Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
Visual Basic support planned for .NET 5.0
We’ve heard your feedback that you want Visual Basic on .NET Core. Visual Basic in .NET 5 will support additional application types.
Visual Basic in .NET Core 3.0
Visual Basic in .NET Core 3 Update: March 12, 2020 This strategy described in this 2018 post has been replaced with the one in this post. Update: Oct 8, 2019 .NET Core 3.0 contains portions of the Visual Basic.NET Runtime (microsoft.visualbasic.dll) that do not depend on WinForms. Visual Basic.NET support for WinForms, WPF, and other application types in .NET Core 3.0 is similar to C#. Special features of the Visual Basic.NET Runtime (microsoft.visualbasic.dll) are not in .NET Core 3.0. As an example, application startup using application models are not supported. Visual Basic.NET desktop templates...
Combining Angular, Visual Basic and .NET Core for developing modern web apps
Visual Basic supports .NET Core starting in Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 (15.3). This opens new possibilities for new applications and modernizing existing applications. Preserving domain-specific code when modernizing applications allows step-wise conversions, decreases cost, and avoids disruptions. This post covers using Visual Basic ASP.NET Core WebAPI for the back end, along with a new TypeScript and Angular front end. Working in Visual Basic lets you work in your favorite language and reuse existing business logic. The TypeScript/Angular front end provides a responsive SPA (single-page-application) user inter...
Roslyn Primer – Part I: Anatomy of a Compiler
![Anthony D. Green [MSFT]](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/eb6b2bca8f98b35298f2041865b4cce5?s=96&r=g){kind=avatar}
So, you’ve heard that VB (and C#) are open source now and you want to dive in and contribute. If you haven’t spent your life building compilers, you probably don’t know where to start. No worries, I’ll walk you through it. This post is the first of a series of blog posts focused on the Roslyn codebase. They’re intended as a primer for prototyping language features proposed on the VB Language Design repo; and contributing compiler and IDE features, and bug fixes on the Roslyn repo, both on GitHub. Despite the topic, these posts are written from the perspective of someone who’s never taken a course in compilers (I ...
Dependency Injection with Visual Basic .NET – Part 2 – IoC Containers
This post was authored by guest blogger André Obelink, a Visual Basic MVP, and published by the VBTeam on his behalf. In my previous post, I wrote about the basics of dependency injection. I explained the technique to define an interface and injecting the dependencies to a client object. These dependencies contain the real implementation of that specific interface. Applying dependency injection makes your code more loosely coupled, which helps you in maintaining, extending, and testing your codebase. The example we ended up with works fine, but it can still be improved for some scenarios. In this post I will sho...
Dependency Injection with Visual Basic .NET – Part 1
This post was authored by guest blogger André Obelink, a Visual Basic MVP, and published by the VBTeam on his behalf. In this first blog post of a series of two, I explain what dependency injection (DI) is and why you might want to use this design principle in your software. The target audience of this post is the junior / medium experienced software developer, with no knowledge of dependency injection or related techniques. In the second post, I’ll describe the use of Inversion of Control Containers (IoC containers), to use dependency injection in a much more flexible way. What is dependency injection? Dependenc...
New for Visual Basic: .NET Standard Class Libraries and the dotnet CLI!
Visual Studio 2017 15.3 Preview 1 included templates for VB class libraries targeting .NET Standard class libraries and for .NET Core console apps. With the release of .NET Core 2.0 today those templates go-live. The .NET Standard You can use the built-in templates to create cross-platform command-line apps, as well as creating and testing cross-platform VB libraries targeting the new .NET Standard. When you target a version of the .NET Standard you get access to all the APIs included in that version of the standard. You can then use that single library in any app targeting a platform that supports that version...
Visual Basic and Cross-Platform: Mobile Apps with VB, Xamarin, and .NET Standard!
How would you like it if you could create a Console App in Visual Basic and run it on Linux? Or running the same Xamarin.Forms-App written in Visual Basic on an iPhone, and Android and a Windows Tablet? Welcome to the world of cross-platform development, which from Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 on – thanks to .NET Standard and .NET Core – is now also available for Visual Basic! Well, currently the preview of Visual Studio 2017 lets you use this, and it is the best set of features that Update 3 (aka VS 15.3) will bring for us VBs: We are getting Visual Basic .NET Core and .NET Standard templates. Note though, that t...
Introduction to (Live) Unit Testing in Visual Basic… [updated for VS 2017 Update 3 Preview 3]
...and Why My Grandma Invented the Concept! Meet late Grandma Grete Schindler. I'd like to introduce you to my grandma, because this post will be about the essence and purpose of unit testing in Visual Basic, and Granny Grete basically invented the concept of unit testing. Yes, she really did, I kid you not – she was a very wise woman! When she saw someone in our family doing their work in a hectic rather than a thoughtful way, she always quoted her most favorite Silesian proverb: “Kinder, schmeißt nicht mit dem Hintern um, was ihr mühsam mit den Händen aufgebaut habt” – which roughly translates to “Kids, ...
Easy Async and Await for VBs Part 1, or…
...letting your code do absolutely nothing! We’ve all been there, one way or the other. Either as users of an app or as the developer to whom users complained to: When a typical Win32 app is waiting for an operation to complete, we often get to see something like this: In discussions about how to get a handle on such scenarios there are all kinds of suggestions, one of the most frequent ones being “You need to do this asynchronously: Just start a new thread! You can do that with Tasks.” And this is when people start introducing patterns like the following into their code which in most cases is not only unnecessa...
