Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
To compare two filenames (Lucian Wischik)
I once visited an ancient tower in China. A sign said "tread carefully for you bear the weight of history on your shoulders". Our guide explained that the tower was over 800 years old! Oh yes, he said, it was built 800 years ago, had burnt to the ground three times in its history, had been moved to completely different locations twice, but it still counted as 800 years old.Back in VB land I was making two different calls into some framework, and each call gave me back a filename, and I needed to judge whether the two results were talking about the same file. But how? The framework docs didn't give ...
Did you know? 300+ Visual Studio Tips & Tricks (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Did you know that Sara Ford just recently passed the 300 mark for her Visual Studio Tips & Tricks? Sara used to be a tester on the Visual Studio Core IDE team, and knows the IDE inside and out! I remember the first time I met Sara was 4 years ago when she was writing some automation and called to find out the expected behavior for arrowing over tab stops in VB. :-) Now she works on CodePlex, but she still keeps up her Tips & Tricks blog going! These tips are most-often language-independent tips to help your productivity when working with Visual Studio. Here's w...
Building a Zune Playlist (Matt Gertz)
![Anthony D. Green [MSFT]](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/letter-avatar/7c5b09a72c1d6e6f2a21258b8cf078b8.svg){kind=avatar}
Well, that was… intense. You may have noticed the lack of articles coming from my direction. I have been so buried in work, and so far behind, that when I look forwards all I see is backwards. I work, I drive home, I work some more, and it all seems to keep piling up. I would like to say that this is going to change soon, but alas, that’d be a lie. Even though my immediate fire drills in engineering process have died down, I’m going to be flying a lot in October visiting our teams around the world, and then right back into the fires when I get home. One of the things that have been getting...
"Future Directions of Visual Basic": Don't miss this talk at the Professional Developers Conference! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is coming up next month, October 27-30 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The conference will focus on the future of the Microsoft platform. Here is the website for more information: http://www.microsoftpdc.com/At this future-looking conference, we will be giving a talk on the future of Visual Basic. Here are the details:Title: Future Directions of Visual BasicSpeaker: Paul VickAbstract: In this talk, language architect Paul Vick discusses the future direction of the Visual Basic language. Learn about the new capabilities on the next version of the la...
Malay Mail coverage of TechEd SouthEast Asia (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Here's a brief addition to my Visual Basic Around the World post... This one's for the folks in SouthEast Asia. The TechEd MVP and Speaker dinner made it into the local Malaysian paper. You can see a copy of the article below. The theme was "Bling-tastic!". I'm at the bottom left with other international speakers: David Tesar, Steve Riley, and Ronald Beekelaar.
Have a background in C#, and starting to write some Visual Basic? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Maybe you just started a job at a company whose development is in VB. Maybe you're working with XML, or Office, and heard that VB would be the best language for this project. Or maybe you're just switching over, to understand what millions of developers around the world love about VB! :) Whatever your reason may be, this post is for you.You'll find that there are a lot of similarities between Visual C# and Visual Basic. Afterall we're both built on top of the same Common Language Runtime! However once you get into the details, you'll find that there are quite a few differences too. Fortunately, VB MVP Kathleen Do...
Are you using Expression Encoder 2 with Visual Basic? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Now you can! Expression Encoder just released an update last month allowing VB developers to use the Expression Encoder 2 SDK. Here's the announcement:http://blogs.msdn.com/expressionencoder/archive/2008/07/26/8773569.aspxExpression Encoder is a tool for video encoding, and is a member of the Expression product suite. It allows you to import and encode video files, produce live webcasts, enhance media with watermarks and advertising, and publish with Microsoft Silverlight. You can learn more about Expression Encoder 2 on the product page here. You can also download the trial version for free!
Are you using Windows Presentation Foundation with Visual Basic? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
After watching this video, you just might be convinced to try it out! VB MVP Billy Hollis demonstrates that Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is about a lot more than just pretty UI. He shows how the technology can be used in an extremely useful way, to create killer line-of-business applications. Watch a few minutes, and you'll understand what I mean! The webcast is hosted on http://www.dnrtv.com/. You can find a direct link to the video HERE. Brad Abrams has also created a post about this video on his weblog.
Channel9 Interview: Meet the VS "Development Experience" Team (Beth Massi)
Today I posted another Channel9 interview. This time I met with the team that brings us the "experience" of coding in Visual Studio, also sometimes referred to as the VS IDE Team. I ask them how their design process works, what the top requested features are for the code editors, how they work with the language teams as well as what their favorite and hardest features are to build and test. Meet the Visual Studio Managed Languages Development Experience TeamEnjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community