Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Community Article: Using Windows Communication Foundation with Windows Workflow Foundation – Part 1 (Beth Massi)
This week on the VB Dev Center we're featuring another community submitted article by Maurice de Beijer (VB MVP) on Using Windows Communication Foundation with Windows Workflow Foundation. Maurice has a great wiki as well that you should check out if you're doing Windows Workflow development. In this article he shows you how to use SendActivity which enables you to call WCF as well as standard web services in your workflows. Stay tuned for the next article which will show you how to use ReceiveActivity, which enables a you to publish a workflow as a WCF service.Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
How-Do-I Videos: WPF Forms over Data (Beth Massi)
If you haven't noticed, we released a couple new how-to videos on the VB Dev Center starting a new series which is focused on data-based application development in Windows Presentation Foundation using Visual Studio 2008. The videos are also being featured on www.WindowsClient.net today. Look for many more in the coming weeks!Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Article: Sharpening Your Axis with Visual Basic 9 (Beth Massi)
In the July/August issue of CoDe Magazine there's an article I wrote with Avner Aharoni (the Program Manager on XML literals) called Sharpening Your Axis with Visual Basic 9. (They just opened up online access to even non-subscribers today!) I highly recommend this article which shows you from the beginning how XML literals, embedded expressions and axis properties work in Visual Basic. I start with the basic syntax and definitions and then walk through the XML to Schema tool (which has been added to VS2008 SP1) to enable XML IntelliSense, as well as show some practical examples of using these features ...
PInvoke Interop Assistant on CodePlex (Jared Parsons)
I'm happy to announce that the PInvoke Interop Assistant tool is now available on CodePlex. This includes the binaries, source code and the dev authored unit tests. It is hosted on the more general CLR Interop Tools page. http://www.codeplex.com/clrinterop I will be actively maintaining this tool in the future and (hopefully) adding more features. There were several features we cut just before release due to QA costing that I would like to add back (including VS integration, wrapper functions). Please post any suggestions you have for the tool on the site and we will definitely...
Protein is Good for You, part 2 (Matt Gertz)
In yesterday’s blog post, I walked through an engine for translating DNA to its amino acid results via messenger RNA. In today’s blog, we’ll work on the visualization using WPF StackPanels. (This example requires VS2008, although it could certainly be written in WinForms as well with just a little bit of extra work.)Caution: The point of this blog is to demonstrate StackPanels, and specifically how you can control their orientation and nesting. Consequently, for the sake of that argument, I’m creating a lot of text objects (one for each base and each amino) and nest...
Protein is Good for You (Matt Gertz)
As I was preparing to graduate from the University of Michigan way back in the late eighties, I had a big decision to make regarding grad school – robotics at Carnegie Mellon, or biology at Washington State? On the one hand, biology was something I’d always really loved, having even intended to go to med school at one point. On the other hand, robotics was more likely to help me pay off my debts a very exciting field with a lot of challenges still ahead of it. Ultimately, I chose robotics (gaining a degree that, to this day, I have never used), but I often wonder what it might have b...
Community Article: Creating a Text-to-speech add-in for Word (Beth Massi)
Just released onto the Visual Basic Developer Center, a new article Creating a Text-to-speech add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 with Visual Studio 2008 from a member of our Italian .NET community, Alessandro Del Sole. The article shows how to use Visual Studio 2008 to create an add-in for Word 2007 that will read your documents out loud to you using the text-to-speech APIs in .NET Fx 3.0. Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
TechEd US 2008: Presentation Materials for TLA325 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This week I presented "Microsoft Visual Basic IDE Tips and Tricks" at TechEd US 2008. Thanks to those of you who attended. The presentation materials are listed below. Thanks!Lisa
Come hear about VB 2008 Tips & Tricks at TechEd US! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The VB team has two great sessions coming up on Wednesday June 4th, covering tips & tricks for the language and IDE. Abstracts are below. Hope to see you there!TLA319 Microsoft Visual Basic 2008: Microsoft LINQ Language Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices Wednesday, June 4 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM, S220 E Speaker(s): Amanda Silver Track(s): Developer Tools and Languages Level: 300 - Advanced Session Type: Breakout Session LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a key platform innovation introduced with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, which brings SQL-style query expressions into Visual Basic and Visual C#, enablin...