Why VB2017 only supports consuming ref returning methods
Hi VBers, Last week Klaus wrote an amazing post detailing a number of improvements made to the Visual Basic IDE and language in Visual Studio 2017 (and he even forgot one, stay tuned for awesome). Regarding the new ref-return feature Jonathan Allen inquired as to why the design was so different from the one in C#. It's not uncommon for considerations in one language to be different in the other or for the styles of the languages to yield different design decisions, even from the same people. But it's a great question so I thought I'd write up a longer explanation for the VB design. To put it bluntly, the capabili...
What's New in Visual Basic 2017
Visual Studio 2017 just shipped, and with it shipped a new version of Visual Basic. With the new language strategy of the .NET Languages, the focus is again on Visual Basic’s original virtue: Provide editor, debugging and refactoring tools as well as language feature to ease complex tasks and boost every VB’s developer productivity without distracting them from their domain specific excellence. After all, it always was first Visual Basic which put the ‘Visual’ into Visual Studio, and let developers get the work done efficiently, yet without compromises in quality! 😎 Speed up Solution Loading times with Enable Lig...
Digging Deeper into the Visual Basic Language Strategy
Today Mads made an excellent post about our overall .NET Language Strategy. As I know this will raise a lot of questions in the VB community I wanted to take an entire post on the VB team blog to dive deeper into how VB fits into that strategy and why and what that means in practical terms for us as a community. Looking Back Six and half years ago, the Visual Studio Languages team laid out the motivations for our then-new co-evolution strategy. Mainly the significant overlap in adoption between VB and C# in adoption and use cases and four "powerful unifying forces" they shared: What's Changed? ...
Relaunching the Visual Basic Team Blog
Last year we decided to retire this blog and consolidate content on the .NET team blog instead. The thinking at the time was that we weren’t really posting a lot of content to it and that there was so much overlap in content between the VB team blog and the C# FAQ that it would be simpler to just focus on the .NET blog. Since then my experience has been that the Visual Basic community still needs a place of its own to discuss topics uniquely relevant to VB developers so we’re relaunching this blog. The .NET team blog will continue to be the source for the latest information on the .NET platform; which is of cours...
New VB T-Shirt Designs on the .NET Blog – Tell Us What You Think
[Update: You can get these cool T-Shirts @ the .NET Swag Store - get yours today!] Mads and Dustin showed off their cool VB and C# team t-shirts at BUILD and tons of people liked them and asked where they could get one. So, we're thinking about making them available for purchase online. I've been working on some new designs and would love to know what you think. See the designs and leave your feedback on the full post over on the .NET team blog. Regards, -ADG
Roslyn ships v1.0-rc2 with "Go-Live" license
For the last six years you've heard us go on and on about this Roslyn thing and how it's the platform for the future and would change everything and that we were all-in on it and "it's going to be great just wait and see". Well, the wait is over. This morning, at BUILD, Principal Program Managers of the Managed Languages Team Mads Torgersen and Dustin Campbell showed during their "What's New in C# 6 and Visual Basic 14" talk that Roslyn is here and Roslyn is ready. As of yesterday Roslyn has a "Go-Live" license. This is the culmination of over half a decade of design and investment from some of the brightest min...
A Journey Through Open Source: The Trials & Triumphs in Roslyn's First Year of Open Source
"I am looking for someone to share in an adventure." — Gandalf, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien On April 3, 2014, Anders Hejlsberg set us on our open source journey when he made the .NET Compiler Platform (aka “Roslyn”) source code public live on stage in San Francisco. Without much open source experience to guide us (or a Grey Wizard), we anxiously yet excitedly hit the open roads. This post details the real and true story of the trials and triumphs we’ve experienced in Roslyn’s first year of open source. The Call to Adventure Previously, in order for developers to build a code-...
Lowercase Keywords Revisited (not an April Fools’ Day joke this time, I promise)
Hey all, I hope you enjoyed yesterday's April Fools' Day post. I thought it was a fun way to kick off an experiment I'd like to conduct and in this post I'll tell you how you can actually try out lowercase keywords for VB on your machine right now no matter what version of VS you're using (no joke). You see, a few years back Architect-emeritus Paul Vick asked a question, "Do PascalCased keywords make VB look more verbose than it really is?" At the time I didn't really give the question enough thought but a lot of commenters responded positively about the look (both then and yesterday) and recently I got to thin...
How “Roslyn” Finally Unshackled Visual Basic From The Tyranny of the Pretty-Lister
UPDATE 2015-04-02: After reading this post be sure to read the follow-up post! I was chatting with an old Microsoftie a while ago and he let me in on the real story behind Visual Basic’s at times aggressive reformatting of code. It turns out that it didn’t actually start out as a feature but as a consequence of how the IDE was implemented. You see, older computers had significantly more limited memory available to them by modern standards. Every byte was precious. If you were to look at the way the VB IDE works today there are separate layers and data structures for representing the syntax of the lan...
Edit & Continue and Make Object ID Improvements in CTP 6
It's the beginning of a new year! According to Back to the Future Part II, everyone will be riding hoverboards in a couple months (and, let's be honest, Doc would love the HoloLens). In the meantime, let's explore the enhancements we've made to the Visual Studio debugging experience. In CTP 6, we improved the edits supported by Edit & Continue and now support Make Object ID in the new 2015 VB and C# expression evaluators. Before you read more about our improvements in CTP 6, make sure you have read Anthony's post on debugging improvements in Visual Studio 2015 Preview. Edit & Continue is reaching its pote...
