Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Channel 9 Interview: Brian Beckman Does Higher Algebra with Visual Basic (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Brian Beckman, Principal Developer (currently working with Erik Meijer), where he attempts to teach me higher algebra using Visual Basic, generics, and operator overloading. Brian is a wonderful person and brilliant physicist and we have a lot of fun with vectors and matrices and VB. I actually think I understood some of what Brian showed me ;). Visual Basic is a great language for mathematics as well as all kinds of other applications. Brian makes the point that he has fun coding in VB because of its intuitive style and how easy it is to be immediately produ...
Higher Algebra with Operator Overloads (Brian Beckman)
Recently I did a Channel 9 interview with Beth Massi where I walked through a Visual Basic program that used Generics and Operator overloads to perform some higher mathematics. I thought I'd follow up with a post explaining the details of exactly what I did. Operator overloads with Generics enable some beautiful designs for data types in Higher Algebra, a branch of mathematics, sometimes called Abstract Algebra. Consider fields and vector spaces. I'll show you operator overloads at THREE levels in a single design. First, background: In this context, a "field" is a collection of unspecified objects, closed under ...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 5: GROUP BY and HAVING (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 4: Functions This post will discuss the GROUP BY and HAVING clauses. GROUP BY A SQL GROUP BY clause allows you to group records by particular fields, so the entire group can be dealt with at once. A LINQ statement can have a Group By clause as well, but with different syntax. An informal (and incomplete) syntax e...
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 12: Calculate the Standard Deviation (Doug Rothaus)
Ingredients:· Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to Objects Introduction:LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 11 showed how you can use LINQ queries to perform calculations on sets of data using a set of standard aggregate functions such as Average, and Sum. In this recipe, you will learn how to add an extension method so that you can include your own custom aggregate function in a LINQ query.This recipe adds two extension methods: StDev (standard deviation) and StDevP (standard deviation for the entire population). Because the extension methods...
Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with Paul Vick (Beth Massi)
Scott Hanselman posted a podcast with with Paul Vick, Principal VB Architect, and Paul Yuknewicz, Senior Program Manager on the VB Team about the past, present and future of Visual Basic. Check it out!Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Channel 9 Interview: XML Literals Performance and Namespaces Explained (Beth Massi)
I just posted a Channel 9 interview with Avner Aharoni, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, as he dives into LINQ to XML and XML Literals in Visual Basic 9 and explains namespace bubbling and the performance gains you may see using XML Literals. This is a good interview to pay attention to if you are struggling with how XML namespaces work in Visual Basic. Get started with LINQ to XML in Visual Basic with these How-to Videos. Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 11: Desktop Search Statistics (Doug Rothaus)
Ingredients:· Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to DataSet Introduction:You can use aggregate functions in LINQ queries to perform calculations on sets of data. Visual Basic includes a set of standard aggregate functions for LINQ queries: All, Any, Average, Count, LongCount, Max, Min, Sum. These functions are documented in the reference topics for the Aggregate Clause. You can use aggregate functions as part of the Aggregate clause for an entire set of data, or as part of the Into portion of a Group By or Group Join clause, where the a...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 4: Functions (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators This post will discuss scalar and aggregate functions. Functions SQL SELECT clauses often involve functions, which can be scalar or aggregate. An aggregate function is applied to a field over all the selected records, while a scalar function is called with individual values, one record at a time. It is possible to re-create both kinds of functions wi...
Channel 9 Interview: Refactoring in Visual Basic with Refactor!
I released a Channel 9 screencast with Lisa Feigenbaum, PM on the VB Team where she shows us how to use Refactor!, the free add-in for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 that provides over 30 refactorings for Visual Basic. Lisa walks us through all the new refactorings that were added for the latest version of Visual Basic 2008. You can download Refactor! here. You can get the demo code she used here.Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community RefactorDemo.zip