Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Customizing Displays in the Debugger for System Types
We've heard feedback from several customers regarding the way certain types are displayed in the Debugger. Many of the displays exist to maintain the user experience between versions of Visual Studio. We constantly evaluate if this is the correct choice for a given version of the product. Starting with VS2008, you don't have to wait for us any longer. In VS2008, VB added full support for many of the debugging features it lacked compared to C# in 2005. In particular we've added full support for the DebuggerDisplayAttribute. By attributing a class or member with this attribute yo...
Option Strict [On|Off|SortOf]
Yesterday I got a question from a developer asking whether or not we could add something called "Option Strict Warn" to the language. This would give a developer a warning when using something like late binding or an implicit conversion, rather than disabling it altogether (through an error).As it turns out the ability to set custom custom values for Option Strict is actually already in Visual Studio. To test this out double click on "My Project" and click on the Compile tab of the Application Designer.The top 3 lines of the grid (under "Warning configurations") contain the following options:- Implici...
Small Business Developers Unite!
I can't believe it's already Sunday. I've been spending all weekend (and the last few weeks) as a returning member of the VB team emersing myself in the product, specifically getting my head around how I would use VB today to build the types of solutoins when I was writing departmental applications, or applications for small businesses. I remember these days well. 1 or 2 week deadlines were usually the norm, and VB was the only reasonable solution. I remember wanting to "wow" my customers (or my boss) with how fast I could create a great user experience.With this in mind, I took time to really learn a...
VB expression trees – string comparisons
Hey there! Last time, I talked a little bit about expression trees and what they are useful for. Expression trees are really interesting to those who want to write LINQ providers and have the ability to reason about the lambda expressions coming into their LINQ provider. However, in general, anyone that want's to reason about a lambda expression should be interested in expression trees. Today, I'm going to write particularly to those who are implementing code that reads expression trees. Even if you don't plan to do that, I hope you follow along because this stuff is interesting to know and understand regardless ...
Visual Basic Developer Center Gets a Facelift (Beth Massi)
I'm happy to announce the redesign of the Visual Basic Developer Center! This is the first step in a series of community-focused and dynamic content changes you'll be seeing on the Developer Center. Many thanks to the people over at MSDN, (especially Kerby) that made this a reality. Besides the new UI and fresh headlines and downloads, check out the new MVP aggregated blog feed and the new article on Silverlight by Rod Paddock. And keep checking back daily for updated content and new features!Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
Visual Basic Pack for Visual Studio 2005 SDK Released! (Beth Massi)
The Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Team released the Visual Basic Pack for Visual Studio 2005 SDK on Friday! This download provides the SDK samples in Visual Basic and a new wizard that is used for generating Visual Basic-based integration packages for Visual Studio. Head on over to the VSX team blog for more info.It's important to note that while current VB support for the VS 2005 SDK is in the form of this independent add-on install, VB support for the upcoming VS 2008 SDK will be included (integrated in along with C++ and C# support). So if you're itching to extend Visual Studio but don'...
XML to Schema Tool for Visual Basic 2008 (Beth Massi)
This week we posted a new tool called the XML to Schema Tool that allows you to easily import XML and infer schemas. The tool runs when when you add a new item to your VB 9 project and select the XML to Schema new item template (look under My Templates after you install). This allows you to work with XML much easier in Visual Basic 9 by inferring schemas from XML files and resources and adding the .XSD files to your project in order to enable IntelliSense on the XML properties. Take a look at the walk-through on this page and download it now!Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
Lambda Expressions and Expression Trees
Hi there! My name is Tim, and I'm the dev lead for the VB compiler team. Recently Amanda convinced me to blog on the VB team blog rather then my own blog for a variety of reasons, and so here I am. My current plan is that I'll post VB related postings here, and more compiler implementation/technology/fun facts on my own blog (ie, things that don't relate to the VB language/features). Recently my article on lambda expressions got published on MSDN magazine. For this blog post, I'm going to expand on some of the ideas in that article, so feel free to check out the article if some of the ideas here don't make s...
Channel 9 Interview – John Stallo on Building N-Tier Applications in VS 2008 (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with John Stallo talking about some cool tools in Visual Studio 2008 that will help you build simple N-Tier applications. Thanks to Kathleen again for helping with the shoot! This time we got fancy and used two camera angles ;-):Building N-Tier Applications in Visual Studio 2008In this in interview John Stallo, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, talks about WCF and simple N-Tier applications. He talks about a specific architecture scenario and some of the pain points we have building n-tier applications today. He then walks us through the improvements made in the D...