We're moving to GitHub!
It’s official. We’re moving to GitHub! We are moving the Roslyn OSS code from CodePlex to GitHub. GitHub has a vibrant open source community that we want to actively be a part of and contribute to. We are also going to take this time to modify our pull request process. Please see below for more details: WHEN: This upcoming Wednesday or Thursday, depending on whether we encounter any problems. WHERE: Under the .NET Foundation. More details coming soon. HERE! (Edit: 1/16/15) WHY: We are moving our code to GitHub as well as switching to use git internally. This means we wi...
Better together: Visual Basic 14 and the Visual Studio 2015 Debugger
"Lambdas! Lambdas! Lambdas! Lambdas! ..." If you hadn't heard, Visual Studio 2015 will support the use of lambda expressions in the debugger windows. We're all very excited to deliver on this longstanding TOP customer request. When LINQ was introduced in 2008 it was a game changer for the way .NET developers think about and code with data. So, to finally be able to use these powerful coding constructs with the Visual Studio debugger is a match made in Redmond. But wait. There's more! The new expression evaluators (the language-specific components that enable you to run snippets of code in various debugger contex...
New Language Features in Visual Basic 14
"Visual Basic 14" is the version of Visual Basic that will ship with Visual Studio 2015. In this blog post I'll talk specifically about the VB language improvements in this release. (Separately, there are a whole host of IDE and project-system improvements as well). There are two overall themes to the language improvements: (1) Make common coding patterns a little cleaner, with easy-to-grasp syntax (2) Fix up some irritating corners of the language that you probably already expected to work. This release will be easier to digest than was Visual Basic 12, with its introduction of async! (The version number of Visu...
New Language Features in Visual Basic 14 (animated)
"Visual Basic 14" is the version of Visual Basic that will ship with Visual Studio 2015. In this blog post I'll talk specifically about the VB language improvements in this release. (Separately, there are a whole host of IDE and project-system improvements as well). There are two overall themes to the language improvements: (1) Make common coding patterns a little cleaner, with easy-to-grasp syntax (2) Fix up some irritating corners of the language that you probably already expected to work. This release will be easier to digest than was Visual Basic 12, with its introduction of async! (The version number of Visu...
Post-Release Goodies
The Rosetta lander Philae wasn't the only thing in space last week. Our launch of Visual Studio 2015 Preview and our announcement to open source the full .NET server stack were out of this world. After all, it’s not every day that you can say your work trended higher than Kim Kardashian on Twitter. After an overwhelmingly positive reception to the news of .NET going open source, we want to make sure you know how and where to contribute. The .NET Core repository already has closed about 80 pull-requests (with the majority being merged) and there are some great community efforts going on right now. Here are...
Short Videos Demonstrating What’s New in Visual Studio 2015 Preview for C#, VB, and F#
Our team has put together a set of short videos to highlight some of our work in Visual Studio 2015 Preview. Check them out to learn more about what’s new in C# and VB, how F# can be good for enterprise, and how to improve your code quality with “analyzers”. To learn more about our team’s work in Visual Studio 2015 Preview, check out our overview post. Over 'n' out Kasey Uhlenhuth, Program Manager, Managed Languages Team
Introducing the Visual Studio 2015 Preview for VB and C#
Download Visual Studio 2015 Preview and review the release notes. Over the past several years, our team has been hard at work re-implementing the full language stacks for Visual Basic and C#. While this was a long investment, we knew that an improved stack with a cleaner architecture would allow our team to work faster, empower others to build "code smart" tools and applications, and create a richer and smarter IDE experience in Visual Studio. Today, we are pleased to announce that this work has culminated with the release of Visual Studio 2015 Preview. Visual Studio 2015 Preview showcases many improvements&mdash...
.NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") for the Rest of Us
WOW! It’s been a while -- almost exactly 4 years since yours truly, Beth Massi, last posted on the VB Team blog (although it’s cool to see I’m still in the tag cloud ;-)). I’m honored to be a special guest post today. If you’ve been reading this team blog I’m sure you know by now that the .NET Compiler Platform (code named "Roslyn") is the next generation of the Visual Basic and C# .NET compilers. But what does that mean? I was up in Redmond a couple weeks ago and I caught up with Dustin Campbell (Program Manager on the Managed Languages Team) and sat him down to explain Roslyn to me, a .NET dev...
VB Universal Windows App: downloads
Here are download links for the "VB Universal Windows App" series: App1.vb This is the minimal VB universal app that we'll build in this blog series. Breakout Universal This is a complete game, based upon all the principles that were covered in the blog series. How Do I video series -- Lucian
VB Universal Windows App Part 5: calling into platform-specific APIs from PCL
This is Part 5 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: So far we've been able to re-use all our code and XAML by placing them in the PCL. Actually, PCLs can only ever contain calls to APIs that are common to the platforms they target. This generally isn't a problem, because most APIs on Windows also exist on Windows Phone, and vice versa. Today we'll explore how to call platform--specific APIs from Common code. In particular, we'll make it so our common main page can hide the Windows Phone statusbar (with connection quality, battery, clock) - when it's running on Windows Phone, of course. Ther...
