Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
New "How Do I" Videos Available on the Visual Basic Developer Center (Beth Massi)
If you missed it, last week 48 new How Do I videos (Forms over data, Windows development, Office development and Security) were added to the Visual Basic Developer Center in addition to adding new download formats for 12 others. Many thanks to Rob Windsor, Pat Tormey and Steve Hansen for doing these videos.In addition to these I also uploaded a couple more that I did on Windows Forms development. One is on the new DataRepeater control available in the latest version of the Visual Basic Power Packs and the other I did in response to customer requests on how to handle unhandled exceptions and email t...
Silverlight Ux Musings: New Control Skin Set [Corrina Barber]
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 mockups of a site to give the mockups a rough and sketched appearance. I take this sort of approach to many of my early mockups; especially, if I don’t want reviewers to focus on design details. Here’s a screen shot of the new set of controls. You can also view a ...
Hotfix available for VB performance issue in VS2008 (DJ Park)
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:• The IDE takes a long time to build/rebuild the solution. • You experience a slow response time when you press F5 to start debugging. • &nbs...
New Community Article – The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 1) (Beth Massi)
MVP Maurice de Beijer is at it again with another great article on Workflow Foundation (WF), this time showing us how to create custom workflow activities in "The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 1)". This is the first of a two part series on how to create custom activities but if you need to get started with an intro first you can check out his Workflow Foundation 101 article as well. Thanks Maurice!And don't forget to check the VB Dev Center often for more great content including 48 new How Do I videos!Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 2: Descendants and Ancestors (Doug Rothaus)
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-elements that show up in different levels of the XML hierarchy. In that case, you can use the XML Descendant axis property.The XML Descendant axis property is identified using three periods followed by the XML element that you want to refer to. For example, in the Adventure...
Did you know? You can now manage your snippet highlighting (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 heuristics that determine when you are done using the snippet. It has also added some new commands that allow you to control whether or not the highlighting appears. Let's take a look at how the works in VB 2008... Snippets can be inserted either from the snippet picker (Rt-click ...
Improvements to Visual Basic 6 Runtime Support on Vista, Windows Server 2008 (by Paul Yuknewicz)
You probably didn’t notice it, but we made some important and beneficial changes to the Support Statement for Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 just a few weeks ago, and I want to share the good news. First, just like Vista, the Visual Basic 6 runtime is officially supported on Windows Server 2008.Second, we have expanded the list of ActiveX controls that are officially supported as part of Vista and Windows Server 2008. For background, when we first announced over a year ago that the Visual Basic 6.0 applications would “just work” on Windows Vista, many of you pointed ou...
Making PInvoke Easy
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 a link to the article and tool The motivation behind this tool is writing PInvoke is a hard and often tedious task. There are many rules you must obey and many exceptions that must be taken into account. Anything beyond simple data structures gets very involved and s...
Launch events in Portugal & England!
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 remember your first Basic program? Visual Basic has come a long way from a simple event handling language to a fully capable Object-Oriented language with the power of the .NET Framework behind it. Visual Basic 9 brings unparalleled productivity for line of business applicat...