and working on VB.NET since it's first release · What industry do you work in?Software development and consulting · How big is your development team?A small team of 4 developers · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Window Applications, ASP.NET Applications, WCF &am...
I'm A VB: Kenneth Wong
· How long have you been using VB?8 years · What industry do you work in?Portal, Financial Consolidation and ERP · How big is your development team?8-10 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?windows and asp.net · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Financial Consolidation ·&nb...
I'm A VB: Lieutenant Commander Mohd Nazri Mohamed Nasir (R)
Website: http://www.GuidedMissileDesign.com · How long have you been using VB?12 years · What industry do you work in?Programming in Military Engineering Design. · How big is your development team?5 to 10 personal · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Application and Database. · What’s the most interesting ap...
I'm A VB: Greg Rothlander
Website: http://www.pbsilink.com · How long have you been using VB?Since around 1998. I think I started with VB3. · What industry do you work in?Consulting · How big is your development team?We are an R&D team with 3 core software developers and an additional 3 to 5 developers that are involved part time and as needed. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?...
I'm A VB: Macario F. Pedraza
Website: http://mfpedraza.wordpress.com/ · How long have you been using VB?Since 1993, starting with VB3, but used QuickBasic before that and started programming in BASIC in 1981 (yeah I know, I'm old) · What industry do you work in?Software Development · How big is your development team?8 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Mostly infrastructure/framework apps, anythin...
I'm A VB: Ryan Hollings
· How long have you been using VB?1 year · What industry do you work in?Land surveyor · How big is your development team?1 person - ME! · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?If anything needs a quicker way to do something I build an app, generally ones to speed up processing in land surveying, currently working on an app to process GSI files ·  ...
I'm A VB: Raja Venkatesh Ramasamy
Website: http://www.rajavenkatesh.com · How long have you been using VB?Since 1995. · What industry do you work in?Currently Banking · How big is your development team?70 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web service · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Linq to Entity debug visualize...
I'm A VB: Andrew Turner
· How long have you been using VB?3 Years · What industry do you work in?Gaming and Windows Development · How big is your development team?Just me :( · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Apps to make stuff and help everyday life. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?I have made a shoppi...
I'm A VB: Shahriyar Yazdipour
Website: http://shery1.web.officelive.com · How long have you been using VB?about 3 years · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Smart Device · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Windows For other interviews in this series, please visit http://imavb.net.
I'm A VB: Ignacio Alvarez N.
· How long have you been using VB?6 years · What industry do you work in?Software Development oriented to ASP.NET Web Applications · How big is your development team?7 people · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web applications with Ajax and third party components like DevExpress and MSSQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 Database Engine. · ...
I'm A VB: Josselin Jouannet
Website: http://www.josselinjouannet.com · How long have you been using VB? 10 years · What industry do you work in? Telecomunication Aerospace industry · How big is your development team? 3-5 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Windows forms and web forms · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built? Gps tracking beacon ...
I'm A VB: Diego Cattaruzza, Visual Basic MVP
Website: http://community.visual-basic.it/Diegohttp://www.visual-basic.it · How long have you been using VB?since version 4.0 (1995) · What industry do you work in?Public Administration (City od Trieste) · How big is your development team?1 person (myself) · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Access, Excel, Word little application to substitute big application...
I'm A VB: Carlos Ferreira
Website: http://www.flash.i.ph/ · How long have you been using VB?8 years ago I started using VB6.. I have programmed with VB.NET 2002/2005 and I am currently programming with 2008. · What industry do you work in?I work in the Telecommunications Industry · How big is your development team?2 developers (me and my boss..) · What kind of apps do you most commonly bu...
I'm A VB: Yelinna Pulliti Carrasco
Website: http://toyscaos.tripod.com · How long have you been using VB?I started with a VB6 course I took in 2000 during two weeks and I played with it during few months. Then I left it until 2006, when I took a free short VB6 course at university. Then I left it until mid 2007 because our thesis project is made in advanced VB6 (at that time I just knew the very basics). Since then, I haven't left it again ;) · What industry do you work in?I work in an enterprise of security for documents, access ...
I'm A VB: Charlie Mun (whitebono)
Website: http://www.vbholic.co.tv/ · How long have you been using VB?almost two years · What industry do you work in?I'm a Student... and 17 years old. I'm not working for industry... · How big is your development team?Only me(?) Cause, I'm developing by myself. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web-browser, Calculator, Note-pad, Games and Security Program which...
I'm A VB: Usman Ahmed
Website: http://usmanahmed.info/blog · How long have you been using VB?6 years · What industry do you work in?Web Development · How big is your development team?11 developers · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Rich Internet Applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?RIA for web servi...
I'm A VB: Mohammed Mujtaba Siraj
· How long have you been using VB?Since 1994 · What industry do you work in?Information Technology · How big is your development team?3 member · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Data driven web applications and desktop applications. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?SQL Script Patc...
I'm A VB: Essam, Binzghayo
Website: http://www.Leaderstechnology.com · How long have you been using VB?since 1999 i have started writting applications by using my lovely language VB · What industry do you work in?Information Technology software house (EBLA) · How big is your development team?more than 20 persons · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows Applications (Database systems...
I'm A VB: John Kotronis
· How long have you been using VB?Since VB 6 begun · What industry do you work in?Hotels, Insurances, Databases, IT, ERP, CRM · How big is your development team?1 to 10 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?WinForm application · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Dynamic ERP that is divi...
I'm A VB: Jung Hwan, Woo.
Website: http://www.jumptovb.net · How long have you been using VB? 10 Years · What industry do you work in? Entertainment · How big is your development team? 20 peoples · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Web, Windows, Windows Mobile Applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built? Mobile + Web & Windows Applicat...
I'm A VB: Jabbar
· How long have you been using VB?9 Years · What industry do you work in?SCADA And Programing · How big is your development team?9 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?e-Systems · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Laptop tracking system (AsseTrax) · &...
I'm A VB: Brian Bierie
· How long have you been using VB? I started off with Access 03 back in 1994 and moved into Visual Studio just last year when it was suggested to me. · What industry do you work in? I work in the Emergency Communications Area. We handle many hospital calls for security, in-house emergencies, Air and ground patient and scene responses, and most of the different types of hospital responses including engineering and housekeeping, and HAZ-MAT. ·  ...
I'm A VB: Ejaz Lateef
Website: WWW.TAKAFUL.COM.PK · How long have you been using VB?LAST 6 YEARS · What industry do you work in?IT · How big is your development team?20 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?ERP,INSURANCE,ACCOUNT · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?ACCOUNT,INSURANCE,ERP · &nb...
I'm A VB: Ali Bidar
Website: http://www.alibidar.com · How long have you been using VB?4 years · What industry do you work in?web developing · How big is your development team?i work alone , all works is on me. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?CMS systems , and News services. · What’s the most interesting app y...
I'm A VB: Sven Knoch
Website: http://www.divinglog.de · How long have you been using VB?Since 1996 · What industry do you work in?Software Developer · How big is your development team?1 (myself) · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?My main application, a logbook software for scuba divers. People can log their dives, download data from their dive computer and create their own printouts for th...
I'm A VB: Imran Khan
· How long have you been using VB?5 years · What industry do you work in?Accounts, Procurement, Payroll, Management Systems. · How big is your development team?more than 30 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Accounts Based · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Insurance Accounting System&nbs...
I'm A VB: Mike Hillman
Website: http://www.mikehillman.com · How long have you been using VB?18 years · What industry do you work in?IT Consulting · How big is your development team?1 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?N-Tier Client Server WinForm applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever buil...
I'm A VB: Michael Parker
Website: www.ece.rutgers.edu/~maparker · How long have you been using VB? I have used VB since2003 for scientific applications in the laboratory. Up until about 1994, I had primarily used the 'structured languages' (and assemly) and decided it was time for an update after a 10 year hiatus. · What industry do you work in? The education related areas for the engineering/physics of optoelectronics, device fabrication, and quantum devices/processes for optical computing and communication. · ...
I'm A VB: Oscar Martin
Website: www.oscarmartin.org · How long have you been using VB?More than 10 years For other interviews in this series, please visit http://imavb.net.
I'm A VB: Michael Becht
Website: http://cracklinhot.com · How long have you been using VB?I think it was VB.3 that I started with. As I recall you weren't even able to connect to a DB back then. Its amazing how much I've had to discard over the years as VB evolved into its current rendition. · What industry do you work in?I'm currently unemployed because of the downturn of the automotive industry. Things are xtra-tuff here in Michigan. · ...
I'm A VB: Frank Buchan
Website: http://frankbuchan.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?Since about 1992, I believe, though I recall playing with something even earlier. · What industry do you work in?My company provides highly integrated operational risk management software for enterprises ranging from oil & gas, to manufacturing, to soft services. · How big is your development team?It varies depending on the build cycle, since I tend to hire co...
I'm A VB: Júlio Ködel
· How long have you been using VB?BASIC since 1986, Visual Basic since 1995. · What industry do you work in?(Really) Generic Software Development · How big is your development team?Around 4 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Development frameworks, as a back-office (like services) or critical solutions (performance, for example) · &nb...
I'm A VB: Luke Burri
· How long have you been using VB? for 7 Years · What industry do you work in? Library Systems · How big is your development team? 2 Persons · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Windows Database Applications, WebServices · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built? Client / Server A...
I'm A VB: Dattaprasad Kulkarni
Website: http://getdotnet.wordpress.com · How long have you been using VB?I am using VB.NET since last 3 years, have used Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 as well. · What industry do you work in?I've worked with Healthcare Domain before, and these days I am working on custom software development. · How big is your development team?We've 10 developers in the team. · &nb...
How do I deploy an application and its prerequisites? (Mary Lee)
Let me count the ways: xcopy, ClickOnce, Windows Installer (.msi), Windows Installer XML, Group Policy, Active Directory, Systems Management Service or System Center Configuration Manager, login scripts, CD, USB drive, and many more third-party software options. Despite the many options, one common requirement is that applications typically have prerequisites to install before the application can run. Prerequisites can include the .NET Framework, Visual Basic PowerPacks, SQL Server Express, Windows Installer, runtime libraries, or maybe even a custom prerequisite. There are three concepts in deployment r...