VB Universal Windows App Part 4: using SharpDX for sound effects
This is Part 4 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: So far we've built a solid app, sharing as much code and XAML as possible by placing it in our PCL. For today's post we'll continue the process, adding game-quality sound effects to our app. SharpDX is the best way to do this. Please bear with me. This is a long technical post, because playing game-like audio is a technically involved low-level task. The video lasts 3 minutes, and you should watch it first before returning to read the rest of this post, in which I’ll explain the why as well as the how. I wish audio wer...
VB Universal Windows App Part 3 (for the end-user): roaming settings, and in-app purchases
This is Part 3 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: In the first two parts we set up a VS Solution that helped us to share between our two app projects. In this post, we're going to code in the user-facing benefits of universal Windows apps. From an end-user perspective, the benefit of universal Windows apps is that (1) if you buy the app in one store then it counts as bought in both, (2) if you buy a durable in-app purchase on one device then it counts as bought on both, (3) settings will roam between the Windows and Windows Phone versions of an app. The first part (buy the app in one sto...
VB Universal Windows App Part 2 (for the developer): sharing XAML, Assets and Code
This is Part 2 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: In Part 1 we set ourselves up by registering the app in the two Dev Centers, and by creating the basic structure in Solution Explorer. In Part 2 today, we're going to share! From a developer perspective, the benefit of universal Windows apps is in sharing as much as possible between the two projects you have to build. Let's step back and see what can be re-used... Sharing XAML For our simple game, we're going to re-use a single XAML page and code-behind between Windows and Windows Phone versions of the app. That's...
VB Universal Windows App Part 1: Getting Started
This is Part 1 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: Recently in April 2014, Microsoft announced Universal Windows Apps. I thought I'd take an old Silverlight paddle game and turn it into a VB Universal Windows App. Here's how the finished game looks, on devices and in the stores: What is a Universal Windows App? A "universal Windows app" is a great end-user experience. It means the user of your app can buy the app on Phone, say, and it counts as purchased on Store as well. The user can make an in-app purchase on one device and it counts as purchased on the other. The user...
Visual Studio “14” CTP Now Available
As announced today by Soma, we've just released the first CTP (Community Technology Preview) of the next version of Visual Studio. This is doubly-exciting as this is the first public release of a version of Visual Studio powered by "Roslyn" by default. At BUILD we released the "Roslyn" End User Preview which extends Visual Studio 2013 by replacing some components with their "Roslyn" equivalents but this version of Visual Studio is built from the ground up on "Roslyn" with "Roslyn". The Visual Studio "14" CTP includes new and improved language and IDE features for Visual Basic such as multiline strings and a fu...
Edit and Continue survey results
Thanks everybody for all the great feedback! We've received hundreds of replies since last week with detailed information and concrete examples for us to review. We are closing the survey today and have started to process the tons of data you have provided. The overwhelming majority of you have told us that Edit and Continue is important and you'd like us to make it even better. We asked of the scenarios we'd identified where Edit and Continue is disallowed today how many of you were impacted by which restrictions and here's what you said: As you can see the most frequently reported ...
TechEd: "The Future of Visual Basic and C#" Video Now Available Online!
If you didn't get a change to make it to TechEd this year, fret not, we got it all on video for your viewing pleasure. Join Principal Program Managers Dustin Campbell and Mads Torgersen as they give you the inside scoop on the future of VB and C#. You'll learn about: And better than just showing off all of these cool features you can get your hands on many of them today with today with the "Roslyn" End-User Preview. This preview includes the new code editing experience we're building for VB and C# as well as a smattering of new language features and a preview of the "Roslyn" APIs. If you haven't had a ch...
Help make Edit and Continue better!
UPDATE 2014-05-20: We've received enough responses and the survey is now closed. Thanks everyone! Hey VB developers! Do you get tired of seeing this box (I know I do)? Tell us about it! The Visual Studio team would like your anonymous feedback on improving Edit and Continue (E&C) when developing .NET applications. This survey can take as little as 3 minutes to complete (I’ve saved you some time already by copying all the words on that page to this page so you don’t have to read it twice) and will guide ongoing support and making it work in more places. If you consider yourself a regular E&am...
*New* video series on Windows Store App development using Visual Basic on Microsoft Virtual Academy
Hey VB hackers, Microsoft Virtual Academy recently published a six-part series all about building modern apps for the Windows Store using your favorite language and staring Visual Basic MVP Bill Burrows and yours truly :) Microsoft Virtual Academy is a free service available to anyone to sharpen their skills and learn the latest and greatest technologies. In this series we talk about some of the fundamentals of making applications which take full advantage of all Windows 8 and 8.1 have to offer to create “fast and fluid” experiences for your users as well as how to use new language features added to ...
QuickVB Goes Open Source!
Yesterday we published a copy of a fun “Roslyn”-powered retro editor for Visual Basic called QuickVB in honor of the 50th birthday of BASIC. We thought this was a neat application to showcase our love of BASIC but since then we’ve realized that it’s also a great example of how to put the power of the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”) APIs to use.In the spirit of openness we’ve decided to open source QuickVB as a sample project on CodePlex so that others may tinker with it and learn from it.Have fun!Alex Turner, Ian Halliday, Anthony D. Green on behalf of the Managed Langu...
Happy 50th Birthday, BASIC!
UPDATE: QuickVB is now open source! The Visual Basic team joins Dartmouth and developers worldwide whose lives have been touched by this amazing language in wishing Dartmouth BASIC (and indeed the whole BASIC family of languages) a very happy 50th birthday (and many more) today! So many of us here on the Managed Languages team got our start with one dialect of BASIC or another we couldn’t help but put together something to show our nostalgia and affection for our roots. In homage to grandpa BASIC’s 50th we give you: QuickVB. QuickVB is powered by the .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") NuGet packages...
