Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
New VB XNA Sample – showing Xbox, Windows and Phone targetting
![Anthony D. Green [MSFT]](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/letter-avatar/7c5b09a72c1d6e6f2a21258b8cf078b8.svg){kind=avatar}
For all those who have started venturing into developing windows phone applications, there are quite a few samples utilizing Silverlight, but the XNA content has been a little bit light. (We are working on getting some more XNA VB samples online). But for those wanting to see a nice VB example of XNA development, the Blackjack sample written in VB is now online. This sample shows a single application which has been written to target all three of the XNA platforms (windows, XBox 360 and windows Phone) with a simple game that is easy to follow the code.http://crea...
VB Support for Microsoft Surface 2.0
Touch screen are great and we’ve seen their use on phone and slates but sometimes these screens still just are not big enough. For those who desire bigger touch screens, Microsoft surface may be the answer. Microsoft surface has been around a while and there have been significant changes with version 2.0. Version 2.0 introduces new functionality and support for more compact hardware. A glance at the Microsoft Surface team web site reveals some incredibly interesting uses for the technology.The samples provided are a great introduc...
Roslyn Syntax Visualizers
Hi All! A few weeks ago, we announced the Microsoft "Roslyn" CTP. I hope many of you have had a chance to download the CTP and take it for a spin :) If you haven’t, do give it a try. To recap – in the Roslyn CTP, we are previewing a powerful set of language services APIs that you can use within your apps to reason about VB and C# code. We are also previewing IDE extensibility points for VB and C# that will allow you to build rich code refactorings, quick fixes etc. that run inside Visual Studio. In this post, I just wanted to point out a couple of tools that you may be interested in if you are worki...
Putting back functionality left out of VB Core – ( If you can't live without Mid when writing WP7 apps ;-) )
For development of windows phone applications a new feature was added to the Visual Basic compiler known as VB Core. This is a reduced version of the runtime designed to allow development for a broader variety of platforms without incurring the larger penalty of having a full VB runtime containing non-supported or older VB6 legacy functionality which are now implemented as part of the framework itself. However this results in some features not being supported on this platform such as Late binding, My functionality and somelegacy VB functions. You may not be targeting WP7 yet but this reduced runtime is also being...
Halloween: VB Style!
Imagine this. It’s Halloween. You’ve got a costume party to go to at 7 but there’s one small hiccup – you’ve got no costume. As a VB programmer you’re used to coming up with nick-of-time solutions to all manner of complex business problems but all your coding skills won’t help you now. After all, you can’t just code up a costume – or can you? Here’s a little number I cooked up two years ago (before I joined the Developer Ghouls division at Microsoft) called the Opensourus Hex costume. First, make up a short but interesting VB program and write it out (i...
Introducing the Microsoft "Roslyn" CTP
(Begin dramatic movie trailer music, slow PowerPoint slide show with cliché sound effects) OK, maybe I have a flair for the dramatic but that’s because today is such a dramatically exciting day. After years of foreshadowing, and mentioning, and updating on our part I’m thrilled to announce on behalf of the united Visual Basic & C# Languages Team the availability of the Microsoft “Roslyn” CTP. This early preview represents an incredible milestone for us in a years-long process of bootstrapping both languages and providing a rich set of APIs exposing a host of compiler anal...
Announcement: Namespace Global
There’s a new feature coming to VB, and already included in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. The feature is called Namespace Global and it’ll make your life easier… The MSDN reference on namespaces (including Namespace Global) is here: Namespaces in Visual Basic. As an aside, I’d like to thank Shimmy Wietzhandler for requesting this feature in Microsoft Connect, and also the people who emailed or who wrote in with comments to Lucian Wischik’s VB language-design blog. It’s from user feedback like these that we decide which features to prioritize. For the future...
Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: Visual Basic (VB) Call Hierarchy
By Zain Naboulsi (Blog) Default: CTRL + ALT + K Menu: View | Call Hierarchy Command: View.CallHierarchy; EditorContextMenus.CodeWindow.ViewCallHierarchy Versions: Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview Languages: VB With the announcement of the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview it’s time to take a look at some of the features you can start using with our latest version of the IDE right away. If you are already familiar with the C++/C# Call Hierarchy feature from my previous blog post then you are already familiar with the features and may just want to start playing with this on your own. Fo...
Dynamics CRM 2011 Developer Training Kit – Updated with VB Source
An update to the training kit has been made providing Visual Basic developers with sample code for the development features of Dynamics CRM and help them build applications using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and CRM Online.Download available athttp://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=23416