Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Visual Basic & Smart Devices (Matt Gertz)
Last week I talked a bit about operator overloading, and used the concept to support a library of matrix functions. This week, we’ll use those functions in a Smart Device application to create a matrix calculator. Smart Device applications It’s extremely easy to create an application for your Smart Device. Let’s start from the solution we created last week. Assuming that solution is loaded, choose “File,” “Add,” “New Project…” and then in the resulting dialog, expand the “Smart Device” node under the Visual Basic node. You’ll find 3 child nodes – one for Pocket PC 2003, one for Smartphone ...
Visual Basic Forms over Data "How-to" video series (Beth Massi)
Friday we posted the first 8 videos of the Visual Basic Forms over Data "How-to" video series on MSDN. If you don't have the Visual Basic Dev Center as your homepage you might have missed the headline. ;-) This how-to video series is dedicated to getting Visual Basic developers productive on areas of data-based Windows Application development. The series starts with the basics of database development with SQL-Server 2005 Express then walks through the details of connecting to and querying databases, and Windows Forms development basics using the built-in designers in Visual Basic 2005. I plan ...
AmandaS' LINQ talk at VSLive Orlando
I escaped from Redmond this week to present at VSLive Orlando on LINQ in Visual Studio Orcas. As promised, please find the slides and demos included as an attachment below. As mentioned during the talk – that was intended to be an overview. If you want really want to understand the nitty-gritty details behind what make LINQ possible, be certain to tune into my LINQ Deep Dive WebCast on May 23rd. If you’d like me to go into something specific during the webcast, just respond to this post. I can’t promise to get to everything in the webcast itself, but I do promise to answer any LINQ related questions in response ...
Operator Overloading: A demonstration using matrices (Matt Gertz)
Over a decade ago, before I joined Microsoft, I was a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon studying robotics. One of the things that you had to do to get into the doctoral program was pass a qualifier test (“the qual”), which was a three-hour oral examination at the conclusion of the Master’s program. My qual was, without a doubt, the most grueling experience I’d ever gone through – rougher than my actual dissertation several years later, and certainly rougher than a Microsoft interview. (“You just want me to write a program to shuffle a deck of cards? I think I can manage that…”) F...
Closures in VB Part 2: Method Calls
For previous articles in this series, please see Jared here again. This part of the series will focus on how method calls are handled in closures. As stated in the previous article, the purpose of closures is to allow all operations inside a lambda or query expression that would normally be available inside the function or sub. To do this closures often need to capture (or lift) relevant variables from the function into the generated class. There are 2 types of methods and method calls that closures have to handle. Scenario #1 Below is an example of a method call inside a l...
Closures in VB: Part 1
My name is Jared Parsons and I am a developer on the VB Compiler and Debugger. One of the features I implemented for VB 9.0 is lexical closure support. This a great addition to the VB language and I wanted to do a series of blog posts to describe this feature and how it will impact your code. Lexical Closures (more often referred to as simply Closures) are the underpinnings for several new features in Visual Basic 9.0. The are part of the guts of Lambda and Query expressions. This will be a several part series on Closures in VB 9.0; how they work, their limitations, pitfalls surroun...
Just Released – Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0!
Today we launched the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0, which makes it easier than ever to upgrade VB6 applications to .NET. This new release builds on version 1.0 by adding support for the following features: In the picture below you can see we've got a VB6 Form hosting a .NET UserControl which contains a MenuStrip and a ToolStrip. By inserting default items, we can build a control containing a MenuStrip and a ToolStrip, and hook it into VB6 - all in less than a minute!Any public Properties, Methods, or Events defined in the UserControl are visible to VB6. You can also use My.InteropToolbox to&...
Four dynamic languages for .NET interoperating!
John Lam just posted a screen cast of four dynamic languages interoperating in SIlverlight on the Mac! Check it out!
VB On Silverlight
One of the great things about being on the VB team is that we’re generally in the loop early and often with teams developing new technologies and products. It’s always exciting to see ideas take shape, evolve into a product, and eventually hit the market—often after four or five code names, a couple of tech previews, and a few release date/year extensions. Despite my best efforts, the sheer volume of new stuff coming out is a bit overwhelming; and maintaining more than a cursory understanding of the products that are incubating at Microsoft is pretty challenging. But when some partner teams started asking ...