Visualizing Roslyn Syntax Trees
Hello everyone! I hope you had a chance to catch the recent announcements around the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”). If not, I encourage you to view Anders’s presentation at Build 2014 (skip to 1:10:28). If you haven’t already, download the previews and take them for a spin! What’s included? The Roslyn compiler codebase is now open source. Check out Matt’s recent post for details around how to enlist in the open source project and modify the compiler. In addition to the End User Preview that Matt discussed at the beginning of his post, we are also releasing an SDK Preview. The End User Preview allows you to ...
Taking a tour of Roslyn
It’s a big day for us on the Managed Languages team! As announced at the //BUILD conference earlier today, and as posted by Soma on his blog, we are not just delivering a new preview of Roslyn to all of you, but are in fact moving all of the compiler code to open source! The code will be released and maintained by MS Open Tech, who are our partners in this endeavor. The goal of open-sourcing the compilers is something that we’ve been working towards for just over a year, and we’re really excited that it’s finally time to make the “big reveal.” (Best of all, we no longer have to try to keep a poker face every tim...
Roslyn performance (Matt Gertz)
(For the next few posts, I’m going to introduce readers to the different feature teams in the Managed Languages org. Today, I’m starting this with a focus on the performance team.)Back in 2000, I found myself assigned to be the performance lead of the Visual Basic team, and my first assigned goal was to drive the performance marks of the (then) forthcoming Visual Basic .NET to be in line with the numbers for Visual Basic 6.0. The primary focus was on the VB runtime APIs at first. That was a relatively simple task; APIs are nicely discrete bits of code, easy to measure and easy to eva...
Updated license for September 2012 Roslyn preview available (MattGe)
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, we ended up with a little too much time between previews, to our subsequent embarrassment. In fact, it came to our attention recently that the licensing for the most “recent” CTP (and admittedly I use the term “recent” loosely, given that it was released in September 2012) is set to expire on January 1st, 2014. We don’t really want to reopen a 15-month-old deliverable to update the license, particularly when the code involved is completely out-of-date and we’re working on a plan to resume previews anyway (as I also menti...
Throwing the Big Switch on Roslyn (Matt Gertz, VS Managed Languages Development Manager)
So, the entryway to my house has eight light switches along the wall. Two of them control the porch lights, and another two work the same entryway light (despite the switches being only a couple of feet apart). I haven’t the foggiest idea what the rest of the switches do. I’ve been scared to try them out, actually. (I worry that one day I’ll accidentally throw one of them and find out later that my couch is missing or something odd like that.) However, I am pleased to announce that we’ve turned on quite a different switch here on the Managed Languages team, with ve...
No new VB and C# Language Features in VS 2013
As you can see in the VS2013 Preview, we have not added new language features to Visual Basic and C# in the next version of Visual Studio. I’d like to share our thinking on this. There are essentially two main reasons why we chose not to evolve the languages this time around.The most important is that we just shipped new versions of these two languages less than a year ago, with support for asynchrony being a major new and impactful language feature in both. Developers are still learning how to integrate and benefit from the asynchrony shift in languages and APIs. We are very excited about the quicker pace ...
Roslyn September 2012 CTP Available for Download!
VB Enthusiasts,Following last Wednesday’s official launch of Visual Studio 2012, we’re excited to announce that the Roslyn September 2012 CTP is now available for download and provides support for VS 2012 RTM. Please note that Visual Studio 2010 is no longer supported by this CTP.We’ve been hard at work since the first public release of Roslyn adding support for new language features and improving our APIs. In addition, we’ve also updated our NuGet packages to match the September 2012 CTP.As always, your feedback is critical! Please get involved in the discussion on the Roslyn forum, file ...
Install Published Samples with Visual Studio
You can use Visual Studio 2012 RC to download and install samples from the MSDN Code Gallery. You can download only the samples you need, or you can download one or more Sample Packs, which group several samples that relate to a technology or topic. You'll receive a notification if source code changes are published for any sample that you download.To locate the samples, open the New Project dialog, and then expand the Online tab, and then the Samples node.To locate the sample packs, choose Tools, Extensions and Updates on the menu bar. In the Extensions and Updates dialog box, expand the Online tab, a...
More VB Metro Samples available
With the recent release of the Windows 8 Release Preview and the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate we also have more of the Metro samples available for VB developers.Although not all the samples are available for VB, there is a good selection of samples showing you how utilize much of the important functionality now available. More samples will be made available as the all the products move towards their final RTM relase.Spotty ResourcesWindows 8 Release Preview - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/release-previewVisual Studio 2012 RC - http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/...
Announcing Microsoft “Roslyn” June 2012 CTP
Hey, fellow VBs,Today, we're excited to announce that the Roslyn June 2012 CTP is now available for download!Since the first public release of Roslyn, we’ve been hard at work implementing new language features, addressing top customer feedback from the October CTP, iterating on our API design and improving performance across our IDE and compiler scenarios. With the recent release of Visual Studio 2012 RC, we have updated the Roslyn CTP to work with Visual Studio 2012 RC. There’s never been a better time to grab the VS 2012 RC and the Roslyn CTP!You can find an in-depth look at what’s...
Kinect SDK v1.5 – Now with VB Samples !!!
