Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Silverlight Ux Musings: New Control Skin Set [Corrina Barber]

March 23, 2008 Mar 23, 2008 03/23/08
VBTeam
One more set of control skins is up and ready for use. I had hoped to have two ready, but one set needed some additional tweaking work that I can't get to until I return to Seattle on 4/14.This new set is very rough and organic in appearance and maybe even a bit esoteric, but it can still work on various sites or it can be used in early ...

Hotfix available for VB performance issue in VS2008 (DJ Park)

March 23, 2008 Mar 23, 2008 03/23/08
VBTeam
I wanted to let you know about a hotfix we recently released that may help solve some performance issues you may have run into using Visual Studio 2008.   DetailsThe hotfix is a 3.98MB download and can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946344 It addresses performance issues in the following scenarios:• ...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 2: Descendants and Ancestors (Doug Rothaus)

March 19, 2008 Mar 19, 2008 03/19/08
VBTeam
This entry in the cookbook shows how you can access descendant and ancestor elements in an XML document using Visual Basic, XML Axis properties, and LINQ to XML objects.DescendantsVisual Basic provides XML Axis properties that enable you to easily refer to child nodes and attributes. As is often the case with XML, you may need to reference sub...

Did you know? You can now manage your snippet highlighting (Lisa Feigenbaum)

March 15, 2008 Mar 15, 2008 03/15/08
Lisa Feigenbaum
Do you use code snippets (introduced in VB 2005)? If you do, then you've probably noticed the green highlighting that stays around for the lifetime of the file. We've heard *a lot* of feedback that once you are done customizing the snippet, it is distracting to see this highlighting stay around. To address this, VB 2008 has improved the ...

Making PInvoke Easy

March 14, 2008 Mar 14, 2008 03/14/08
VBTeam
Jared here again.  I very excited to announce we recently released a tool I've been working on to MSDN that will greatly help with using PInvoke in managed code.  The tool is called the "PInvoke Interop Assistant" and is included as part of a MSDN article on marshalling data for PInvoke and Reverse PInvoke scenarios.  Here is ...

Launch events in Portugal & England!

March 13, 2008 Mar 13, 2008 03/13/08
VBTeam
All -- I'm very excited to be speaking at launch events in Lisbon, Portugal and Birmingham, England within the next week. After a 17 hour journey, with much jet-lagged-sleepiness in my eyes, I'll be speaking tomorrow morning at 9:30am in room A3 of the Centro de Congressos de Lisboa. DEV10 - Expert VB.NET 2008: Past, Present, and FutureDo you ...

Orcas introduces the IF operator – a new and improved IIF (Sophia Salim)

March 12, 2008 Mar 12, 2008 03/12/08
VBTeam
One of my all time favorite features in C# and CPP has been the conditional operator (?:). The brevity and elegance introduced by this operator in the code is unparalleled. We had IIF in all the previous versions of VB.net, which was not an operator in the true sense (It was a call to a function). But now with Visual Studio 2008, we have ...

Silverlight Ux Musings: Silverlight 2 Control Skins [Corrina Barber]

March 11, 2008 Mar 11, 2008 03/11/08
VBTeam
Silverlight 2 beta one is now available with lots of great new functionality!! You can go to Silverlight.net to find important downloads, specific details about new functionality, and very cool sample applications. So, what I want to talk about today is the controls that Silverlight 2 now provides. There are a bunch of new controls ...