I'm A VB: Mohammadhani Toutounchi
Website: http://honeyos.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?10 years · What industry do you work in?Software Consulting.E-Comerce(Forex) · How big is your development team?3 Engineers · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?OpenSource And Mono Development As a consultant, I get called upon to build a pretty broad variety of things. ·  ...
I'm A VB: Ambarish Joglekar
· How long have you been using VB?6 Years · What industry do you work in?Software Consulting.IT · How big is your development team?10 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web Portals, B2B Apps As a consultant, I get called upon to build a pretty broad variety of things. · What’s the most interesting app you...
Getting Loopy (Matt Gertz)
In my last post, I talked about the hidden costs that can occur whenever you call out to methods, particularly in loops. In looking at my examples, reader KG2V commented that another thing that folks need to be aware of is avoiding the assumption that the world (or, in this case, a list) is a static thing. It’s a good point and it deserves some attention, particularly given that different languages will react in different ways to change.To illustrate this point, let’s assume that we have a form with a ListBox on it, and that we also have a button on the form that, when clicked, runs the fo...
Hidden Costs (Matt Gertz)
(Note: there was a grievous error in this post based on a bad assumption on my art regarding VB. Not feeling the need to hide my ignorance :-), I have instead made a number of edits in this post to bring it back to some semblance of reality.)One thing that gets me annoyed with myself is realizing that the product or service I’ve just bought has some hidden costs that I didn’t anticipate. It might be as complicated as realizing that my plane ticket has all sorts of byzantine surcharges and luggage costs, or as simple as making budgeting for a new killer gaming PC and forgetting about the sa...
Free SQL Server 2008 Express How-To-Guide Series
Thanks to the SQL Server Team we just released a free SQL Server 2008 Express How-To-Guide Series on msdev.com. During the next weeks we’ll also integrating parts of the series into the Visual Basic Developer Center, C# Developer Center, the Beginner Developer Learning Center, etc.One video of the series: How do I query data in a database?Given the fact that we don’t have unlimited resources (yeah, I know… that was the biggest surprise for me as well when I started working at Microsoft. “Where are all the bags with money standing around in each corner? What? There are none? D’oh!&rd...
Testing Events for Nothing/Null (Doug Rothaus)
While helping some Windows API folks with some sample code this week, I stumbled upon...uh...I mean “carefully researched” an issue that you might find handy.You may be aware that the RaiseEvent statement automatically checks to verify if an event handler exists before raising the event. If the event is Nothing, then there’s no event handler and RaiseEvent terminates. If the event is not Nothing, then RaiseEvent triggers the event.However, what if you want to follow a different code path if the event is Nothing? Unfortunately, the RaiseEvent statement doesn’t return a value that could indi...
Properties vs Fields – Why Does it Matter? (Jonathan Aneja)
The other day I got an email from a developer asking an interesting question about VB10’s Auto-implemented Properties feature. “I am, however, somewhat confused regarding the properties feature you mentioned - i.e. turning 11 lines of get/set/backing variable into one line. Wouldn't this be exactly the same as the existing functionality of creating a public variable? I see no benefit for using a property in this case, except perhaps for the sake of what some would consider best practice.” On the surface there doesn’t seem to be a big difference between this: Public Property Name() As String And this: P...
It’s a Small World, After All, part 2 – VB, C#, and GPS (Matt Gertz)
In my previous post, we fixed up a C# GPS library to provide more support, and wrote all of the UI for a VB GPS application, all based on (but modified from) a Mobile GPS sample in the Windows Mobile 6.0 SDK. In this post, we’ll finish up the app by enabling a bunch of cool functionality not exposed in the original sample.The C# sample uses a helper function called UpdateData – I will too (as noted above), except that the code is going to deviate significantly. We’ll start out by checking is the GPS is actually running, just in case we called outside of an event: Pr...
It’s a Small World, After All, part 1 – VB, C#, and GPS (Matt Gertz)
The title of this blog post has sort of a triple meaning for me. First of all, I just got back from a long (and wonderful!) cruise in the Caribbean, followed by a stop at Disney World. And of course, if you go to Disney World with kids, it’s the law that you have to go through the “It’s a Small World” ride, thereby having the accompanying song burned into your brain for the next six months.Secondly, “It’s a Small World” also reminds me of how new technologies are bringing us closer together. It’s amazing to me that I can do a full presentation in (...
I'm A VB: Juan Rafael
Website: http://juanrafael.wordpress.com · How long have you been using VB?7 years (7 años) · What industry do you work in?Software Company - ISV (Compañia de Software – ISV) · How big is your development team?I work in a development team that creates large solutions for several countries of the Andean region. (Equipo de desarrollo grande para soluciones en varios países de la regi&oacu...
I'm A VB: Hassan SadeghiOrang
· How long have you been using VB?7 years · What industry do you work in?Software Development · How big is your development team?5 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows applications and web applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?SAF ·  ...
I'm A VB: Anup Warade
· How long have you been using VB?7 years · What industry do you work in?IT · How big is your development team?5 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web products, portals. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Most are related to ERP, banking, web services, portals and products. ·...
I'm A VB: Mehmet Şahin
Blog: http://mehsah.spaces.live.com/ · How long have you been using VB?20 Years · What industry do you work in?Food For other interviews in this series, please visit http://imavb.net. Are you a VB, too? Submit your story here!
I'm A VB: Russ Yeagley
Website: www.EagleSecureSolutions.com · How long have you been using VB?I'm one of the extremely lucky developers who did beta work for Microsoft on Project Thunder - Visual Basic 1.0. While attending a symposium in Chicago, Tom Button (from Microsoft at the time) and I were talking about what, if any, future Microsoft Professional BASIC would have. He told me that its future is going to be truly amazing, both for Microsoft and for the BASIC computer language. He also mentioned that he'd be passing out forms to anyone in attendance who would be interested...
I'm A VB: Manoj Kumar
· How long have you been using VB?2002 - VB 6.0. 2004 - VB.NET · What industry do you work in?Environmental Services - MIS Department · How big is your development team?50 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web Apps, Web Services, Window Services · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever b...
I'm A VB: James Kahl
· How long have you been using VB?I have used every version of Visual Basic since its inception. So I guess for about 20+ years. · What industry do you work in?Manufacturing/Engineering · How big is your development team?There are about 20 of us, but most development is done individually rather than a group effort. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I mainly writ...
I'm A VB: Bruce Meeker
· How long have you been using VB? 15 years · What industry do you work in? Utility/Nuclear · How big is your development team? We have about 8 actual developers in an application group of 20. We rarely have more than 2 working a project at a time. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Client Server applications and interfaces to third party software. · &n...
I'm A VB: Sinhue Baez
Website: http://zingo.tumblr.com/ · How long have you been using VB?I've been using VB since version 5, when I started to work in my current job, 9 years ago. Then I moved to 6, then to VB.NET first with Framework 1.1, and I'm currently developing in 2.0 (VS 2005). · What industry do you work in?I work in the foods industry. I work for the biggest poultry producer in Mexico. · How big is your development team?We are 2 guys here, who curren...
I'm A VB: Amin Choroomi
Website: http://vanda-dev.com · How long have you been using VB?Since ‘99 · What industry do you work in?Government Organizations, Cement Factories · How big is your development team?3 people · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Data Driven Applications, Information Systems · What’s the most interesti...
I'm A VB: Sameer Tripathi
· How long have you been using VB?For the last 9 years · What industry do you work in?Real estate, Utilities, Sports · How big is your development team?From 1 to 18 people · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web sites, intranet applications, mobile applications · What’s the most interesting app you’v...
I'm A VB: Jorge Paulino, Visual Basic MVP
Blog: http://vbtuga.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?10 years ago I started using VBA with Access and Excel. 6 years ago I discovered VB6, and it was love at first sight! After that I never stopped, and I jumped to VB.NET 4 years ago. I have programmed with VB.NET 2002, 2005 and I am currently programming with 2008. I hope to start programming with 2010 soon! · What industry do you work in?I work in the Automobile industry, for an international corporation. I...
I'm A VB: William "Bill" Sheldon, Visual Basic MVP
Blog: http://www.nerdnotes.net/blog · How long have you been using VB?I picked up a VB for Dummies book back in '98 and taught myself the language. At the time I was doing my main work in C++ and Mumps, and I knew I was leaving Mumps. The syntax was simple and I could quickly create GUI's but I still preferred the C++ structure. With the launch of .NET I learned both C# and VB.NET, which was now a first class language. Over time I've grown to really like the VB programming model in .NET · &n...
I'm A VB: Erick Kurniawan, Visual Basic MVP
Blog: http://geeks.netindonesia.net/blogs/erickkurniawan · How long have you been using VB?I've been using VB for about 4 years now. I used VB since VB6. Now I use VB9 for my current project. · What industry do you work in?Academic, I am working as lecturer. I also developed several projects for the Academic Information System. · How big is your development team?2-3 people, including me. · &nb...
I'm A VB: Rambod Taati
Website: www.secure-kernel.com · How long have you been using VB?About 7 years. (Since 2002) · What industry do you work in?Software house, Web and Windows programming, Developer · How big is your development team?7 people. (3 developers, 2 designers, 1 graphic artist, 1 manager) · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web, WPF and Windows · ...
I'm A VB: Burak Dikici
Website: www.minor.com.tr · How long have you been using VB?I’ve been using VB for 3 years. · What industry do you work in?Software development and consulting. · How big is your development team?Now we are three people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows apps. Web apps. Mobile apps. · What’s ...
I'm A VB: Thanigainathan Siranjeevi
Website: http://geekswithblogs.net/Thanigai · How long have you been using VB?6 years · What industry do you work in?Information technology - Retail currently · How big is your development team?2 members · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web applications - Elearning & retail marketing · What’s the mos...
I'm A VB: Khor Eng Boon
Website: http://engboonspace.spaces.live.com/ · How long have you been using VB?1-2 Years · What industry do you work in?Student - Business Information Systems · How big is your development team?2 or 3 people · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Assignments (Homework), Tools · What do you like most about VB as a p...
Dynamic Searching using LINQ – Dataset + Joins
About two years ago I posted some code that shows how to dynamically construct LINQ queries at runtime. On average there's a couple questions per month about trying it in some edge case, and usually the support already exists within the API. Recently though someone posted a question that has to do with Datasets and Joins that raised some interesting issues: I have a dataset with two datatables (One Loaded From A CSV file) and (the other loaded from a query) what I would like to be able to do is set the criteria (i.e dtCSV.Field1=dtQuery.Field7 AND (dtCSV.Field5 != dtQuery.Field4 or dtCSV.Field5 != dtQ...
