Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
What do the announcements at Mix mean for the Visual Basic developer?
At the Mix conference today in Las Vegas, Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie were dropping goodies like tootsie pops from a piñata. There was so much packed into their over two hour keynote that I thought it would be useful to distill the announcements down into one bite-sized post that should make for a pretty quick read (but unfortunately, includes no code samples.)- VB on Silverlight – In short, this means that you can now use Visual Basic as the code-behind for whiz-bang rich interactive applications that run on Windows or the Mac and can run in IE, ...
The Best of Intentions (Matt Gertz)
The title pretty much describes this post. I had fully intended to work on a Smart Device application for VB last week, and post the walkthrough here. VB is a great language for coding against devices, and there are a lot of cool things you can use a device for, so I was looking forward to a fun post on that this morning. However, I ended up needing to dig into some administrative work last week, and so I must apologize for not getting to the coding. I’m hoping that this current rush will wind down later this week, and I can refocus on a little app building.The root cause of my perso...
So, you're going to Mix?
Now that Orcas Beta1 is on your machines, we’re trying to finish up the Beta2 version of Orcas to deliver those features you are so eagerly awaiting – features like Group By, explicit Joins, Nullable, keyword Intellisense, and Lambda Expressions. Things are looking very good as you probably witnessed in Kit’s web cast just the other day. In other news, the MIX developer conference starts on Monday in Las Vegas. I wanted to make sure that our VB web developers out there know which sessions to attend to get the best picture of what’s coming down the road. Obviously, the most revolutionary for ...
Want to Customize your menus in Visual Studio 2005? Here's how… (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This post was inspired by a customer bug on Connect. However, it exposes a cool trick that you all might want to try!Consider the case that you want to make the Command Window item appear in the View menu itself (rather than in its current location in View->Other Windows). Here are 2 ways of doing so:DRAG & DROP: Go to Tools->Customize...Click on the View menu in Visual Studio and navigate via Other Windows to Command Window.Drag the Command Window item from the Other Windows flyout to the location you prefer in the View menu.Close the dialog, and you're done! Note: You can us...
Working with Shortcut Keys (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Since we have so many Orcas posts going up on this blog, I've decided to continue with a few that you can use TODAY in Visual Studio 2005. This one is about working with shortcut keys...For those of you using the Visual Basic Development Settings, your keyboard scheme is set to Visual Basic 6 by default. You can verify this by checking the setting in Tools->Options->Environment->Keyboard.The complete list of keyboard shortcuts for the currently bound commands in the VB6 scheme is located here. (Note: This is also a good source for command descriptions.)Once you ...
Save Time – Use Keyboard Shortcuts! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Visual Studio is all about developer productivity. To help developers be more efficient, Visual Studio has built keyboard shortcuts into the product for most of the functions normally found through the user interface – just like CTRL-C for copy. To help you take advantage of these shortcuts, we’ve created posters that map out the default key bindings for our most popular Visual Studio 2005 languages – Visual Basic, Visual C# and Visual C++. These key binding reference posters are available as free pdf’s through the download center at Microsoft.com. They are provided in pr...
Controls on the fly (Matt Gertz)
Controls on the fly (Matt Gertz) So last week, I posted up a simple “Maze” game, in which you navigate through a virtual environment similar to the old “Myst” game. The way I’d coded it, though, it didn’t actually have any “game” to it – you just walked around. In this post I’ll add some state to it (which, after all, is pretty much all that defines a game, beyond being fun) -- things to interact with. There are a number of ways I could implement environmental objects in the game, but I think I’ll take this opportunity to discuss how to add controls on the fly. I could add a bunch of controls to...
Visual Basic LINQ Samples Updated for Orcas Beta 1! (Beth Massi)
The Visual Basic LINQ Samples have been updated for Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1! This is a set of 101 samples that demonstrate all the features of Visual Basic's Language Integrated Query in Orcas Beta 1. Also check out the The LINQ Project page. This has been updated with links to some news articles and quote highlights that give an overview of the history of Microsoft's Language Integrated Query (LINQ) project, the reasons behind its development, and the benefits and features LINQ offers to developers. We’re also continuing to update the main Visual Basic Developer Center wit...
Visual Basic "Orcas" Beta1 is in the wild! (Amanda Silver)
Woohoo! Its official, we finally got Orcas Beta1 out the door! We’re very excited to get this release out to you so we can finally talk about some of the stuff we’ve been working on in addition to the LINQ and XML feature-set. We believe that Orcas Beta1 displays all of the essential value in the Orcas product but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not feature-complete. There are many features (for example: lambda expressions, support for nullable types, etc.) that will be coming online in a later milestone. That said, back to Beta1! Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion on this blog about the L...