As developers start to realize the full potential of Microsoft Kinect and new hardware is made available for the PC it’s really great to see the Kinect team provide some sample support for VB developers. For a while the Compilers team (who handle both VB and C# compilers) have been hearing VB developers asking for content on new technologies and have been working with other product teams to ensure VB developers get some content in a timely manner. The Kinect team has included a “Basics” series of samples with language coverage in C++, C# and Visual Basic. Kud...
Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11, now available for .NET 4 and Silverlight 5
If you’ve held off trying Visual Studio 11 Beta because your .NET 4 or Silverlight 5 app uses the Async CTP, your wait is over!Today we’ve published the Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11, a NuGet package that lets your Visual Studio 11 projects target .NET 4 and Silverlight 5 while taking advantage of VB11's new Await keyword. While Visual Studio 11 provides built-in support for Await in projects that target .NET 4.5 or .NET for Metro style apps, this targeting pack provides the API support to expand the set of target platforms to include .NET 4 and Silverlight 5 as well.Check out o...
Visual Basic 11 Beta Available for Download!
As you may have read in Jason’s announcement, today we announced that Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download. This is a huge release for Visual Basic as it provides full platform support for building Windows 8 Metro style apps, a first-class asynchronous programming experience, and also the long-awaited Iterators feature. And in the true spirit of VB, you’ll see a ton of other improvements that will make you more productive every day. AsyncAs the world moves to mobile phones and tablets, the demand for responsiveness in today’s applications is higher than ever...
New VB XNA Sample – showing Xbox, Windows and Phone targetting
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
Updated Samples for WP7 Developers
For those VB developers who are developing (or keen to start developing) for WIndows Phone 7. The samples have been updated and as you'll notice virtually all of them are in both C# and VB.http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431744(VS.92).aspx
New Async Programming Video's
Some great new video's on MSDN showing how to do async programming using the Async CTP. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh378091.aspx There are different versions of video's for both VB and C#. This is a great opportunity to see the power of the new Async languages featuresand follow through a series of examples showing how easy it is to use the new feature. Also, the MSDN forums have one specifically dedicated to the Async CTP which compilers team member are monitoring to help answer any questions. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/async/threads [Update] Code Samples ...
Temperature Monitoring using VB.Net, Micro-framework and a Netduino
Introduction As a bit of a geek, I like to tinker with basic gadgets. I often think of little ideas that would be great to implement but the device involves some hardware and very little software. As a software engineer I tend to think in terms of simple programs to but in order to implement something tangible would involve electronics and the interface between embedded electronics and high level languages such as VB or C# is somewhat disconnected. For a long time much of the embedded devices was coded using low level languages such as assembler and the prospect of going back to write assembler or getting...
Kinect SDK For PC – VB Samples available.
Today, Microsoft announced the Kinect SDK for PC http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/download.aspx VB Samples are there at launch and available for downloading http://files.ch9.ms/coding4fun/KinectSDKSamplesVB.zip
Micro-framework v4.2 Support for Visual Basic
The release of .NET Micro framework v4.2 Beta brings Visual Basic support for the .NET Micro-framework. For those that have not heard of the Micro framework before “The .NET Micro Framework is .NET for small and resource constrained devices. It offers a complete and innovative development and execution environment that brings the productivity of modern computing tools to this class of devices.For current .NET developers, this means that they can now create applications that run on a range of devices from targeted devices like remote controls to PCs and Servers and on to the cloud &nd...
VB Support for the XNA platform
With the release of the Mango Toolset, Visual Basic support for XNA and Windows Phone has now been added. VB resources include VB XNA documentation and VB WP7 code samples and starter kits and this post is intended to walk you through some of the steps in creating a simple XNA application for Windows Phone 7 using VB. What is XNA? Microsoft XNA is the development framework and tools used to create application for the Xbox 360 / Desktop PC and also the windows Phone 7. It provides access to build managed game type applications. The goal as with any framework is to avoid the developer having to ...
Happy 20th Birthday Visual Basic!
Twenty years ago, May 20th, 1991 at Windows World, in Atlanta, Microsoft founder Bill Gates demoed Visual Basic 1.0. Twenty years later, the 10th version of this latest in an unbroken line of Microsoft BASIC languages stretching back to Microsoft’s founding is still going strong. When you look back over the history of a tool that’s been around that long you start to see some familiar experiences from Wetware products (commonly called children :P ): The cute and cuddly days of its youth, in the 16-bit era; the awkward teen years and the transition to .NET; sibling rivalry with the new baby (C...
Simultaneous Async Tasks (Alan Berman)
The new Async feature in the Visual Studio Async CTP (SP1 Refresh) provides an elegantly simple technique to make code asynchronous.Our writing team uses an internal app that would benefit from asynchronous calls. For each URL contained in the MSDN documentation that we publish, the app lists the title from the link, and the title parsed from HTML in the downloaded web page. We use the app to verify that URL links are valid.The following example is a very simplified version of the relevant code, which does synchronous reads of multiple web pages. Imports System.Net Imports System.Threading.TasksM...
The Temple of VB (Matt Gertz)
Hi, all!It's been a while since I've posted to this blog, and a lot has happened in my world since then. Though I've been pretty busy on our engineering systems team, I took a little time off last summer to do some traveling and, more importantly, some long overdue writing. Although I'd always enjoyed writing the "here's how you build this application" blog posts, I always felt that I could do a bit more with them, and so I took my favorite posts, cleaned them up, added a lot more text and pictures, and turned them into a Kindle e-book. The posts I've included and expanded on are: the Euchr...