I'm A VB: Uday Gupta
· How long have you been using VB?For the last 4.5 years. · What industry do you work in?Software development, Student. · How big is your development team?Single. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows and Web. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?The Offliner. · ...
I'm A VB: Daron Yondem
Website: http://daron.yondem.com · How long have you been using VB?Basic is my native programming language. Starting from QBasic 1.0 it's a story of love and excitement. I jumped in the VB world with version 3.0 and the story goes on with 4.0, 6.0. Finally .NET saved us all and now we have one of the most powerful programming languages ever: VB.NET! · What industry do you work in?Software development and consulting. User experience is our special focus, with Silverlight and WPF. · ...
I'm A VB: Mark Harr
Blog: http://www.harr.us/markblog · How long have you been using VB?Since shortly after VB 1.0 came out. I was looking for a new development environment to rewrite an application written in Easel that did not cost $12K and have a $600/PC runtime license. · What industry do you work in?Software Development Consultant. I work in whatever industry my client does. ;) · How big is your development team?Depends on the client, b...
I'm A VB: Blake Pell
Blog: http://www.blakepell.com/Main/Blog.aspx · How long have you been using VB?Since VB1 for DOS (yeah, it still works too, I just fired it up on Windows 7). After starting Basic on my Commodore 64 and TSR-80 (GWBasic), I found I loved that I could make forms applications easily (even in DOS). When VB3 came out, I begged my mom to drive me to the nearest Best Buy to get a copy. I'm not sure if she realizes that set me on my career path. · What industry do you work in...
I'm A VB: Waleed El-Badry
· How long have you been using VB?I started with VB 6 in 2003. I developed a real time temperature monitoring system of 25 channels as my graduation project. In 2005, I migrated to VB.NET. · What industry do you work in?I'm a teaching assistant in the Mechatronics Engineering Department. We teach young engineers how to build fully automated electromechanical systems, based on embedded processors or PCs. · How big is your development...
I'm A VB: Hefin Dsouza
Website: http://dotnetworld.in/forum · How long have you been using VB?For the past 6 Years. · What industry do you work in?Software Development and Training. · How big is your development team?I am a Freelance Developer. I develop projects on my own. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Business Automation Applications like Billing Systems, Employee Management Systems, E...
I'm A VB: Fuzz Box
· How long have you been using VB?I’ve used VB since VB4, and I’ve used VB.NET since the Beta version of 2002/2003. · What industry do you work in?IT industry. · How big is your development team?I'm a contractor that works on big and small teams. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I build mainly desktop Windows apps with dips into control and automation.&nb...
I'm A VB: Alex Dybenko
Blog: http://accessblog.net/ · How long have you been using VB?Since version 3. · What industry do you work in?Software. · How big is your development team?Up to five persons. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Business automation. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?VODKA...
I'm A VB: Veeresh Athimamula
· How long have you been using VB?Since 2001, Started with VB 6.0 · What industry do you work in?Business Service Industry · How big is your development team?10 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Internal Web Applications (Web Profile, Inventory Management and Profile Approval) · What’s the most interesti...
I'm A VB: Saul Ortiz
Website: http://www.softwarereflections.com · How long have you been using VB?8 Years · What industry do you work in?Government Entity · How big is your development team?2-3 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Database Applications/Smart Clients · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Heal...
I'm A VB: Dave Campbell
Blog: http://bciamthedad.blogspot.com · How long have you been using VB? My first language was BASIC, starting in 1984. I have been using VB since 2000, when I started using VB6. · What industry do you work in? I work in the Public Sector for a political subdivision of the state. · How big is your development team? Including me, one. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? I write progr...
I'm A VB: Dylan Borg
· How long have you been using VB?About a year and a half. · What industry do you work in?I am still a student. · How big is your development team?I am a one man team. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows Applications, Console Applications and Class Libraries. · What’s the most interesting app you&r...
I'm A VB: Abdul Aziz
Website: http://www.azizm.zoomshare.com · How long have you been using VB?8 Years · What industry do you work in?Software development · How big is your development team?10 people · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Account keeping, Inventory, etc.. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?I...
I'm A VB: Mostafa El-Barky
· What industry do you work in?Media and Content. · How big is your development team?Just Me in my company. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows Application and some ASP. I've been using VB for a wide variety of applications, including media and broadcasting applications. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Adding a dynamic Layer ...
I'm A VB: Jaspreet Dhillon
Blog: http://dhillonjaspreet.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?12 years, since VB 4.0 · What industry do you work in?Insurance, IT, Manufacturing, Pharmaceutical, Oil & Gas · How big is your development team?25 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I recently involved in developing Rate Quote Issue-RQI, BPM solutions and some other web application fo...
I'm A VB: TB
Website: http://phynat.de.tl/ · How long have you been using VB?I´m 13 years old and from Germany. I´ve been using VB over one and a half years. I like VB very much!! · What industry do you work in?I develop applications for my own use, and for some special directions (for teachers). Of course, I don't have my own company. · How big is your development team?Only me. · W...
I'm A VB: Greg S.
· How long have you been using VB?10+ years, starting with VB 3. · What industry do you work in?Software, Financial, Energy over the last 10+ years. · How big is your development team?5. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Back end processes without GUIs for processing database data coming from end user web applications, OCR'd documents, and legacy data. ·&n...
I'm A VB: Jim McDevitt
· How long have you been using VB?A few years, GW basic since 1979. · What industry do you work in?Promotion. · How big is your development team?4 of us. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?"How to Improve". · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Bowlers Improve Your Average. &...
I'm A VB: Steve Kellaway
· How long have you been using VB?Since I couldn't find any decent examples for basic windows development in Delphi, which I had just bought, but could for VB. So, that must be 1995. · What industry do you work in?Whatever my client tells me :) Insurance, banking, process control, etc. · How big is your development team?Depends on the client or who is cooperating on internal projects - so between 1 and 5. · &n...
I'm A VB: Carlos R. Nobrega
Website: http://www.webauditor.com.br · How long have you been using VB?6 years. · What industry do you work in?SaaS for "Engineering Safety at Work". Brazilian standards audited by the Ministry of Labor. · How big is your development team?Just 1. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web applications. · What&...
I'm A VB: Charles Stratton
· How long have you been using VB?10 Years · What industry do you work in?Insurance, Education, and many others. · How big is your development team?4 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?ASP.Net, Sharepoint, Webparts, AJAX, Silverlight. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?I built...
I'm A VB: Adam Leyshon
Website: http://www.coland.co.uk · How long have you been using VB?5 years · What industry do you work in?Bespoke programming · How big is your development team?3 People · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Mostly retail applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?I've written a pr...
I'm A VB: Charl Adrian Klein
· How long have you been using VB?I have been using VB.Net for approximately 3 years, Before that I was using Borland Delphi. · What industry do you work in?I work in the IT industry. Primarily with small - medium businesses. · How big is your development team?Less than 5 people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I build distributed data access, control and reporting ...
I'm A VB: Soumya Sengupta
· How long have you been using VB? 11 years · What industry do you work in? HR/Financial software development. · How big is your development team? 50 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Windows desktop/distributed applications in an n-tier model with various back-end platforms. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built? It's hard t...
I'm A VB: IIS MATT
Blog: www.iismatt.com/iismatt · How long have you been using VB?10 Yrs · What industry do you work in?Comercial Real Estate · How big is your development team?1-5 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Ecommerce Site · &...
I'm A VB: Daniel Seara, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=918755FC-EE78-462E-B546-8C03ADB85982Blog: http://blogs.solidq.com/ES/dseara · How long have you been using VB?Oh.. since the previous century, maybe sometime in the middle of it. :) I knew Visual Basic when he was three floppy-disks old :) · What industry do you work in?Software and database consultant. · How big is your development team?We are more consultants than a...
I'm A VB: Dat Nguyen
· How long have you been using VB?More than 15 years. · What industry do you work in?Contract Manufacturing Services. · How big is your development team?I am the only developer! · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows smart client and ASP.NET applications. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve...
I'm A VB: Ed Lance
Website: http://sandiegodatapro.com · How long have you been using VB?I have been using VB since around 1995 when I started developing with Access. · What industry do you work in?I own a software development company. We develop custom, data intensive, corporate software for many industries, including manufacturing, construction, retail and insurance. · How big is your development team?Around three people. We use subcontractors ...
I'm A VB: Subair Ayobami
· How long have you been using VB?5 years · What industry do you work in?ICT · How big is your development team?5 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Distributed Applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Biometrics · Pl...
I'm A VB: Walter Sassano
· How long have you been using VB?Since VB4.0, so that's about 13 or 14 years. · What industry do you work in?I work for a Fortune 500 cosmetics company. · How big is your development team?Our development teams tend to be small, from single developers to 4 or 5 developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I build a lot of infrastructure / middleware applications and ...
I'm A VB: Sameh Fakoua
Website: http://www.osdservices.com · How long have you been using VB?Since 2001. · What industry do you work in?Software Development. · How big is your development team?18 Computer Engineers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Desktop/Database Applications, Web portals. · What’s the most inter...
I'm A VB: Javier Sanchez
· How long have you been using VB?Since the late 80s. · What industry do you work in?Own Agilisa Technologies. Software Development. · How big is your development team?8. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?ASP.NET / Windows Services. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Pr...
I'm A VB: Shawn Greer
Website: http://vbstyler.codeplex.com/ · How long have you been using VB?I believe 4 years. · What industry do you work in?None currently. I am just a hobbyist right now. · How big is your development team?I currently have no team. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I like to make user controls on the visual side. I like games and go deep into p...
I'm A VB: Muhammad Rashed Nadeem
Blog: http:// · How long have you been using VB?Since 1999. · What industry do you work in?Banking. · How big is your development team?Very little. Only me, VB.Net, and my computer. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Helpdesk, Human resource managment system, and network monitoring utilities. · What’s the ...
I'm A VB: Alexey Mastjuk
Website: http://www.alexmsoftware.tut.su/ · How long have you been using VB?11 years. Since 1998, (Visual Basic 5.0). · What industry do you work in?Windows Applications Development for Zhitomir Branch of Ukrainian State Enterprise of Posts “Ukrposhta”. · How big is your development team?1 person. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows Forms Applications...
