Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 4: Get Inner XML from the Nodes Property (Doug Rothaus)
Recipe 3 showed one way to work with mixed XML content using the XML Descendant axis property and the ReplaceWith method. This is one way to do an identity transform and we’ll look at another method in a later post. There is a key capability not mentioned in Recipe 3 that you will need for fully-functioning identity transforms. That is the concept of copying the inner XML of an element. You get the inner XML of an element from the Nodes property.Recipe 3 transformed e-mail objects from our AdventureWorks sample document into hyper-links in an HTML document and preserved the original formatting by performing...
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 3: Identity Transforms (Doug Rothaus)
An identity transform in XSLT does just what the name implies: replace the identity of an element or attribute with a new identity. Identity transforms are especially critical when dealing with XML markup that is less rigid in its structure. Consider a documentation structure for news articles. Whenever a title is referred to within an article, it is highlighted with italics. However, the XML schema for the article does not specify italics, it specifies that the term is some type of title so that different transforms can handle the term in their own fashion. When you transform XML such as this into a readable for...
New Community Article – The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 2) (Beth Massi)
On Wednesday we released onto the VB Developer Center the second part of Maurice de Beijer's article on Windows Workflow. In this second article about developing custom Workflow Activities, Maurice takes a look at some of the more advanced aspects of Workflow Activity development.Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
"Git Over Here": Making Your Windows Mind Their Manners (Matt Gertz)
Supporting the “pajama programmer”Telecommuting is a great thing, and as the environmentally-conscious person that I strive to be, is something I wholeheartedly endorse when it can be done practically. My current job involves a lot of face-to-face meetings with people, so I don’t actually do a lot of it. However, I do work from home in the evenings (for example, when crafting blog posts), so it’s important to me that my setup for working from home is usable.The challenge that I face is that my work machine is dual-monitor, whereas my home machine is single-monitor. Conseq...
VSLive San Francisco Content (Amanda Silver)
All - I'm about to go on for my LINQ Deep Dive and Tips &Tricks session at VSLive in San Francisco. I posted all demos & slides here:https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=LaunchVB&ReleaseId=805
Milestone Quality & Dogfooding (Matt Gertz)
After some hard but fruitful work, we’ve just finished our “milestone quality” (MQ) efforts, the goal of which was to get ourselves ready for developing the next versions of Visual Studio, Team System, and .NET. Although not specific to Visual Basic, I’ve opted to use this “bully pulpit” to let you know about these efforts, which certainly do impact Visual Basic along with other Visual Studio and .NET products. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the MQ work doesn’t involve new features or any such thing – what it does is get our tools and processes ...
LINQ to SQL (and LINQ to Entities) performance improvements (Tim Ng)
Over the last few months, the VB and Data Programmability teams were working on fixing a performance problem with LINQ to SQL (which also manifested in LINQ to Entities). The issue was that LINQ to SQL was generating sub optimal T-SQL queries when the VB LINQ queries included filters over nullable columns. For example, consider the following query: In this scenario, the Orders.EmployeeID field is a nullable field (Integer?). In VB, the logical operators (<. <=, =, etc) are considered "three-value" operators, and thus, the result of the equality comparison is a “Boolean?” however, the LINQ operators expect t...
Recap of European Launch Events for Visual Studio 2008 (Amanda Silver)
Last week I had the privilege of speaking in Lisbon, Portugal & Birmingham, England at launch events for Visual Studio 2008. There seemed to be a lot of buzz and excitement in the air at both events -- no doubt due to the recent release of Visual Studio. TechDays, Portugal The TechDays event is similar to TechEd in that it's a four-day long affair with an ITPro track and a Developer track and tons of exciting sessions, breakouts, Hands-on-Labs, and experts at booths. I only arrived for the last day of the conference and presented my session at 3am my time given jetlag from which I never recovered. (I retur...
STAThread vs. MTAThread (WHorst)
I recently ran into an interesting threading problem that I wanted to share, so that perhaps I can save some people from the same confusion I had. I started with a C# application someone else had written. I’ll call it “DeltaEngine” for the purpose of this post. DeltaEngine calls into a native assembly and handles certain events from it. I created a solution where I referenced DeltaEngine as a library project, and called into it from a VB project. I’ll call this project “VBApp”. So, the reference structure looks like this: VBApp (VB) -> ...