Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Visual Basic on Channel9 (Beth Massi)
I just posted a couple screen casts/interviews on Channel9 you should definitely check out. I rounded up VB team members and influentials and asked them what their favorite Visual Studio 2008 features were and to give us all a demo of them! The first one is with Erik Meijer and he shows us his favorite feature, XML Literals:In this in interview Erik Meijer, an Architect on the Data Programmability team, shows us how LINQ to XML works in the next version of Visual Basic, 9.0. He talks about some of the history behind the features as well as how XML literals, unique to Visual Basic, are implemented. He takes us on ...
Sons and Daughters Day: a pure blast!
On Friday, Chris Smith and I (Chris is a test engineer on the VB Team) attended an event called 'Sons and Daughters' day. The day consisted of 2 sessions (20-25 kids in each) where kids aged 6-13 were run through a class of writing an app in VB (20-25 kids in each). The class was very introductory, but eas very appropriate for the audience. Parents typically hung out with their kids to help things along. The role Chris and I played was to be additional helpers, to be able to provide extra assistance as necessary (parents were typically good at helping their kids along, but the odd issue or question wuld...
How do we write software at Microsoft: a PM intern’s perspective #1
Now that you know our team, it is time to get down to the real meat - we are building software here, so let’s talk about software. As I promised to keep you up to date with what is going on here at Microsoft, I decided to start a series of blog posts under the title “How do we write software at Microsoft: a PM intern’s perspective”. Expect to get a flavor of the Dev and QA prospective as well really soon!Even though our team is small and the project lifecycle will be relatively short (just 3 months), I am sure that throughout the series you will be able to get an idea of how much energy it...
Shameless Plug (Scott Wisniewski)
If you get a chance, you should check out the August 2007 edition of MSDN Magazine. In addition to its usual array of awesome goodies, this month's edition features a super cool Basic Instincts column, written by me. In it I discuss the design of Query Comprehensions in VB, giving an overview of the basic framework used by the compiler to translate queries into code. I hope that it should be interesting to anyone who wants to write their own custom query provider, or for anyone who just wants an understanding of how things work under the covers. If you don't have access to the print version, you can see the onlin...
Using the PrintForm component in Visual Basic (Matt Gertz)
(This is the fourth and final part of the Paint-by-Numbers series) Late last year, some clever guys on our Visual Basic team released the PrintForm component on the web. The idea behind the PrintForm component was to make printing and previewing your form very easy in .NET. I’m going to leverage this component to enable printing of the Paint-by-Number puzzles created in the application I’ve been building in this series. First of all, I need to download the component, which is available here on the Microsoft site – it’s about 500KB. Once downloaded, I’ll install it (you can even do this while Vis...
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 7: Selecting Pages of Data from Northwind (Jonathan Aneja)
Ingredients: - Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) - Connection to Northwind database Categories: LINQ-To-Objects, LINQ-To-SQL Instructions:· Create a new Windows Forms project with a Northwind DataContext (for step-by-step instructions on how to do this please see Recipe #6)· Drop a DataGridView control from the Toolbox onto the Form· &nbs...
Linq Cookbook, Recipe 6: Your first Linq Application using Northwind (Kit George)
This example is intended as a ‘primer’ for following recipes (so we don’t repeat the same instructions multiple times). This recipe takes you through everything you need, and assumes only that you've installed Visual Studio (and in so doing, you've installed SQLExpress). Subsequent Northwind based Linq-To-Sql recipes will point to this entry.Ingredients:- Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) We assume that SQL Express (or better) has been installed Categories: LI...
How to implement IQueryable (by Kevin Halverson)
Here’s a link to a post I just finished on ‘How to implement IQueryable’ (create a custom Linq provider).http://blogs.msdn.com/kevin_halverson/archive/2007/07/10/how-to-implement-iqueryable.aspxMy example project allows you to query the Windows Vista (Desktop) Search engine for files on your local machine. For example: Dim index As New WDSQueryObject Dim cutoffDate = #6/28/2007# Dim r = From file In index _ ...
Loading and Saving Files in Visual Basic (Matt Gertz)
(This is part 3 of the Paint-by-Numbers series)There are four issues I want to deal with in this post: New, Open, Save (As), and Exit. I’ll be doing these in order, but all of them depend on knowing whether or not the application is dirty, so I’ll deal with that problem first. Opening and saving files isn’t a particularly hard problem once you know how to deal with streams, but knowing when to notify users about potential data loss when opening files (or creating new ones, or closing an application) involves some logic, and that's where understanding "dirtiness" comes into play...