I'm A VB: Moonhyuk Choi
Website: http://dotnetpower.kr · How long have you been using VB? About 10 years. · What industry do you work in? Software/Web Development. · How big is your development team? 7 Developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Web, Windows, Services, all of the above. Working as a technical engineer. · What’s the most interesting app y...
I'm A VB: Gary Lima, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=B2255B06-7323-40CB-8968-F95F8B0B3B53 Website: http://www.visualbasicrocks.com · How long have you been using VB? I've been using Visual Basic for about 8 years now. I started out with VBA, programming in Word, PowerPoint and Access, and moved into VB6. However, Access quickly became my primary IDE. I started creating simple databases for our company, then complex databases, and finally started writing automation applications. Today I'm a hardcore VB.NET enthusiast! I've programm...
I'm A VB: Ustes Greenridge
· How long have you been using VB?Since VB 5.0. First VB job was in 96... · What industry do you work in?Financial. · How big is your development team?4 Developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Asp.net, Silverlight, WCF Services. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?ps template ...
I'm A VB: Cihan Yakar
Blog: http://www.cihanyakar.com · How long have you been using VB? After QBasic, I used VB4 for a short time. Altogether, I've been using some version of Basic for about 10 years. · What industry do you work in? IT, Tourism. · How big is your development team? 1 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Mostly Web Applications. Sometimes I build Windows ...
I'm A VB: Carl Boudreau
Website: http://www.kite-cam.com · How long have you been using VB?12 years. · What industry do you work in?Contractor, so almost all of them. · How big is your development team?Currently 20 people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows apps, services, and web applications. · What’s the most interest...
I'm A VB: Christopher Deweese
Website: http://christopherDeweese.com/ · How long have you been using VB?7 years in VB.Net, prior to that 3 years of VB Script Classic ASP and a little bit of VB 6. · What industry do you work in?Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. · How big is your development team?10 developers on our law enforcement team including both .NET and mainframe developers. · What kind of apps do yo...
I'm A VB: Jens Burup
Website: www.nectosoft.dk · How long have you been using VB?Since it was published; I think it was in 1978. · What industry do you work in?Manufacturing of industrial machinery and equipment. · How big is your development team?Myself + .Net. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Quotation and configuration sales tools, including CRM and data mining. &midd...
I'm A VB: Jackie Goldstein, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=8DCDBC52-511A-4A36-B035-B15A5E4E6F98 Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/jackieg/ · How long have you been using VB? I first started with VB3 when it was released in 1993. After working many years in the real-time / embedded space, I had spent the previous half year learning Windows programming in C (Petzold). When a friend of mine told me that VB3 was "the greatest thing since sliced bread" I checked it out and haven't looked back since. · What ...
I'm A VB: Leonardo Omar Sailer
· How long have you been using VB?8 years. · What industry do you work in?Telecommunications. · How big is your development team?Currently I'm alone. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web applications, SOA, Silverlight. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?It is an application based on Sil...
I'm A VB: Alex Pfrogner
Website: http://www.SpidersWS.com · How long have you been using VB? Approximately 5 years. I taught myself to program with it the summer before my 9th grade year. · What industry do you work in? Web Application Development for a custom metals company. · How big is your development team? 2 people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Most commonly web apps, but we do some useful tools lik...
I'm A VB: Paulo Santos
Blog: http://pjondevelopment.50webs.com · How long have you been using VB?Geez... I've been using Visual Basic ever since VB for DOS 1.0. It has been a long while. · What industry do you work in?Currently I'm working in an educational company. · How big is your development team?My development team has 9 people. A project manager, a solution architect (me), four VB developers, and three testers. · &...
I'm A VB: José Batista
Website: http://www.fatorar.com.br · How long have you been using VB?Since VB 3.0. · What industry do you work in?Construction and mobile services. · How big is your development team?Three people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Mobile services, CRM and intranets. · What’s the most interesting app you&...
I'm A VB: Mohammad Reza Moasherati
· How long have you been using VB?13 years. · What industry do you work in?Software Industry Company. · How big is your development team?6 persons. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?More than 30 apps. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Everything about that app is interesting. ...
I'm A VB: Ramesh Pujeri
· How long have you been using VB? 6 years. · What industry do you work in? Product Development. · How big is your development team? 50. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? ERP. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built? SmartClient. · Please tell us about an app th...
I'm A VB: Milind Sawde
· How long have you been using VB?Since 2001, with VB 6.0. · What industry do you work in?IT - Software Development. · How big is your development team?4. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Inventory Management Systems, Vessel Tracking Systems. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Ves...
I'm A VB: Adam Hall
Website: www.hitched.co.uk · How long have you been using VB?5 years. · What industry do you work in?Wedding industry. · How big is your development team?2 devs inhouse, with 5 extras outsourced for various projects. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Large, dynamic SEO-friendly web pages. · What’s the mo...
I'm A VB: Roman Sallin
Website: http://www.alcoda.ch · How long have you been using VB?12 years. · How big is your development team?2 developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Software for libraries (public and private). · Please tell us about an app that you’re working on at the moment.It is a library management system. For the staff: a WindowsForms applicationFor the public user...
I'm A VB: Jason M. Hirst
· How long have you been using VB? Since Visual Basic 2, way back in 1992!! I've seen it grow from a child, to its teenage years in VB6 (and the tantrums it sometimes had!) to it's now young adult years, and loving every release! · What industry do you work in? A mixture: Industrial, Commercial and educational. You name it; I've probably done a solution (in VB) for it. · How big is your development team? 4 People. Myself as senior developer for Windows a...
I'm A VB: Franklin Garzon
· How long have you been using VB? Six years. · What industry do you work in? Satellite Location, Education Institute, Military Education, Food Factories, Supermarkets. · How big is your development team? 18 members. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Satellite Location and Commerce Apps. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve...
I'm A VB: Faisal Ghaznavi
Blog: http://ghaznavies.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?From last 10 years. · What industry do you work in?Textiles, Medical, Oil, Government. · How big is your development team?100 Developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Database related + Imaging system + Document managements system. · What&r...
I'm A VB: Nolan Sunico
· How long have you been using VB?Five (5) years now. · What industry do you work in?System Development. · How big is your development team?Small. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Database Systems. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Accounting System. · &nbs...
I'm A VB: Anthony Papillion
Website: http://www.cajuntechie.com · How long have you been using VB? I've been using VB since its earliest DOS version but I left and went to C++ shortly thereafter. I came back around version 6. · What industry do you work in? Software development and healthcare infomatics. · How big is your development team? 2-5. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Records k...
I'm A VB: Sachin Palewar
Website: http://www.palewar.com · How long have you been using VB?Since 1998, VB 5.0. · What industry do you work in?IT - Software Development, Consultancy, Field Force Automation. · How big is your development team?8. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Field Force Solutions, Windows Mobile Applications, Document Management System. · ...
I'm A VB: Mark Wisecarver
Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/markwisecarver/ · How long have you been using VB?Late 80's. · What industry do you work in?Own Solomon Technologies Intl. Create Webcasts for DiscountASP.NET and Microsoft. · How big is your development team?Just me. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?ASP.NET, Silverlight, Expression Studio. ·  ...
I'm A VB: Mayur Tendulkar
Blog: http://blog.mayurtendulkar.com · How long have you been using VB?From 2001. I'm in love with Visual Basic, because of its simplicity and magic… · What industry do you work in?Academic and IT Industry. · How big is your development team?College Project team: 5. In company: 4. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web, mobile and mobile-web applications. &...
I'm A VB: Ehsan Valizadeh
· How long have you been using VB?5 years. · What industry do you work in?Oil & Gas Industries. · How big is your development team?4 people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?ASP.NET & Windows Applications. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?It's a search application!! ...
I'm A VB: Duncan Jones
Website: http://www.merrioncomputing.com · How long have you been using VB?I started with VB3 in 1992, having got hooked on programming thanks to BBC Basic in the preceding years. · What industry do you work in?Financial Services. · How big is your development team?3 developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Financial reconciliation and risk management application...
I'm A VB: Zafer Kafkas
· How long have you been using VB?4 months · What industry do you work in?Education · What do you like most about VB as a programming language?Programming games For other interviews in this series, please visit http://imavb.net. Are you a VB, too? Submit your story here!
I'm A VB: Steele Price, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=DD672B90-7677-4A03-968D-3407491C3860 Website: http://steeleprice.net · How long have you been using VB?Since V1. In 1992, I was looking for a replacement to QBasic when developing a Point of Sale Application for Windows. · What industry do you work in?Software Development. We are very diversified in our client base, touching Medical Records, Financial Services, Home Automation, Factory Floor Control, Online Gaming, Media and Training. &m...
I'm A VB: Leonardo Testa
Blog: http://leonardostudio.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?It’s been 6 years since I started with VB6. After 3 years, I switched to the Visual Studio environment. (Hace 6 Años que comencé con VB 6, después de tres años me pase al Visual Studio 2008.) · What industry do you work in?I’m working in a company that sells appliances and furniture’s in Paraguay. In this company, I have learned everything I know about VB. It also served ...
I'm A VB: Alberto De Luca
Website: http://www.dotnetwork.it/ · How long have you been using VB?Since 1994. · What industry do you work in?My own business. I'm a Ferrari consultant. · How big is your development team?1 developer: Myself. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Management systems, data oriented. · What’s the most interes...
I'm A VB: Biser Dimitrov
Blog: http://ajaxus.net · How long have you been using VB?I started with VB.NET in 2005. · What industry do you work in?Our company is UK based and operates with UK's NHS. · How big is your development team?We are relatively small team - 10 programmers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?We develop only web based systems. · &nbs...
I'm A VB: Ennio Della Lucia
Website: http://www.eelimedia.it/ · How long have you been using VB?15/16 years · What industry do you work in?Internet Service Provider - ISV · How big is your development team?Three developers · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Vertical - SaaS - Industry · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ev...
I'm A VB: Kristof Zerbe
Website: http://www.zerbit.de · How long have you been using VB?First version was 5.0, after years of programming with Access-Basic (since version 1.0) and later VBA · What industry do you work in?Software-Development, Consulting · How big is your development team?4 Developers · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?In my business, I'm developing applications in Access, VB,...
I'm A VB: Yemi Ajibabi
· How long have you been using VB?5 years · What industry do you work in?Institution · How big is your development team?2 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Database · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Estate Manager · Please tell us about an app t...
I'm A VB!
