Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
TechEd: "The Future of Visual Basic and C#" Video Now Available Online!
![Anthony D. Green [MSFT]](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/letter-avatar/7c5b09a72c1d6e6f2a21258b8cf078b8.svg){kind=avatar}
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...