Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Creating Visual Basic Add-ins for Windows Home Server (Beth Massi)
We recently announced the availability of Windows Home Server. Here's an interview on Channel 9 with Dev Lead, Chris Gray, where he talks about the extensibility model and then walks through how to create an add-in for the Home Server console using Visual Basic Express. A couple people on the thread have also posted VB templates that you may find useful. Get Chris's code here.Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Channel 9 Interview: Type Inference in Visual Basic with Bill Horst (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Bill Horst, a member of the Visual Basic QA team. Bill shows us the ins and outs type inference in the newest version of Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008. He shows us how the new Option Infer works and how various types are inferred by the compiler without having to explicitly declare them. Type inference is one of the new features in Visual Basic to support LINQ.Also make sure to check out these LINQ How-Do-I videos on the VB Dev Center.Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 10: Pre-compiling Queries for Performance (Doug Rothaus)
Ingredients:· Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to SQL Introduction:As we add cookbook entries, we will include performance improvement tips where appropriate. Here’s a tip that you can use with LINQ to SQL to speed up queries that you will call numerous times: Pre-compiled queries. By pre-compiling a query, you perform the processing to compile the query once, and then skip the compile step every consecutive time that you run the query.Pre-compiled queries are created using the Compile method of the CompiledQuery class in ...
Petzold Chapter 3 (Young Joo)
I am Young Joo, PM @ VB team. I will be helping out Patrick on converting samples in Charles Petzold's WPF book (Applications = Code + Markup) to Visual Basic. This is an exciting project and I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. Another exciting news is that we have an extra help for this project. Evan Lim who currently teaches WPF & Blend courses at Foothill Community College in Los Altos, CA, has decided to help us with this. He already has a lot of chapters converted. So we will be able to release them much more quickly. Attached is VB sample for chapter 3. Enjoy! Ch_0...
Refactoring in Action (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Have you downloaded the latest Refactoring tools from Developer Express? There is a free version available on the Visual Basic Developer Center. Once you download, you will discover a number of cool capabilities you can now do in the Visual Basic IDE. When used to the fullest, it can really change the way you code!VB super-user Kim has created a video which demonstrates just that point: http://www.renaissance.co.il/downloads.aspx. (It's the download called "Coding Model-View-Presenter with CodeRush and Refactor Pro!"). In the video, Kim goes through the process of creating a Model-View-Presenter (M...
New Community Article – Using Business Objects with WCF (Beth Massi)
There's a new article up on the VB Dev Center by Rob Windsor, a follow up from his first Getting Started with WCF article, called Using Custom Business Objects with Windows Communication Foundation. Rob explains how to serialize your own custom business objects using WCF DataContracts and what issues you may run into in Visual Studio 2005. Check it out!Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
New Visual Basic LINQ to XML Videos Released! (Beth Massi)
We just released a new set of How-Do-I videos in our LINQ series on LINQ to XML in Visual Basic. These 4 new videos will help get you up to speed on using this new language feature in Visual Basic 2008. They walk you through the basics of LINQ to XML, creating, querying and transforming documents as well as how to import XML namespaces and infer schemas to enable IntelliSense. In the end I demonstrate how to create an Excel spreadsheet like I did in this post. In addition to the videos, check out these blog posts to help you get started: And don't forget you can also subscribe to the How-Do-I Video RSS...
Silverlight Ux Musings: Controlling Alignment of UI Elements [Corrina Barber]
This is my first post on the VB blog! I’m a designer on the team with a background in visual and interaction design, and I also have some .NET coding experience. I plan to start blogging on the VB blog on a regular basis, and my goal is to share some of my thoughts on and explorations with Silverlight.I’m sych'd about the possibilities enabled by Silverlight for many reasons, but, being a designer, one of the main reasons is that I can actually get cool UI implemented exactly as I envisioned. I love that I can create unique and beautiful UI in Blend, bring it into Visual Studio, and then add the inter...
Let the Music Play! (Matt Gertz)
Oh, boy. Sorry I haven’t written any posts lately, but I’ve transitioned to a new job within Visual Studio and have been getting my sea legs there. One of the job tasks is getting Visual Studio 2008 out to you folks, and while I’ve always been involved with that aspect of the product in the past, it was always to a lesser degree. I could best describe each day now as “23 hours of nervous tension followed by one hour of utter panic” as we knock down the last few things that would otherwise keep us from shipping on time.(Incidentally, in the spirit of making sure that...