Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Today's Live From Redmond Webcast Rescheduled [Beth Massi]
Amanda Silver came down with a nasty sickness last night so we just had to reschedule her Live From Redmond: VB9 - Conquering XML with LINQ to XML talk for this Tuesday July 3rd. If you're already registered then you're good to go for next week and automated emails should have been sent out to notify you all of the change. If you haven't registered yet, what are you waiting for? :-)Sincerest apologies from Amanda -- and we hope she feels better very soon!
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 2: Find all capitalized words in a phrase and sort by length (then alphabetically) (Kit George)
Ingredients:- Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher)- Some text you want to search Categories: LINQ-To-Objects, LINQ and strings, LINQ and WinForms Instructions:- Open Visual Studio 2008, and Click ‘File/New Project’. Find and double-click the ‘Windows Forms Application’ Icon- Drag and drop a Listbox to the form. Size the listbox to be fairly tall. Drag and drop a button to the form- &nbs...
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 1: Change the font for all labels on a windows form (Kit George)
Folks, we’re gonna start a ‘cookbook’ of LINQ entries, which we’ll be building over time. This is just meant to be a series of solutions to specific scenarios, that the team comes across when writing code and using queries. I can't think of a better way to communicate everything you might use LINQ for! The point of the series is to show you the wide array of things LINQ can do. Like any good cookbook, we’ll have categories for the cookbook, so you can easily find items later. Don’t expect any particular ‘recipe’ to have a large description, although they will c...
Closures in VB Part 4: Variable Lifetime
For previous articles in this series please see Sorry for the long delay between posts here. We're getting Orcas out the door and getting this series completed takes a back seat to shipping. Originally I wanted to talk about looping structures next. However when I started writing that post I realized that I had to talk about lifetime before the looping structures would make sense. Prior to Orcas the lifetime of a variable in VB was the entire function. This presented several problems from a closures perspective. Imagine you had a looping structure and the value was used in ...
Slide Deck and Samples for LINQ Best Practices (Beth Massi)
Lisa Feigenbaum gave a great webcast this morning on LINQ best practices (if you missed it, just click the link and view it on-demand). Here is the deck and the samples she used. Please Note: The sample code is based on a more recent build of Visual Studio 2008 so some of the Join syntax may not work in Beta 1. We felt it important, however, to release this to the community early so you could see the latest syntax for LINQ. Happy LINQing! -Beth Massi, Program Manager VS Community LisaLINQWebcast.zip
Live From Redmond Webcast Just Added on LINQ to XML (Beth Massi)
Back by popular demand! Amanda Silver will be presenting Live From Redmond: VB9 - Conquering XML with LINQ to XML on June 27th. In Visual Basic 9.0, XML becomes a built-in data type with a rich editing experience that completely eliminates the conceptual barrier between the code that you write and the XML that you’re trying to express. Amanda will take you from the guts of the LINQ to XML API to the easy to grasp abstractions presented in Visual Basic 9.0. It will cover tips, tricks, and gotchas so that you reach peak performance when programming against XML with Visual Basic 9.0.Hope to see...
Some thoughts on Edit and Continue and Design-Time Expression Evaluation (Matt Gertz)
The story of Edit and Continue (which I’ll refer to as EnC) is a very long one. Having been a cornerstone of Visual Basic in the past, it had always been planned for us to ship an Edit and Continue experience with Visual Studio 2002. But we didn’t. Why? Well, it all came down to time. VB7 (let’s call it that for convenience, though it’s not the official moniker) was a total rewrite from VB6 – not one line of code was reused. The new code had to target a different editor (owned by the VS Shell team) and a different runtime (owned by the CLR team).&n...
What is the difference between VB 9, VBx and Silverlight? (Scott Wisniewski)
I recently received an email from a customer asking for clarification as to what the difference was between VB 9, VBx and Sliverlight. In particular, it seems as if we have been releasing so much information about cool new stuff that at least a few people have become confused, making them a bit nervous about the future of VB. The customer had also expressed some concerns about upgrading from VS 2005 to Orcas (VS 2008), particularly because he was considering making an upgrade from VB 6 to VS 2005 and wanted to make sure he would be able to take advantage of Orcas when it was released. I figured there may be other...
Slide deck for Interop Toolkit Webcast
Thanks to everyone who was able to make it out for this morning's webcast. We covered how to use the Interop Toolkit 2.0 to upgrade VB6 applications to VB.NET, how to deploy hybrid applications, and finally we touched on some other great interop resources available on MSDN. As promised the slide deck's available below, and here's the list of important links: VBRun - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbrunInterop & Upgrade Forum - http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=879 Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/bb419144.aspxVB PowerPack Team - vbpwrpk@micr...