Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Euchre Revisited: Fixing bugs and service releases (Matt Gertz)
It’s really embarrassing when a bug gets out the door in a product. In particular, it’s hard for me to just sit and take it (however well deserved the criticism is) when a Microsoft product gets nailed in the press for a bad error. It’s much worse when a friend or relative is the one dealing out the grief. However, worst of all is when your specific product – your specific feature – is getting railed on by your family. I vividly remember an incident about eleven years ago, when I was a developer on Visual InterDev and my wife was working on her Master’s in Education. She needed to create a...
New VB Community Article: Creating Visual Studio Add-ins (Beth Massi)
Rod Paddock's latest Community Article is up on the Visual Basic Developer Center on Creating Visual Studio Add-Ins which first appeared in CoDe Magazine. Rod goes a little bit deeper than I did when building an add-in and shows how to work with the project system and automatically open files and insert code. Thanks for submitting, Rod! Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
Silverlight Ux Musings: Providing Panning Functionality for a Canvas of Objects – Part 2 [Corrina Barber]
I’m back with part 2 of the blog on panning functionality (part 1 is here), and, to quickly recap, we’re creating a region in a web site that can be panned rather than scrolled (users can click and drag to pan and navigate the region). We’re also designing the region so images always align properly (no images clip when the user finishes panning). I have a sample solution that looks like my design goal pictured at right that can be downloaded here or you can simply check it out online here. Please note that the UI in this solution has many buttons and features that are disabled because my primar...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators (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 Continuing with specific query clauses, I will cover topics related to DISTINCT, WHERE and ORDER BY. DISTINCT SQL SELECT statements can include the DISTINCT specifier, which causes all duplicate records in the query result to be removed. In a LINQ expression, Distinct is its own individual clause, rather than a specifier on the Select clause. This means that Distinct can appear between any two other clauses. The Distinct clause takes whatever result is...
Silverlight Ux Musings: Providing Panning Functionality for a Canvas of Objects – Part 1 [Corrina Barber]
Recently, I was experimenting with Silverlight and decided to create a website that would allow me to browse some of my personal images, and the website was designed to look something like the image below.My intention for the site was that it would be able to display many images, certainly more than the 12 that you see grouped together and aligned left in the image above, but I didn’t want to provide a standard scrolling region. Instead, I decided to implement panning functionality for the region (the ability to click and drag to pan and navigate the available images). I also wanted to ensure that the image...
Job Alert: Programming Writer opening on Visual Basic Team (Robin Reynolds-Haertle)
The Visual Basic User Education team has an interesting opportunity that I wanted to share with you all. We're looking for a Visual Basic .Net application programmer who also has a flair for writing. If you’d like to submit your resume, please apply for this job via the Microsoft Careers site. - Robin Reynolds-Haertle, Documentation Manager Do you have a passion for .NET programming? Are you ready to be an early adopter of new technologies? Do you want to be a subject matter expert? If so, join the Visual Basic User Education team, and you’ll be at the cutting edge o...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics. I’ve made the following name changes since the last post, which I hope will make the code examples clearer: · Customers -> CustomerTable · Orders -> OrderTable · cust -> Contact · CustomerName -> ContactName · ID -> ContactID Since I plan to do a handful more of these posts, I welcome any feedback or suggestions so I can make these as clear and useful as possible. Continuing on to specific clauses, we’ll start with the most fundamental, FROM and SELECT. FROM A SQL SELECT state...
Launching External Tools from inside Visual Studio (Jonathan Aneja)
Visual Studio has a small but extremely useful feature that allows you to hook external tools directly into the IDE’s Tools menu. All you have to do is click Tools->External Tools… and then you can add your own custom menu items that will launch a specified program. On a typical day I’ll probably fire up Reflector and/or ildasm a few times, and I’ve always found it annoying to have to leave the IDE to launch the program, then navigate to the folder where my .dll is. Adding them to the menu once simplifies things and saves a lot of time. Let’s take a look at how we ...
Drawing Maps with Visual Basic (Scott Wisniewski)
If you find yourself looking for something to do with your awesome new copy of Visual Studio 2008, you should check out the December 2007 edition of MSDN magazine. It features an article, written by me, that provides a walk through on how to visualize data on a map using VB 9, WPF and LINQ. To give you a sneak preview of what the app described in the article does, I've included a screen shot below: Over my next several posts I plan on expanding on the article by showing how you can extend the application by adding new functionality to it. For now, I will give you some time to read through t...