Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Visual Basic XML Transform – TechEd demo prep
Hello from Orlando! I’ve been at TechEd 2007 this week in very sunny Orlando. As part of my demo prep, I had to create a little xml transform to convert the TechEd schedule that I got off the www.msteched.com website in an Excel XML format into a more readable xml file format. I could have done this all with one transform, but the newer XML file format made for good demo fodder to show off the XML Intellisense features coming in Orcas Beta2. I thought the code was interesting and fun – a great blend of XML properties, XML Literals, and query – so I’ve posted it below: Imports System.IO Imports <xmlns:ss="urn:...
InteropForms 2.0 Tip #1 – Font Property
(Starting today, we'll be highlighting various tips that might help you when using the InteropForms 2.0 toolkit. With the latest release of the toolkit, you can do some fairly impressive upgrades to your existing VB6 applications. Don't believe me? Check this out as one cool example - WPF in VB6 anyone?!) If you don't have it, you can download the toolkit here. Adding Font Property:Here's a tip on extending Interop Usercontrols that some of you might find useful. Most usercontrols have a "font" property associated with them which can inherit its values fro...
Deploying Applications with the InteropForms 2.0 toolkit
(Recently, we released the InteropForms 2.0 toolkit which allows you to add the richness of .net windows forms to your vb6 application. We've gotten a fair number of questions from customers asking for more details on deployment, so this will hopefully answer most of your questions) As I'm sure you're aware, deploying VB6 COM based applications can get complicated at times, which is one of the great advantages that moving your applications to .NET gives you. The Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 allows you to easily extend your VB6 applications with .NET functionality, which is great,&nbs...
Dissecting Snippets (Matt Gertz)
The snippet feature is one of the features that I’m fondest of in Visual Basic. It was another one of a handful of features that got discussed in a series of “What if…” meetings that Sam & I had during the “Whidbey” planning stages. As I recall, the things that motivated it for Sam was demos, and for me it was macros. Visual Studio already had the capability to allow users to drag text to the toolbox to be reused elsewhere in the code, a time-saver frequently used by program managers during demos, but the code would often need to be modified for diff...
Visual Basic LINQ Hands On Labs for Orcas Beta 1 (Beth Massi)
The VB team just posted some Hands On Labs on LINQ and LINQ to SQL for Orcas Beta 1. The first lab provides an introduction to The LINQ Project. You'll look at basic LINQ features including the Standard Query Operators, and you'll see how these features can be used against in-memory collections, connected databases, and XML documents. The second lab aims to provide a clear picture of the relational data access support provided by the LINQ Project, referred to as LINQ to SQL. Enjoy!- Beth Massi, VS Community
So what does ComClass actually do?
I came across a really cool article yesterday by James Ashley, which shows some of the cool things you can do with the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0. The three VB6 examples cover consuming a WebService (complete with a Dilbert icon showing up in the VB6 toolbox!), implementing multithreading using the BackgroundWorker component, and last but not least a cool WPF cube. Best of all there’s tons of code samples and no less than *15* screenshots! Along with the samples there’s also some C# translations of the templates that ship with the Interop Toolkit. While playing with these...
Bill & Steve (Jobs!) reminisce about floating point BASIC
Another entry in the annals of BASIC history today…. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sat down for an interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital for the D5 conference. One of the highlights of the video is recalling the agreement Apple struck with Microsoft for a version of BASIC which supported floating point numbers. Apparently, Steve begged Steve Wozniak to implement such a version of BASIC, eventually licensed a version that supported floating point numbers from Microsoft, and then released it as Applesoft BASIC in 1979. Watching them tell the story is like having your parents ...
Closures in VB Part 3: Scope
Jared here again. For previous articles in this series please see Thus far in the series we've only lifted variables that are declared in the same block/scope. What happens if we lift variables in different scope? The answer is that one closure class will be created for every unique scope where a lifted variable is declared and all of the variables in that scope that are lifted will be placed in that closure. Once again, examples speak best The code will end up looking like so ... There are a couple of items to take away from this example. The next twist is what were to happ...
Error correction (Matt Gertz)
It’s funny how we come up with a VB feature sometimes. I remember one case pretty well. I was the new dev lead of the VB editor at the time, and I was talking about possible features for “Whidbey” (i.e. Visual Studio 2005) with my program manager, Sam. We’d been talking about snippets, a feature that Sam & I had coincidentally converged upon from different directions, and we were trying to iron out the differences between our designs. Sam brought up a visualization that he’d put together on Power Point, and I quickly prototyped a part of it in C++ (that being th...