Who’s the “typical VB.NET developer”? Is there one? There are millions of VB.NET developers in the world, and they each have their own unique story. We decided to talk to some of them to find out what kinds of applications they’re building, what technologies they’re using, and what their favorite features are. Watch the interviews and find out for yourself who today's VB.NET developers really are! View the interviews Are you a VB, too? Tell your story here or leave a comment below.
I'm A VB: Chris G. Williams (VB MVP)
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=D81FAC63-665A-44BA-AEF7-8CFE3588E7EF Blog: http://www.blogusmaximus.net · How long have you been using VB?I've been using VB since version 3.0, way back in 1993. It was love at first sight. · What industry do you work in?Software Consulting. We serve pretty much every industry. · How big is your development team?It varies from project to project, anywhere from 1 to many, with local an...
We Need to Talk (Matt Gertz)
By now, many of you will have downloaded the recent beta that we posted to the net, and (hopefully) are getting excited about the features that we’ve been developing. Recently, Beth Massi interviewed me about some of the work that I’ve been doing as a part of that effort. I always enjoy interviews, and Beth is great at pulling out some of the more interesting aspects of a person’s work, but I’m always somehow left with the feeling afterwards that there’s something more that I wanted to say -- some different issue to which I forgot to draw folks’ attention. You...
I'm A VB: Joacim Andersson, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=56643689-ABE7-4313-A865-442BCBE05B54 Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/joacim · How long have you been using VB?I've used VB since '91. Starting with VB1. · What industry do you work in?I currently work for a company that creates SaaS solutions for the pharmaceutical industry. · How big is your development team?We are a small team of 5 developers working on new development. We also have a ...
I'm A VB: Wilson Kutegeka, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=8BAFA316-058B-44A9-84F0-F8228EAB6379 Blog: http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/wilson/ Website: http://www.clinicmaster.net/ · How long have you been using VB? Well, despite the fact that I was already a physics graduate, I learned how to switch on a computer in 2000, the same year I wrote my first program in C. C-language made me learn DOS before windows. However, I could not produce a window in C and that’s when I jumped onto VB 6/MS Access and did lots of work out of self-drive and self-train...
I'm A VB: Vishal Shukla, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=97E0CC61-BECF-4CDE-A994-5BAA1533A258 Blog: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/vishal · How long have you been using VB? 18 years, started with GWBasics · What industry do you work in? Application Development for Local Government · How big is your development team? Around 150 developers · What kind of apps do you most common...
History of Microsoft Video: Bill Gates Talks about Altair Basic (Lisa Feigenbaum)
A few months ago, Tina started a great series on Channel9 that walks through the history of Microsoft, year by year: The History of Microsoft In the first episode, Bill Gates talks about what it was like to build Altair Basic. He actually shows the tape that represents the instructions for Basic! Lots of rare footage, and an entertaining show on how it all started. Episode #1: The History of Microsoft - 1975
InfoQ Article on the Future of VB.NET (Lisa Feigenbaum)
For those of you who prefer text over audio, here's a recent InfoQ article that was released based on the podcast I did with Joe Stagner:InfoQ: Is There a Future for VB.NET?
I'm A VB: Dave Noderer (VB MVP)
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=339A9F64-818D-46B8-A984-9DB6D89B4968 Blog: http://geekswithblogs.net/dnoderer/ Business Website: http://www.computerways.com Community Website: http://www.fladotnet.com · How long have you been using VB? I jumped in with Access 1.0 in 1993 then converted a couple of apps from VB 1.0 to 3.0 in 1995 or so. Previously used the Microsoft Basic interpreter on the Altair 8800 which came on paper tape in 1975/76. · What industry do you work in? Whiche...
I'm A VB: Pep Lluís Baño, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=AAF2211D-2C08-4B28-8401-D356C20ECAD7 Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/peplluis/ · How long have you been using VB? Since the first version of VB-DOS in 1992 J and earlier Basic Interpreters from 1986/1987 http://msmvps.com/blogs/peplluis/archive/2008/04/15/when-vb-becomes-oop-cuando-vb-se-convirti-243-en-poo.aspx · What industry do you work in? Automation & industrial environments like food, Wood, Concrete, Measuring instrumentation...
TechEd Video: Future Directions for Visual Basic, by Anders Hejlsberg and Jonathan Aneja
As part of the new VB/C# co-evolution strategy, Visual Studio Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg has broadened his role. In addition to being Chief Architect for C#, he now sets the direction for both the VB.NET and C# languages. At TechEd, Anders participated in both the VB.NET and C# language presentations. In watching these sessions, you can see that the future trends and directions for the VB.NET and C# languages are now the same. TechEd NA 2009 Session Video: "Future Directions for Visual Basic" by Anders Hejlsberg and Jonathan Aneja In this talk, we discuss the future direction of the Visual Basic language ...
I'm A VB: Antonio Chagoury, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=F68AA8DD-FBAB-460C-813B-BB9C990EA4AA Blog: www.cto20.com Website: www.inspectorit.com · How long have you been using VB? My first language was BASIC. I have been using VB in the true development sense since 1997. · What industry do you work in? Software Development and Consulting, primarily Web. · How big is your development team? The current size of the development team is 11, and they ar...
Implicit Line Continuation (Kathleen McGrath)
In the second part of my interview with Doug Rothaus, he describes the new implicit line continuation feature in Visual Basic 2010. Learn about the most common scenarios that no longer require the underscore character (_) in the topic, Statements in Visual Basic. See the Video: implicit Line Continuation --Kathleen McGrath http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen
Misfit Geek Podcast – Episode #2 "Does VB have a Future?" (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The Misfit Geek, Joe Stagner, asked me this provocative question in a recent episode on his new podcast series: "Does VB have a Future?". Tune in to hear more details on my answer, which of course is YES! :) We talk about plans for increasing the VB.NET content across Microsoft, the great innovations that are happening in VB.NET, idea sharing that's been happening between VB.NET and C#, the similarities and differences between VB.NET and C# developers, and more! Episode #2 - Lisa Feigenbaum from the .NET Managed Languages GroupIn this episode - The Misfit Geek talks with Lisa Feigenbaum from the .NET Managed...
VB Entity Framework Samples Now Available (Lisa Feigenbaum)
There are a lot of great Entity Framework samples on Code Gallery that you can now find available in Visual Basic .NET. This was recently announced on the ADO.NET team blog. Browse through the list below and start downloading! ADO.NET Entity Framework Query Samples (Download)ADO.NET Entity Framework Query Samples is a small Windows Forms program which contains several basic Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities queries against that NorthwindEF Entity Data Model (a modified version of Northwind). Its goal is to help you learn the features of the different query languages available in the Entity Framework, and to le...
Auto-Implemented Properties (Kathleen McGrath)
In this interview, Doug Rothaus, a programming writer on the Visual Studio User Education team, describes the auto-implemented properties in Visual Basic 2010. He also demonstrates some of the code examples in his Help topic: Auto-Implemented Properties. See the Video: Auto-Implement Properties. --Kathleen
Try Out Dotfuscator in VS 2010 Beta 1!
The team at PreEmptive Solutions recently posted a great blog article that walks through all the latest features in VS 2010's Dotfuscator Software Services - Community Edition (previously known as Dotfuscator CE). Browse through the article to learn what's new, or download the beta to follow along in the IDE.What's New with Dotfuscator in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 by Bill Leach
VS2010 Beta1 Extensibility News (Lisa Feigenbaum)
I recently received this letter from the Visual Studio Extensibility team, that I thought would be interesting to readers of this blog. Whether you're building Visual Studio extensions or downloading them from others, there's news here for you. News from the Visual Studio Extensibility team… Are you building new tools to simplify your life or change the way people work? Check out the opportunities to create innovative extensions for Visual Studio 2010. Examples of cool things you can do: ·...
How We Do It: Building the Visual Studio Product Line (Beth Massi, Matt Gertz)
Ever wonder how we build Visual Studio and the .NET Framework? I mean literally. You know, the build process that spits out a product at the other end? Well I sure did and it's not just hitting F5 people ;-). In this interview I sit down with Matt Gertz, frequent VB blogger and also the guy in charge of the builds in Developer Division (he has a long title, but I forget what it is :-)). He explains how the build and test processes work on a team of two thousand people all on Team Foundation Server. I must say it's pretty darn impressive. Many thanks to Matt for taking time out of his busy schedule to do thi...
Learning about Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 (Mary Lee)
To learn more about Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, Kathleen McGrath is highlighting new documentation about these products with a weekly blog post and a daily tweet. If you want to learn more about the new features and scenarios, check out her blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen and her twitter feed at https://twitter.com/kathleenmcgrath. Mary Lee, Programming Writer.
Phoning Home, revisited (Matt Gertz)
In my post “M. G. Phone Home,” I discussed how to write a simple phone application for Windows Mobile, using Visual Basic, which accesses the Bluetooth service. What I didn’t discuss was how to deploy it to the phone via CAB. Since I purchased a new phone yesterday (a Samsung Saga, running Windows Mobile 6.1), and I’ve discovered that I need the same app on it, I thought this would be an opportune time to discuss how to do this, since it’s not obvious and slightly different from the distribution of “normal” applications. If you want to follow along, you ...
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 Released Today! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The public availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1 was announced today on Jason Zander's blog:http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/05/20/general-download-of-vs2010-net-framework-4-0-beta-1.aspxBelow are some resources to use as you download and start using the Beta. Cheers, Lisa Feigenbaum | Program Manager | VS Languages VB, C#, and F# 2010 on MSDN These are the best one-stop shops for information on what’s new in VB, C#, and F# in VS2010: VB: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/dd819153.aspx C#: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/dd819407.aspx F#: htt...
Channel9 Interview with Luca Bolognese: VB.NET and C# Co-Evolution (Lisa Feigenbaum)
There was a great Channel9 video posted last week on the future directions of VB.NET and C# and how they are related. Charles Torre interviewed Luca Bolognese, who is currently the Group Program Manager for VB.NET, C#, and F#. Please see below for more details. Luca Bolognese: C# and VB.NET Co-Evolution - The Twain Shall Meet by Charles Torre For most of their lifetimes, C# and VB.NET have evolved at their own pace and in their own ways (C# added iterators, VB.NET didn't. VB.NET added XML Literals, C# didn't. etc, etc...). Today, Luca Bolognese and team have embarked on a new approach to how .NET's premiere langu...
