Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Channel 9 Interview: Matt Gertz Plays Cards with Visual Basic (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Matt Gertz, Development Manager on the Visual Basic team (well former Dev Manager, I'll let him explain <g>) where he shows off a Euchre game he's developed in Visual Basic that includes speech and sound. Matt is one of our best bloggers on the VB Team and he loves game programming as well as the VB Community. Matt talks about his experiences at Microsoft and the Visual Basic team, and what he'll be doing going forward. Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Visual Basic 9.0 Language Specification Released (Beth Massi)
The Beta 2 version of the Visual Basic Language specification has been released onto the download center. This language specification corresponds to the version of Visual Basic that will ship in Visual Studio 2008. The spec covers the following major new features:• Friend assemblies (InternalsVisibleTo)• Relaxed delegates• Local type inferencing• Anonymous types• Extension methods• Nullable types• Ternary operator• Query expressions• Object initializers• Expression trees• Lambda expressions• Gen...
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 9: Dynamic Sort Order (Doug Rothaus)
Ingredients:· Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ-To-XML Introduction:You can use the Order By clause to easily sort the results of a LINQ query in Visual Basic. A common requirement for sorted data, however, is that the user be able to choose the fields that the results are sorted by. The Order By clause requires that you specify a static list of sort fields and sort directions, so how do you specify a sort order when you don’t know which fields the user has chosen until run time? The solution is to use the OrderBy or OrderB...
A Note about Enums (Scott Wisniewski)
I recently received an email from a customer who had a few questions about "enum inheritance" in VB, specifically as to why it wasn't supported. In particular, he sent us the following snippet of VB code (I've changed the names of the classes and methods involved) : Option Strict On Public Class BaseClass Public Enum SomeEnum Value1 Value2 End Enum Public Overridable Sub DoSomething(ByVal e As SomeEnum) Select Case e &...
Continued search for Small Business Developers and Chapter 2 of Petzold's book (finally!)
I've attached the chapter 2 Visual Basic.NET code for the ongoing project of converting Peztold's Applications = Code + Markup book on WPF proramming. I am happy to say that Young from my team is going to help with this effort so you will see these chapters coming out more frequently. Also, we are about to close the doors on our intial sweep of bringing in our fellow small business developers to help us shape Visual Basic. As a note, I should mention that if you or someone you know is still using VB6 or has switched to another technology, we are very intersted in talking with you. A fe...
Visual Studio Content – Tell Us What You Think! (Beth Massi)
The documentation team has just released a survey aimed at gathering feedback on Visual Studio content. Are you dying to tell us what you think about the Visual Studio content in the MSDN library? Please share your perspective by taking part in the Visual Studio Content Survey. The survey is completely anonymous and doesn't require that you fill in any personal information. It should take about 10 minutes to complete. Visit Kathleen's blog for more information. Thanks for helping us improve our documentation! Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Channel 9 Interview – Offline Data Synchronization Services in Visual Studio 2008 (Beth Massi)
I just posted a Channel 9 interview with Milind Lele showing us his favorite VS 2008 features - the new Data Synchronization designer and how the sync services for ADO.NET work to support occasionally connected scenarios. He shows us how to set up a local database cache using SQL Compact Edition and how to use it to store read-only data caches as well as how to add the code to support two-way synchronization. If anyone's ever tried to implement an occasionally connected smart client, they'll very much appreciate this new tooling and framework in Visual Studio 2008. For more information on sync services catch...
Why you should learn WPF (and how I can help)
A few weeks ago I mentioned I was working on a side project. Well, then the soccer, tennis, and school season hit and..well I won't tell you the rest. What I had started to do was take all of the samples in Charles Petzold's book Applications = Code + Markup and rewrite them in VB for publication to the VB community. I had invited anyone else to do the same as it was a great way to learn WPF, and for the customers I will be focussing on over the next few years (the small business developers and IT pros) there was method behind my madness; especially for those still using VB6. One of m...
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 8: Querying XML Using LINQ (Doug Rothaus)
Ingredients:· Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ-To-XML Instructions:· Create a new Console Application in Visual Basic.· Create an RSS document. Add the following code to Sub Main. Dim rss = <?xml version="1.0"?> <rss version="2.0"> &...