Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 9: Full Outer Join (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series. It makes the same assumptions as Part 8, and I will pick up where I left off, covering Full Outer Join. Once again, I recognize this isn’t an ideal situation, so if you’d like to see better support of Full Outer Join in a future VB release, you can file a suggestion from our product feedback site. A Full Outer Join is basically like the union of the results of a Left Outer Join and Right Outer Join. Records are joined together based on common fields, and all records with no match are also displayed, whether i...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 8: Left/Right Outer Join (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series. After my post on joins, I’ve had some questions about outer joins. As you can see in part 6, VB9 doesn’t have smooth support for Left or Right join. I showed how to get similar functionality with Group Join, but I’ve looked into the subject some more, and want to give everyone a more extensive explanation of how to get left, right, and full outer join results accurately with VB LINQ. Admittedly, these queries are very complex for a relatively simple conce...
Preparing for the Next Product Cycle (Matt Gertz)
I once had to learn how to juggle in a very brief time in order to get an “A” in my high school computer science class. I am not making this up. The idea was that juggling, being a systemic process, was somehow analogous to writing programs and… well, it sort of made sense at the time. I’d done well that semester (my final semester) and was looking forward to getting a good grade in the class. The instructor (probably the best teacher I’d ever had) gave me a preview of my grade, and it wasn’t what I’d expected. Hmm. Without getting int...
Petzold WPF Book Sample Conversion – Final Chapters (Young Joo)
I've just posted a final set of chapters (Chapters 25 - 31). This completes our conversion efforts and you now have access to entire sample code from Petzold's book in VB. I would like to thank Evan and Ged who have been working with me on this. You guys rock!!!A few things to note: Hope you enjoy this!Thanks!Young Joo
Announcing the Forums Bug Submission Pilot (Sarika Calla)
In addition to Connect, you can now report Visual Basic bugs directly in the Visual Basic Forums. The forum posts get entered as a bug or product suggestion into VB’s internal bug tracking system. With this we hope to take Forums (our vibrant online channel for feedback) a step further by making it easier to submit bugs and product suggestions. Currently this pilot is integrated with 3 Visual Basic Forums, Visual Basic Language, Visual Basic Interop and Upgrade and Visual Basic Power Packs. Depending on the feedback we receive, we will consider enabling this functionality in more forums! Here’s...
Source code of Visual Basic runtime has been released to public. (Vladimir)
One of the things we have been working on recently was publishing sources of VisualBasic runtime library. I am very excited to announce that the sources of VB runtime (Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll) are publicly available now! This is a part of a more general work on making .Net Framework sources available to public ( http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx ). The most important result of this is that developers can see and debug through VB runtime code. There is a very detailed description on how to set up VS debu...
Channel 9 Interview: XML Properties and Enabling IntelliSense (Beth Massi)
Today I posted a Channel 9 interview with Avner Aharoni, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team. In this interview Avner shows us how to enable XML IntelliSense in Visual Basic using the XML to Schema Wizard. He also shows the differences between how IntelliSense works with axis properties on XDocument and XElement objects and speaks to how the wizard can infer multiple schemas from multiple sources -- as well as the affect XML namespaces have on IntelliSense. Get started with LINQ to XML in Visual Basic with these How-to Videos. Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Did you know? VB IntelliSense now filters as you type! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Our goal in designing VB2008 IntelliSense was to make users of the feature the most productive that they could be. One problem we found in watching people use the feature, is that sometimes intelliSense displays so many items that it is hard to know whether or not you're close to the item you're looking for. You basically have to read them all of them to know. (Not very time-efficient...) Thus, we added a new feature in VB2008 IntelliSense to make the list filter-as-you-type. Here's an illustration: Let's consider that I am looking for a control named "lblTotalNum". I start typing letter by letter... When I type ...
Did you know? What you can do with Debugger Datatips… (Lisa Feigenbaum)
There's a lot of cool functionality built into VS debugger datatips that often goes unnoticed... For example, did you know that not only can you *see* values in the expanded datatips, but you can also edit them? Watch the following walk-through... While debugging, hover over a variable to view its debugger datatip: Next press the '+' to expand the tip and view the variable's members: Click on a value in the righthand column to edit it. Start typing: To verify, look in the Watch window to see that the value has changed based on your edit: Voila! The value is changed. The next great (hidden) debugger datatip fe...