CodeRush Xpress Released Today! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
CodeRush Xpress is a FREE Visual Studio 2008 add-in containing 60+ refactorings, 7 editing features, and full support for C# and Visual Basic. Download hereCodeRush Xpress includes the following features. In addition, you receive the following refactorings.Add Parameter Create Overload Create With Statement Encapsulate Field Encapsulate Field (read only) Extract Interface Extract Method Extract Property Extract XML Literal to Resource Flatten Conditional Introduce Constant Introduce Constant (local) Introduce Local Introduce Local (repl...
CodeCast Episode 20: Biz Apps Team and VB with Beth Massi (Lisa Feigenbaum, Beth Massi)
Code Cast Episode 20: Interview with Beth MassiThis show's interview is Ken interviewing Beth Massi, Microsoft, program manager on Microsoft’s BizApps team in the VS group. Beth discusses her work over the past two years at Microsoft on the VB team and now on the BizApps team, and chats about some cool new features and content in Visual Studio 2010.Topics· Beth Massi (@ 27:28) – Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassiLinks· VB Team Blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam· VB Developer Center – http://msdn.com/vbasic· VSTO Developer Center – http://msdn.com/vsto&...
How Do We Learn to Be Good Programmers? (Matt Gertz)
I’ve always enjoyed writing. Putting pen to paper (or, these days, fingers to keyboard) is something that brings a lot of joy into my life, even more than music or any other hobby that I have. I’ve been writing stories since earlier than I can remember, have faithfully kept a daily diary for many years, and have published countless journals, conference papers, and other articles on this or that technology. So, when I was in my early twenties, it seemed the most obvious thing to try start writing professionally. I wrote out a number of stories (mostly science fiction), which I s...
Ask Kathleen: Working with MEF (Lisa Feigenbaum)
MEF stands for Managed Extensibility Framework. MEF is a new .NET library that enables greater reuse of applications and components. Using MEF, .NET applications can be dynamically composed. Kathleen has a great article on MEF in last month's edition of Visual Studio Magazine. She explains what it is, how to use it, and outlines the application scenarios MEF is designed to enable. Visual Studio Magazine "Ask Kathleen" Column: Working with MEF
CodeRush Xpress 9.1 Beta: 59 Refactorings, 17 Consume-first providers, and Much more! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Very exciting news! Developer Express is coming out with a new version of the FREE add-in we all know today as Refactor!. The new product, CodeRush XPress, builds on Refactor! by increasing the refactoring count to 59! It also includes a host of other editing functionality, making it a much richer tool for all-around IDE productivity. Consume-first providers enable a different way of programming, whereby you can refer to variables, properties, classes, and other members before they are defined. Then the IDE tools insert the definition for you, so you don't need to write all that plumbing code, or break your thoug...
CodeCast Episode 17: Visual Basic 2010 Preview with Lisa Feigenbaum
I recently recorded a CodeCast interview with Ken Levy. We discussed the VS2010 Editor, VB.NET line continuation removal, interop with dynamic languages, the Microsoft languages strategy, and the upcoming VS2010 Beta1 release. Recording: CodeCast Episode 17: Visual Basic 2010 Preview with Lisa Feigenbaum This episode includes Ken Levy with a part 2 interview with Microsoft’s VB community program manager Lisa Feigenbaum. Lisa discusses many of the cool new features coming in the VB 2010 language and compiler, and some new VS 2010 IDE features. Also discussed is VB within Microsoft’s family of various...
XML Literals, WCF and LINQ Article by Steele Price (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Steele wrote a great article in last month's issue of Visual Studio Magazine on XML Literals, WCF and LINQ. He shows how to use these three technologies together to produce more responsive ASP.NET pages, and more readable code. Lots of great tips for VB 2008.VSM's "On VB" Column: XML Literals, WCF and LINQ by Steele Price
.NET Rocks! with Beth Massi on the Open XML SDK and XML Literals (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Beth Massi shot a couple of great episodes last month on dnrTV! If you are interested in learning more about the Open XML SDK, and how to easily access it using VB.NET XML Literals, be sure to check them out. dnrTV Show #137: Beth Massi on the Open XML SDK Our good friend Beth Massi returns to dnrTV to introduce us to the Open XML SDK, Microsoft's tool kit for creating and manipulating Office 2007 documents. dnrTV Show #138: Beth Massi on Open XML and Office Beth Massi is back to talk about how to generate custom Word documents and Excel spreadsheets with LINQ to SQL and XML Literals in Visual Basic .NET....
TechEd North America, here we come! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
TechEd North America 2009 is right around the corner. For those of you attending, we look forward to spending time with you at the VB.NET sessions and Technical Learning Center (a.k.a. booth). I've pasted the VB.NET session list below. See you in LA!
When using LINQ to XML why don’t I get results if I don’t import a XML namespace (Daniel Walzenbach)?
Hi,I posted a bit of code the other day which I used to get a list of all Code Snippets we ship in Visual Studio. In a nutshell, I used XElement.Load to create a new XML document from a filename from which I then read elements from (There are way to many ‘”from” in this sentence ;-) ). Unfortunately, I forgot to import the XML Namespace in the code I posted which caused my code not to return any results (but instead provided me with a brilliant opportunity to write another post. hehe :-) ).Let’s have a look at the code which is causing trouble and a Code Snippets to understand what’s...
Luca Bolognese on Asynchronous HTML caching in VB.NET (Lisa Feigenbaum)
You may know Luca Bolognese from his well-known work on C# LINQ. Luca is now the Group Program Manager for VB.NET, C#, and F#. You can check out his blog here. Luca recently blogged his first VB.NET post. It is about asynchronous HTML caching, and is part of a longer series in which he is converting a financial VBA Excel add-in to .NET. The code uses the .NET Parallel Extensions that will be shipping in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Check it out at the link below:An Async Html cache – part I
How to get a list of all files of a directory (subdirectories included) (Daniel Walzenbach)?
I needed to create a list of all Code Snippets we ship in Visual Studio the other day containing their title, description and path on disc and size. As you might know, Code Snippets are stored in multiple directories below "%ProgramFiles%Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0" so I had to traverse all the subdirectories of the aforementioned path to find all snippets. Fortunately – linq to the rescue – this came down to a few lines of code :-)This statement gives you a List of Strings (or, to be a bit more precise, a System.Linq.IOrderedEnumerable(Of String)) which you can walk over to do all kinds of crazy thi...
Two free e-books available till April 22th to celebrate MS Press’s 25th b-day (Daniel Walzenbach)
2009 is the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Press! To celebrate their b-bay they’re giving away two free e-books, namely Before opening one of the links make sure that you disable your Pop-Up blocker as the window containing the book will be opened in a new window. Additionally, when the new window gets opened give it some time to show the content as the VB book is roughly 8MB and the Windows Small Business Server book is around 24MB. To download the book click "Page >> Save As..." and rename the download in the Save window. Get them as soon as the offer lasts (April 22nd) :-) Daniel Edited April 22...
Keep the Customer Satisfied (Matt Gertz)
As I’ve written elsewhere, the toughest critics for any work you do can always be found in your own family. Pleased at the immense work that I’d done in scanning in and tagging all of my photos and media (as noted in this post), and with my ego sufficiently boosted by writing a screensaver in VB that would display not only the pictures but the tags associated with them, it was a deflating experience to have my middle child, Aidan, pepper me with comments like “That’s not me; that’s Brandon” or “You didn’t include Grandpa in the tags, but I can see his ear in t...
Negative delays: not in VB (Lucian Wischik)
Our recent post on "negative sleeps in VB" was an April Fool's joke. VB doesn't have negative sleeps, and isn't going to. But the joke's on me! Several readers wrote back to say that other languages do have negative sleeps. Tony Hoare, inventor of "Quicksort" amongst other things, wrote: Did you know that negative delays have long been used in practice in the design of systolic circuits? The negative delay is used to synchronise signals in the middle of the network, just like a positive delay. There are a series of commutation laws that allow delays to be moved before or after a circuit element....
Using "negative sleeps" to improve responsiveness in VB web apps
[NOTE: please also read the followup to this article] .NET 4.0 will introduce many new threading and concurrency classes -- SpinLock, Parallel Linq, and ConcurrentDictionary to name but a few.The new feature that excites me the most is the ability to pass a negative argument to Thread.Sleep. This article describes how you can use it to speed up a program by compensating for internet latency.Let's start with a simple VB program which retrieves an RSS feed and produces from it a new feed with only those items from a particular date of the year:Option Strict OnImports System.NetImports...
CodeCast Episode 12: Visual Basic and the VB Community (Lisa Feigenbaum, Dustin Campbell)
Be sure to check out the latest episode of CodeCast with two VB interviews, including myself and VB program manager Dustin Campbell!Thursday, February 19, 2009 CodeCast Episode 12: Visual Basic and the VB CommunityIn this episode of CodeCast, Ken Levy, Markus Egger, and Gary Short discuss Internet Explorer 8, Windows 7 beta, Kindle and Sony eBook readers, and Visual Studio 2010. Ken has two in-depth interviews on the topic of Visual Basic, .NET languages, and the VB community. The first interview is with VB community program manager Lisa Feigenbaum and the second is with VB program manager Dustin Campbell.&mid...
Implicit Line Continuation in VB 10 (Tyler Whitney)
Things are always changing. I was at the Washington State History Museum with my daughter a couple weeks ago. One of the exhibits features pictures of various sites that were taken many years ago. Then it contrasts them with contemporary pictures taken of the same locations. It was really interesting how much things changed and how quickly. I have a couple computers in my office that I had when I was a kid. My wife suggested that I move my little museum to a place where it would be more appreciated—which meant out of the house ;-) So here they sit in my office. I ha...
Channel 9 Interview: No More Underscores in Visual Basic 10 (Beth Massi, Tyler Whitney)
I just posted a new Channel 9 interview. This time it's with Tyler Whitney, a developer on the Visual Basic compiler team. Here he demonstrates how line termination has changed in the Visual Basic 10 compiler making underscores unnecessary as line continuation indicators. This makes your code more readable especially when writing multi-line LINQ queries. Yes it's true, many underscores are unemployed so the team has created a support group for them at www.unemployedunderscores.com :-)Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
The Silverlight Toolkit Adds Visual Basic Samples (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The Silverlight Toolkit March 2009 release is enhanced with Visual Basic source code. Please follow the links to view these samples for both Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3. Silverlight 2: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html Silverlight 3: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl3/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle. It includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 18 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and ...
Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight: VB QuickStarts, Hands-On-Labs, and How-To Topics released! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Today the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team released a download aimed to help Visual Basic developers use the Composite Application Library. It includes VB versions of the QuickStarts, Hands-On-Labs, and How-To topics: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=537da1cd-43e1-4799-88e7-a1da9166fb46 I've included some more information about the Composite Application Guidance below . You can also find more resources on MSDN and on CodePlex. Please post feedback on the current VB release to Blaine's blog. (Blaine is a Program Manager on the Microsoft Patterns & Practices te...
Channel 9 Interview: WPF Improvements in VS2010 for Business Apps (Beth Massi, Milind Lele)
Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on WPF Improvements in Visual Studio 2010 for Building Business Apps.At the MVP Summit a few weeks ago, Italian MVP Alessandro del Sole was so excited about the new WPF features in Visual Studio 2010 that he asked me if he could interview Milind Lele himself to get the low-down -- I said sure! Milind is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team. In this interview he chats with Alessandro about the new WPF improvements in Visual Studio 2010 for building business applications. This time Milind shows off the new Visual Studio UI and the new WPF data grid as he ...
Channel 9 Interview: Using the Touchless SDK with Visual Basic (Beth Massi, Lucian Wischik)
Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on using the Touchless SDK. The Touchless SDK enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. "Touch without touching." It's actually pretty cool! In this interview I meet up with Touchless SDK creator, Mike Wasserman and Visual Basic Spec Lead, Lucian Wischik. They explain the project and show off a game they developed using Visual Basic 9 in Visual Studio 2008. I almost got my block knocked off playing the game but you'll see how it was worth it ;-)For additional information mentioned in the video check out: ...
MIX 09 Video: Making XML Really, Really Easy with Microsoft Visual Basic (Alex Turner, Lisa Feigenbaum)
Alex Turner presented VB XML yesterday here at MIX 09. Check out the video from his session! Video link: https://channel9.msdn.com/events/mix(The powerpoint slides are attached.) Making XML Really, Really Easy with Microsoft Visual Basic 9 MIX09-T72M Wednesday March 18 |11:55 AM-12:15 PM | San Polo 3401 By: Alex Turner Tags: Languages 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, and other XML-specific Visual Basic 9.0 features will tr...
Visual Studio at MIX 09 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
MIX 09 is here! ScottGu kicks off the keynote today at 9am PST. Below is the list of Visual Studio related sessions. The full conference list is posted here. Didn't buy a pass? Don't worry. Tune in to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/locations/events to watch sessions live, or to view them on-demand within 24hrs of recording. In addition to watching the sessions, here are some other ways to stay connected this week: Keynotes and Visual Studio related sessions: Day One Keynote MIX09-KEY01 Wednesday March 18 |9:00 AM-11:00 AM | By: Bill Buxton, Scott Guthrie Day 1 keynote f...
Presentation Materials from Belgian TechDays 2009 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Last week, I gave two talks at the Belgian TechDays in Antwerp. This was my first time at the conference, and it was a great event! I've created a resource page on Code Gallery for the presentation materials from my talks: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/techdays I've included the direct links below as well. Future Directions for Visual Basic (Slide Deck, Demo Code) In this session, we'll discuss the future direction of Visual Basic both in the near and long term. Come see the exciting new language features in VB 2010, including additional LINQ functionality, syntax simplifications and dynamic lang...
Tips and Tricks for Finding Information in the MSDN Library (Mary Lee)
When you have a question about how an API works, most of you will look in the MSDN Library. There are some tips and tricks to finding what you need in this vast resource. First of all, there are two main ways you can read the content in the MSDN Library. You can also use the MTPS Web service at http://services.msdn.microsoft.com/ContentServices/ContentService.asmx to access MSDN and TechNet content. For two examples on how to use this Web service, see How to: Bind to a Web Service and Walkthrough: Binding to Data from a Service in an Application-Level Project. The offline and online ...
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
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.
What's the list of new language features in Visual Basic 10.0 and C# 4.0? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This post is in response to a question we received in the blog comments last week. It's often difficult to study future versions of VB and C#, and figure out what's the same and what's different! Therefore, I've put together a chart that shows both the VB 10.0 and C# 4.0 feature lists together. (VB 10.0 and C# 4.0 are the language versions that will be included in the Visual Studio 2010 release.) One thing you may notice is that the lists look very much the same! That is part of our efforts to ensure that whichever language you are using, you will have the same functionality available to tackle your development t...
Are you a VB developer and interested in Silverlight? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
If so, vote here to see more Silverlight samples in VB:http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=1222
Join the Visual Basic team on Facebook! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Do you spend a lot of time on Facebook? Facebook is now one more way that you can connect with the Visual Basic team, and other fellow Visual Basic friends. Log on and join today! Friends of the Microsoft Visual Basic Team Facebook Group
Make sure you apply this fix before your VS2010 CTP VPC expires! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Have you downloaded and started using the Visual Studio 2010 Community Technology Preview ("CTP")? If so, you may have noticed that the Virtual PC it runs on, will expire at the end of the year. See the following blog posts from Brian Keller and Jeff Beehler, on how to turn off the synchronization between the Virtual PC and the host OS, and fix this problem!Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC: Dealing with Activation MessagesDealing with the Team System 2010 CTP expiration
Walkthrough: Quick Search for Files and Symbols in Visual Studio 2010 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Quick Search has to be one of my favorite features in the 2010 CTP. I find myself using it all the time! I hope you will find it useful in your development too. The Quick Search functionality has become a pretty common feature in development environments today. That's because it since it handles such a common scenario - needing to find something in your code! Read on to learn more about this exciting addition in VS 2010. This blog post is part of a series on the walkthroughs included in the October VS2010 CTP. Each walkthrough guides you through a series of steps, to help you experience the new features coming u...
Visual Studio: Snow Edition
There was lots of snow today. The Microsoft campus was almost empty as everyone worked from home. This picture shows what it's like to develop Visual Studio in the snow... Wallpaper sized: http://www.wischik.com/lu/programmer/vbdev/vs_snow_1600x1200.jpg (378k)Widescreen: http://www.wischik.com/lu/programmer/vbdev/vs_snow_1920x1200.jpg (445k)
Community Article: Scaling ADO.NET DataTables (Beth Massi)
We we released a new community article onto the Visual Basic Developer Center by one of our MVPs, Jeff Certain, called Scaling ADO.NET DataTables. In this article Jeff shows shows us how to query and aggregate data using the built in DataTable methods as well as LINQ to DataSets. He compares the performance on indexed and non indexed DataTables in a variety of scenarios. See for yourself what Jeff recommends on large sets of data.Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
Walkthrough: Dynamic Programming in Visual Basic 10.0 and C# 4.0 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This blog post is part of a series on the walkthroughs included in the October VS2010 CTP. Each walkthrough guides you through a series of steps, to help you experience the new features coming up in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Even if you choose not to download the CTP, you may find that you are still able to give feedback based on the descriptions and illustrations below. Please leave your feedback on this feature set at the end of this post, or at the following forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vs2010ctpvbcs/thread/afb90240-1bc1-4191-b48f-d5e3a218b520 Thanks! Lisa Walkthr...
Walkthrough: Office Programmability in Visual Basic and C# in VS 2010 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This is another walkthrough, demonstrating how to use some new Visual Studio 2010 features available in the October VS2010 CTP. It provides steps to follow in the CTP build; however, you may find that you are able to give feedback on the descriptions below without actually downloading and executing the steps yourself. Please leave your feedback on this feature set at the end of this post, or at the following forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vs2010ctpvbcs/thread/6172efc9-3075-4426-a773-cf2504f51dca Thanks! Lisa Walkthrough: Office Programmability in Visual Basic and C# This walkthrough demonstr...
Walkthrough: TDD Support with the Generate From Usage Feature in VS 2010 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
As part of the October VS 2010 CTP, we also shipped a set of walkthrough documents explaining how to use the product to experience the new features. The CTP was released as a Virtual PC image, and can be a pretty hefty download to undertake. So for those of you just interested to know what's there, reading the walkthroughs can be a good alternative! Below is the combined VB/C# walkthrough for "Generate From Usage". Please tell us your feedback on this new IDE feature, either at the end of this blog post or at the following forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vs2010ctpvbcs/thread/d37cd027-dfa0-4bb...
VB 2008 Keyboard Shortcut Posters — Download your copy today! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Some of you may be using the 2005 posters we released last year. There is now a 2008 version available as well! There aren't too many changes. We've actually tried to stay pretty consistent with the VB keybindings (going back to at least VB6), since we know there's nothing more frustrating than upgrading and finding the keystroke that used to take you to the watch window now deletes the current line. :) However, we have added a few new keyboard shortcuts for 2008 features, so you might want to download the 2008 copy to have the latest. Happy shortcutting! http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyi...
Using both VB.Net and C#? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
It's common today to switch back and forth between VB.Net and C# for different projects, jobs, teams, etc. VB MVP Kathleen Dollard and C# MVP Bill Wagner have gathered some tips to keep in mind when you make these transitions. They both write for Visual Studio Magazine, which is where these articles were released last week as part of the December edition.What C# Devs Should Know About VB by Kathleen DollardWhat VB Devs Should Know About C# by Bill WagnerEditor in Chief, Patrick Meader, also wrote an Editor's Note for this issue On the Benefits of Learning Multiple Languages. He explains that "Developers of VB and...
M. G. Phone Home (Matt Gertz)
M. G. Phone Home (Matt Gertz)I have a slight problem with my cell phone. It’s a smartphone; I love it, I use it all the time, and I don’t what I’d do without it, but I’ve been pretty aggravated with its support of Bluetooth. It will fail to pair with the Sync system in the car at random times, which drives me crazy as I’ll only notice the problem when I’m on the highway or something. Here in Washington State, it is (thankfully) illegal to drive and operate a hands-on cell phone at the same time, and so one of the whole points of getting a car with Sync was to ...
Did you know? You can unwind the call stack from exceptions (Bill Horst)
The ability to unwind the call stack from exceptions is one of the debugger features that was newly introduced in Visual Basic.NET 2005. When the debugger hits a first-chance exception, you can unwind the call stack in order to make code edits to fix the exception and continue debugging with the changes. The exception assistant UI will have an “Enable Editing” option which will unwind the debugger to the topmost call stack frame with code in the current solution.When an exception is unhandled, the unwind will occur automatically, but this can be turned on and off from the Options dialog (under Tools)....
