Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Petzold WPF Book Sample Conversion Update (Young Joo)
Been a while since I posted Chapter 3 of Petzold's WPF book converted to VB. In case you missed it, Patrick started working on this project which I took over early this month. Anyway, I am very excited to tell you about progress we've been able to make so far.First, we now have a separate article page, Applications = Code + Markup (Charles Petzold) Visual Basic Code Sample, where you can grab all the converted sample packages. We will be updating this article page as we continue with our conversion project. We did this to make it easier for you to find all sample codes witho...
Applications = Code + Markup (Charles Petzold) Visual Basic Code Sample
Charles Petzold's latest book, Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, is the best WPF book available right now. Unfortuantely, all code samples in the book are written in C#. In order to help VB developers trying to learn about WPF, we are working with a couple of VB experts to convert all samples appearing in the book to VB. As we finish converting each chapter, this page will be updated with a link to sample code package.Quick info about two experts helping us with this. Link to a single download: Petzold_WPF_VB_All.zipTo access ...
Awesome VB9 Blog Series by Bart De Smet (Amanda Silver)
I guess I've been working too hard on getting the product ready to ship to notice that Bart has put together an awesome blog series on VB9. It includes discussion of a feature called runtime agility or compiler agility that we haven't taken up on this blog. We introduced this feature to make it much easier for new .NET platforms (think Silverlight, XNA, & .NET Micro Frameworks) to allow Visual Basic programmers to target their platform. For those of you language/compiler wonks or VB zen masters -- this is a good feature to learn about as it gives you insight into the dependencies the Visual Basic compil...
Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 and Visual Studio 2008 Shell released (Beth Massi)
Today the VS Ecosystem team released the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 and the Visual Studio 2008 shell. The VS 2008 SDK contains full native Visual Basic support and contains many VB samples. What was in the VB Pack for the VS 2005 SDK is now included in the VS 2008 SDK, plus more. I've started playing with building Visual Studio AddIns in Visual Basic and it's really simple to get started. I've got the Tip of the Day Browser running at startup now. Stay tuned for a post on that. ;-)Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Hidden Gems in Visual Basic 2008 (Amanda Silver)
Yesterday I promised to post about the hidden gems in Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2008 that you haven’t read about in blog posts or seen at conferences. I forgot that I mentioned a few of my favorite features in the Beta1 announcement where I showed off the improvements in the Intellisense experience – statement completion for keywords, local variables, and expressions. In that post, I also cover a new language feature called Relaxed Delegates which allows you to provide alternate signatures for events. Both of those are pretty great features – but I promised to tell you about some new stuff....
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics (Bill Horst)
As you may already know, VB LINQ statements enable SQL-like syntax for queries in the VB language. LINQ syntax doesn't match SQL syntax exactly, so if you are already working with SQL or familiar with SQL queries, you may find yourself wanting to convert an existing SQL query to LINQ.This will be the first in a series of posts about converting SQL to LINQ. In this post, I want to establish a basic understanding of how SQL differs from LINQ, and then get into specific language constructs next time.AssumptionsThe SQL code examples I'll be using assume a table called Customers and a table called Orders.&...
Visual Basic 2008 Ships!!! (Amanda Silver)
Hooray! Today we’ve finally shipped Visual Studio 2008, previously known as “Orcas”, previously known as some symbol which doesn’t have an ascii representation. We’ve come a long way, but it’s been a great ride. In his blog, Soma mentions many of the flagship features at a high-level that will undoubtedly make the every developer and head of IT salivate, but this blog is about Visual Basic. :) This is a tremendous release for Visual Basic users everywhere as it’s the first to introduce query expressions and XML as a first class data-type. Not only does this make Visual B...
One is the Loneliest Number (Matt Gertz)
(This post assumes that you’ve read my previous post on Windows Media at http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2007/10/30/let-the-music-play-matt-gertz.aspx – I will be modifying that code in this post.) After posting my media player blog sample a couple of weeks ago, I got a few questions from a reader called Saleem on how to adapt it to take multiple files as arguments when launching the app. After a few exchanges, I figured that it made sense for me to write up a post on command line arguments, since it’s actually a really fascinating topic. The first “given” in this problem is that your application ...
Don Box on Visual Basic 9 (Beth Massi)
It looks like Don Box is really liking Visual Basic 9 and it's unique XML support, LINQ query syntax, and lambdas. He even mentions in a post about authentication with REST that his dream stack would be doing direct XML payload programming with Visual Basic 9. There's so many interesting things you can do with VB9 and XML. If you want to get started learning this great new feature check out the LINQ to XML How Do I videos on the Visual Basic Developer Center. You can also read some more articles I have on the subject on my blog. Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community