Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Channel 9 Interview – Visual Basic Intellisense Improvements in VS 2008 (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview with Lisa on Channel9 that you'll probably want to check out -- showing the new and much much imporoved Intellisense for Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008:In this interview Lisa Feigenbaum, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Editor, shows us all the improvements made to the Intellisense support in Visual Basic including keyword and local variable Intellisense, new language feature support, and top customer requests. Although every feature is important, the biggest chunk of the work this cycle was supporting the new language features including LINQ. As Lisa puts it, "The...
LINQ to XML Videos (Beth Massi)
Bill Burrows has created a series of videos to help get the community started with LINQ to XML in Visual Basic! These videos were created in conjunction with his upcoming MSDN article that will be published soon. Bill takes an easy to follow, step-by-step approach to explaining the details in this exciting new technology in Visual Basic 9.0. He walks us through creating an Excel spreadsheet from an RSS feed of homes for sale using the Windows Live Expo service. Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
Channel9 Interview: Scott Wisniewski on Extension Methods in Visual Basic 9.0 (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview with Scott on Channel9 where he talks about extension methods, a new language feature in Visual Basic 9.0:In this in interview Scott Wisniewski, a Developer on the Visual Basic Team, talks about Extension Methods and shows us a couple interesting LINQ providers. In his own unique way, Scott dives into the meaning of Extension Methods and how they can extend types with discoverable methods which are part of the underpinnings of LINQ. He walks through some code written as an extension to LINQ query results to generate pie charts and then dives into a LINQ provider he built th...
If I gave you $200 to spend on VB, how would you spend it?
I spent the last few weeks using VB, and I kept thinking things such as “Wow, this is really awesome, I wish all other languages had that!” or “I’m sure there is an easier way to do this”. I simply can’t help it - just as with any other language, when I start using it I notice a few things that are really cool, and a few things that can be improved.So, I had my very own list of what was really cool and what could be better, but then I wondered – how did other VB developers feel? And, what is a better way to answer a question like this than actually asking the co...
Amanda Silver will be Presenting VB and Silverlight on Second Life! (Beth Massi)
If you haven't seen or experienced Second Life it's pretty amazing. It's an online, 3D, digital world. Visual Studio has created an island where you can come listen to live Microsoft presenters in this virtual world's live presentation theater! Amanda Silver will be presenting Visual Basic on Silverlight tomorrow, July 31st at 4pm Pacific time. There's a lot of other fun events you should check out as well. See you there! -Beth Massi, VS Community
Kit George and Chris Smith on Channel9 (Beth Massi)
I posted a couple more videos on Channel9 that you'll definitely want to check out! Thanks again to Kathleen for helping with the production.The first one Kit George walks us through some of his favorite VB9 language features that enable LINQ:In this in interview Kit George, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team and a former member of the CLR Team, shows us his favorite language features that enable LINQ without actually talking about the queries themselves. His excitement about Extension Methods, Anonymous Types, Object Initializers, Type Inference and the new Refactor! shows through in typical Kit ...
Lambdas, and Take While, and Group By, Oh My!
Hooray! Visual Basic 2008 Beta2 has been released to the wild today to return to its natural habitat – the desktops of our beloved customers. (Please note our smiling GPM's face on that landing page -- he's so happy the Beta is done.) What’s inside? So much that there might be more new features than we released in Beta1, but who’s counting? Here’s a laundry list that’s specific to the VB language that’s new for Beta2: · Query operators o Group By, Group Join, Join, Take [While], Skip [While], Aggregate, Count, Sum, Min, Max, Average, From à Let · &n...
Closures in VB Part 5: Looping
For previous articles in the series please see Once again sorry for the long delay between posts. Looping structures can cause unintended consequences when used with Lambda expressions. The problem occurs because lambda expressions do not execute when they are constructed but rather when they are invoked. For example take the following code. Many users are surprised to find out the above will print "4 4 4 4 ". The reason goes back to my previous 2 posts on variable lifetime and scope. All "For" and "For Each" blocks in Vb have 2 scopes. The first scope is entered on...
Today's Performance Webcast Slide Deck and Channel9 Interview (Beth Massi)
The VB team thanks everyone who attended Cameron's webcast on Performance Improvements in Visual Studio 2008 this morning. If you missed it, you can click this link for the on-demand replay. I've attached his slides that he used in the webcast for your reference. Also check out Cameron's Channel9 interview for more information (and if you're curious to see what he actually looks like!). Enjoy! -Beth Massi, VS Community performancewebcast.pptx