Happy 10th Birthday to the Italian VB Tips and Tricks Community! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
"Visual Basic Tips & Tricks" is an Italian online community that was started 10 years ago today. To be exact, the first tips were actually published in 1996 on a personal web page of the founder and leader, Gianluca Cannalire. However, the group recognizes the first day of the "real community" as December 8th 1998, when a web portal was created with articles, forums, mailing lists, downloads, and tips. "Visual Basic Tips & Tricks" currently hosts 36,300 subscribers, and is the second largest Italian development community! Visit it here: http://community.visual-basic.it/ The Microsoft Visual Basic team wou...
Did you know? There are many ways to insert a snippet into your code (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Code snippets were introduced in the Visual Basic 2005 release. They provide an easy way to learn how to do a particular coding task, or to re-use a piece of code in various parts of your application. Code snippets can be inserted in a variety of ways. The method you choose will depend upon the situation. When browsing for a code snippet, use the Code Snippet Inserter: Code Snippet InserterThe Code Snippet Inserter can be invoked in the following two ways: by typing ‘?+Tab’ in your code file, or by right-clicking and selecting "Insert Snippet..." from the context menu that appears. Y...
Video: Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Tips and Tricks (Lisa Feigenbaum)
I've blogged the session materials for this presentation before, but now we finally have the video available too! Here are some section markers: Enjoy! http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/developer/tv/default.aspx?vid=79
Video: The Joy of Writing Code in Visual Studio 2010 (Karen Liu)
We've had a couple recent posts about the Code Focused development experience coming up in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE: Code Focus Announcements in the TechEd EMEA Keynote Code Focus Videos on Channel 9 Now for the ultimate coverage (a complete TechEd presentation on the subject), check out the following video by Karen Liu! http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/developer/tv/default.aspx?vid=80
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...
Installing the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as a Prerequisite (Mary Lee)
By now, you have heard of all the great new features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Now that you've developed your new applications, you want to include the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as a prerequisite in your Setup project or your ClickOnce installer. The default deployment experience in VS2008 SP1 is to download and install the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 from the Microsoft Download Center. However, you can add the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to the Visual Studio bootstrapper directory on your development computer, and make the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installer available in the same director...
My *V*Birthday with VB friends in Spain! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Yesterday I turned a year older, and spent the day meeting new people at user groups in Spain. Here's how the day went: 07:45 Meet our host, VB MVP Pep Lluis Blano. Leave the hotel in Barcelona and head to Vic in our van, rented for the week. 09:30 - 12:30 User group presentations in Vic. 12:30 - 14:30 Lunch with user group members in Vic. Chocolate birthday cake for all. :) Streets in Vic outside the restaurant: My birthday gift from Pep. (Very nice scarf!) Marta, a woman involved in the user group, picked it out. :) 14:30 - 17:00 Drive from Vic to Tarragona, waiting in traffic for an accident. 17:30 - 20:00 ...
Visual Basic en España (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This week Jonathan Aneja and I are traveling from city to city, and presenting to VB.Net user groups in Spain. We began the tour in Barcelona where we were speaking at TechEd EMEA, and will finish in Madrid. VB MVP Pep Lluis Blano organized the entire itinerary! Here are the topics for the presentations: The schedule is below. Each meeting is 3hrs. Come join us if you can! Read on for the invitation and more details en español... VS/VB Spanish Tour 2008 Un encuentro sin duda esperado. Esta tercera semana de noviembre y una vez finalizado el TechEd Europeo, nos complace anunciar la visita de los eq...
Romeo and Juliette and Windows Azure (Lucian Wischik)
1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead but I'm not really"2. Romeo receives the message3. Romeo finds Juliette looking dead, but knows she's not really dead4. They live happily ever aftervs.1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead but I'm not really" [the message is lost in a plague-related network outage]2. Romeo never receives the message3. Romeo finds Juliette looking dead, thinks she's dead, and kills himself4. Juliette wakes to find Romeo dead and k...
Where are the Windows "SDK tools"? Where is ildasm? (Lucian Wischik)
C:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv6.0binildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv6.0Abinildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0Abinildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0Abinx64ildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0AbinNETFX 4.0 Toolsildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0AbinNETFX 4.0 Toolsx64ildasm.exeC:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SDKsWindowsv7.0Abinildasm.exeC:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SDKsWindowsv7.0Abinx64ildasm.exeC:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SDKsWindowsv7.0AbinNETFX 4.0 Toolsildasm.exeC:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SDKsWindowsv7.0AbinNETFX 4.0 Too...
Community Interview with Doug Rothaus (Beth Massi)
This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole. This time we have Doug Rothaus, a writer on the documentation side. Doug has blogged up an XML cookbook here on the team blog with a bunch of "recipes" on how to use different features of XML Literals and LINQ to XML in Visual Basic. Check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. Here's the interview with Doug: 1. Nice to meet you Doug! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: wh...
TechEd Barcelona: Session Materials (Lisa Feigenbaum)
I'm here at TechEd Barcelona, and the week has gotten off to a great start. Jason Zander did the keynote this afternoon, and announced lots of great tooling support that will be included in Visual Studio 2010! Exciting stuff.I have 4 sessions here, starting tomorrow. I've attached the materials at the end of this post, in case you want to follow along during the talks! TLA325 Conquering XML with Visual Basic 9.0 *CLICK HERE FOR SESSION MATERIALS* Tuesday, November 11 09:00 - 10:15, Room 121 Primary Speaker(s): Lisa Feigenbaum Track(s): Developer Tools and Languages Level: 300...
"Future Directions of Visual Basic" Interview with Paul Vick (Lisa Feigenbaum)
In this short 10min video, I interview language architect Paul Vick about what industry trends he would think about while designing the Visual Basic language. Some of these trends have motivated features in the next version of the Visual Basic language (VB 10.0), such as interop with dynamic languages. Others are things the team is currently thinking about, and plans to address in future versions. These include concurrency, and "opening up the black box" to expose the Visual Basic compiler as a service. These features were announced publicly at last week's Professional Developers Conference. The li...
Typeless expressions (Lucian Wischik)
"My dog has no type.""How does he smell?""Awful!"Two of the new features of VB10 -- array literals and multi-line lambdas -- are interesting from the language perspective because their expressions have no type! This article is for language lawyers. I remember at my very first undergraduate computer science lecture, the lecturer Frank King handed out the class list and asked for corrections. One student raised his hand, apologized for being pedantic, and said that his name had an "å" with a ring above it, not a plain "a". Dr King praised him for the correction, saying "computer science needs pedants".On my p...
New WPF How Do I Videos Released! (Beth Massi)
I posted two more WPF "Forms over Data" videos onto the Developer Center that you should check out. How Do I: Edit Tabular Data in WPF? - learn how to create a simple data grid in WPF for editing tabular data using Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.How Do I: Create a Master-Detail Data Entry Form in WPF? - learn how to create a master-detail (or one-to-many) data entry form in WPF using Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.Subscribe to the How Do I video feed.Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
"Visual Basic 10: New Features" Interview with Paul Vick (Lisa Feigenbaum)
In this video, I interviewed language architect Paul Vick about what new language features are coming in the next release of Visual Basic. We talked about auto-implemented properties, collection initializers, statement lambdas, removal of the line continuation feature, and more. These features were recently announced at last week's Professional Developers Conference. Visual Basic 10: New Features (video)
Community Interview with Lucian Wischik (Beth Massi)
Here's a community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with Lucian Wischik, a Developer on the team. I'm just getting to know Lucian but he is a very interesting and bright person who is just a pleasure to talk with (I hope he starts blogging a lot more). When I told him that out Italian community had sent some interview questions over he responded to them in Italian! I feel totally lame that he speaks fluently and I don't, although he had the benefit of actually living there... oops I don't want to ruin the interview.Anyway, please check out the Visual Basic Team page for p...
Download the CTP and Submit Your Feedback! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP) is now publicly available! It's time to try out the features that you've been hearing about from the PDC. :)http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=922B4655-93D0-4476-BDA4-94CF5F8D4814&displaylang=enOnce you download the CTP, start Visual Studio and you will see a link to the CTP Walkthroughs from the Start Page. These walkthroughs are meant to guide you through the new features introduced in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Microsoft team members are very interested to hear your fee...
What to watch, as a VB Developer at PDC (Lisa Feigenbaum)
After you discover the PDC videos online, and you watch the Future Directions for Microsoft Visual Basic, you may wonder what other sessions this year's PDC has to offer for the VB developer... Lots!Here's a list of PDC sessions related to the VB language and IDE: Beyond the languages sessions, there are many more topics to watch: ASP.Net, Windows7, Oslo and more. So get comfortable and start watching!
VB 2010 Language Features: The Channel9 Version (Lucian Wischik, Lisa Feigenbaum)
I recently blogged about the new VB 2010 language features announced at PDC, as well as the video available from Paul and Lucian's "VB Futures" session. Another way to learn about the new features coming out in 2010 is by watching the following Channel9 video with VB specification lead, Lucian Wischik.Title: Lucian Wischik and Lisa Feigenbaum: What's new in Visual Basic 10Abstract: In this demo-heavy video, Lucian shows off a number of new features in Visual Basic 10 including Collection Initializers, better Office integration, inline functions, parallel LINQ, simpler type handling, auto properties, and lots more...
PDC Dinner in honor of VB and C# MVPs (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Last week at the Professional Developers Conference, the VB and C# teams held a special dinner in honor of the VB and C# MVPs in attendance. ("MVP" = Most Valued Professional) It was a great opportunity to connect with folks, talk about the exciting things being announced at the conference, and even hear from Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander! VB and C# language architects Paul Vick and Anders Hejlsberg were also in attendance, as were a number of other members from the team. Here are some photos from this special event.
I'm a VB! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This year at the Professional Developers Conference, there was a new trend called PDC badges. To fully understand the buzz, check out the following blog post and Channel9 video by Adam Kinney (badge extraordinaire): http://adamkinney.com/blog/366/default.aspxhttps://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Countdown-to-PDC2008-Badges-We-dont-need-no-stinkin-badges/ You might have heard references to the VB badges in the "VB Futures" presentation. Here's what they looked like: What else can I say? I'm a VB! :)
Experience PDC 2008 whenever and wherever – for FREE! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
That's right... All sessions from last week's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles have been videotaped and made available for FREE on Channel9.https://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/Check it out and enjoy the conference. :) For photos, see the "PDC2008" tag on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=pdc2008&m=tags&s=int