WebMatrix Series #1: How to Create Visual Basic Websites Using WebMatrix
Microsoft WebMatrix is an exciting new product that makes the creation of custom ASP.NET Web sites possible without all the complexity of the full Visual Studio environment. WebMatrix supports web site development in both C# and Visual Basic. In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to create VB websites using Webmatrix. Before you begin, you need to have the following settings configured on your machine: You can create the Visual Basic websites using WebMatrix in the four simple steps as follows: Step 1: Select a Template Step 2: Create a Website using the Calendar Visual Basic Template Step ...
Silverlight 4 Firestarter Series #3: How to work with Panels, XAML, and Controls in Silverlight
I am back with details on how to work with Panels, XAML, and Controls in Silverlight. In this walkthrough, we will see how to work with Panels, XAML, and Controls to create a Data-Driven Silverlight Interface. During this walkthrough we will cover the following topics: Before you begin, you need to download the offline kit from the Firestarter Labs to use the existing applications. To work with Panels, XAML, and Controls follow these three simple steps: Step 1: Create a Data-Driven Interface Step 2: Create a Form Entry to edit the Interface Details Step 3: Add a Menu using the StackPanel Step 1: Create a...
Silverlight 4 Firestarter Series #2: How to migrate an ASP.NET Web Forms Application to Silverlight
In this walkthrough, I will demonstrate how to convert an existing ASP.NET/jQuery application that consumes data from a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service to Silverlight. Here are some topics that we will cover: Before you begin you need to download the offline kit from the Firestarter Labs, to use the existing applications. You can migrate an ASP.NET Web Forms application to Silverlight in three simple steps as follows: Step 1: Explore the ASP.NET Web Forms application Step 2: Migrate the ASP.NET application to Silverlight Step 3: Call a WCF Service and Bind data Step 1: Explore the ASP.NE...
Silverlight 4 Firestarter Series #1: How to migrate a Visual Basic Windows Form Application to Silverlight
In this walkthrough, I will demonstrate how to convert an existing Windows Forms application that consumes data from a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service to Silverlight. Also in the process of conversion we will ensure that the existing functionality is preserved. Here are some topics that we will cover: Before you begin you need to download the offline kit from the Firestarter Labs, to use the existing applications. You can migrate the Windows Forms application to Silverlight in three simple steps as follows: Step 1: Explore the Windows Forms Application Let’s take a look at the...
Async Feature Control Flow (Alan Berman)
What is asynchronous programming? Let's say you send out an email, then wait and do nothing for the two minutes it takes to get a response back. You do nothing while you're waiting. It's worth waiting because it'll be back fast. When that happens, sending the email and getting a response is synchronous. But another time you send an email and then forget about it and do something completely different. Three and a half hours later--while you're engrossed in activity B, Outlook pops up a message that you got your response. That's asynchronous. You don't know when the response will be received, and you don't hang aro...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #11. How to create an accelerometer for Windows Phone 7
Previously, I explained how to create a panorama and pivot effect for Windows Phone 7. In this blog post, I want to share a sample that will help you to create an accelerometer for Windows Phone 7. An accelerometer is a device that measures the proper acceleration of the device. It is a sensor that measures acceleration forces caused by moving the sensor. In this application the accelerometer feature will allow you to determine the orientation and the motion of the phone. Now I will demonstrate how to create an accelerometer for Windows Phone 7, using Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. Sounds intere...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #10. How to create a panorama and pivot effect for Windows Phone 7
Previously, I explained how to create a keyboard input scope application for Windows Phone 7. In this blog post, I want to share a sample that will help you to create a panorama and pivot effect in Windows Phone 7. A Panorama is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, or a three-dimensional model. This feature allows you to view controls, data, and services by using a long horizontal canvas that extends beyond the confines of the screen. A Pivot is a page orientation in which a rectangular page is oriented for normal viewing. It helps you to easily man...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #9. How to create a keyboard input scope application for Windows Phone 7
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #8. How to create a settings page for Windows Phone 7
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #7. How to create a Bing Maps application for Windows Phone 7
In our previous post, I explained how to create an application bar for Windows Phone 7. Bing Maps is one of the applications that is commonly used on phones these days. In this blog post, I want to share a sample that will help you to create a Bing Maps application for Windows Phone 7. This application will provide the feature to view maps in road view and aerial view. This application will also provide the zooming in and zooming out features. I will now demonstrate how easy it is to create a Bing Maps application for Windows Phone 7, using Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. The Bing Maps application...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #6. How to create an application bar for Windows Phone 7
In our last post, I explained how to create a control tilt effect application for Windows Phone 7. In this blog post, I want to share a sample that will help you to create an application bar for Windows Phone 7. This application will allow you to add the menu functionality. It also will allow you to adjust the visibility and opacity of the application bar. I will now demonstrate how easy it is to create an application bar for Windows Phone 7, using Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. The application bar can be created in 4 simple steps as follows: Prerequisites: To create the appl...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #5. How to create a control tilt effect application for Windows Phone 7
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #4. How to implement a model-view-viewmodel pattern in a Windows Phone application
In our last post, I explained how to create a custom indeterminate progress bar application for Windows Phone 7. In this blog, I want to share a sample that will help you to implement a model-view-viewmodel pattern in a Windows Phone application. A model-view-viewmodel pattern is used to separate data from the user interface. This pattern allows the developers to code data models and the designers to create user interfaces. In this sample, I will demonstrate how to create a game tracker application by implementing the model-view-viewmodel pattern. I will now demonstrate how easy it is to implement the model-view-...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #3. How to create a custom indeterminate progress bar application for Windows Phone 7
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #2. How to create a microphone application for Windows Phone 7
In our last post, I explained how to create a mini browser for Windows Phone 7. In this blog, I want to share a sample that will help you to create a microphone application for Windows Phone 7. This application will have the feature to capture audio from a microphone and then play back the captured audio. I will now demonstrate how easy it is to create a microphone application for Windows Phone 7, using Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. The microphone application can be created in 4 simple steps as follows: Prerequisites: To create the microphone application, let’s follow the 4...
Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series #1. How to create a mini browser application for Windows Phone 7
I have experienced a lot of fun writing Windows Phone 7 applications in Visual Basic. Web browser is one of the applications that is commonly used on phones these days. In this blog post, I want to share some sample source code that will help you to create a mini browser application for Windows Phone 7. I will now demonstrate how easy it is to develop a mini browser application for Windows Phone 7, using Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. The mini browser application can be created in 3 simple steps: Before you create a mini browser application, you need to install the following applications: ...
Visual Studio is Hiring
Do you want to work on a product used by millions of developers around the world? I do! Come join me to deliver Visual Studio, the set of developer tools used across Microsoft and around the world. We have open positions available across Test, Dev and PM at varying levels on many projects across Visual Studio Professional. We’re looking for the most talented folks around to help us deliver the core parts of Visual Studio, from the Shell & IDE, languages (VB/C#/F#), packaging & setup, to our future investments in C# & VB. Here are a list of our open positions.&...
VB Core – New compilation mode in Visual Studio 2010 SP1
While most servicing releases do not include new functionality, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 introduced an important new compiler feature that enables Visual Basic to target new platforms that were not previously supported. This was mentioned in some of the initial SP1 blog posts such as Jasonz blog. This is a strategic investment by Microsoft in the future of VB. This provides VB with an increased agility in the future for new platforms to support Visual Basic. This blog provides more information about the feature; let me know if you have more questions. &nbs...
Using Entity Framework in Silverlight with Visual Basic
If you’re looking for ways to get started with Entity Framework 4.0 in Visual Basic then be sure to check out this month’s issue of CODE Magazine. In it the Entity Framework team has put together a walkthrough that shows how to use EF4 in Silverlight, and best of all the entire article’s in VB! Using Entity Framework in Silverlight with Visual Basic The walkthrough covers the end-to-end experience: writing the WCF service, using EF’s Self-Tracking Entities to send data over the wire, and writing the Silverlight UI in XAML. Finally, it also shows how new VB10 f...
VB Goes Mobile: Announcing “Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools – RTW”
With the release of Windows Phone Developer Tools in September, and the availability of Windows Phone 7 devices in stores, the Windows Phone platform is growing. Today marks another milestone in the progression of Windows Phone. Today we are announcing Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools - RTW. This release doubles the developer audience for Windows Phone, by enabling Visual Basic developers to create applications for Windows Phone, as well as C#. Please stay tuned for the following announcements and walkthroughs going live today: We released a preview of this VB support in Sep...
Microsoft Help Viewer 1.1 – Updates Planned for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (Kathleen McGrath)
Paul O’Rear, a Program Manager on the Library Experience team, describes the changes to the Microsoft Help Viewer planned for Visual Studio 2010 SP1. He demonstrates the new functionality of the viewer in an early build of Help Viewer 1.1. See Microsoft Help Viewer – Updates Planned for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 You can learn more in The Story of Help in Visual Studio 2010 --Kathleen
Announcing the Async CTP for Visual Basic (and also Iterators!)
We're very happy to announce today the Async CTP for Visual Basic and C#. Asynchronous programming is something that helps make your UI more responsive, especially in applications that interact with databases or network or disk. It's also used to make ASP servers scale better. And it's the natural way to program in Silverlight. Until now, asynchronous programming has also been prohibitively hard, "not worth the investment"-hard. But with the Async CTP we've made asynchronous programming easy enough that developers should routinely consider asynchrony for most of their applications. Async is a true "parity" f...
Announcing Microsoft Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools
Today we announced availability of the Microsoft Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools. You can download the release here: This CTP is to be used with the Windows Phone Developer Tools, in order to do Windows Phone 7 development with Visual Basic. We have heard a lot of customer requests for this capability and are all very excited about today’s announcement. Here are some Microsoft blog posts regarding this announcement: Please find below a walkthrough with screenshots of the experience creating a Windows Phone 7 application with Visual Basic, using the new CTP. WALKTHR...
Channel 9 Interview: Multi-Targeting Deep Dive (Beth Massi, Spotty Bowles)
I’m back with Spotty Bowles, a tester on the VB compiler team, shows us the ins and outs of how multi-targeting works in Visual Basic projects in Visual Studio 2010 in this Channel 9 interview: Channel 9 Interview: Multi-Targeting Deep Dive with Visual Basic 2010What's tricky in Visual Studio 2010 is that there are now two supported versions of the CLR. Spotty shows us how to work with client and full framework profiles in Visual Studio, as well as what happens at runtime when referenced class libraries target a different profile. He also shows us how to use some of the new VB10 language features when down ...
Productivity Improvements for the Entity Framework
BackgroundWe’ve been hearing a lot of good feedback on the recently released update to the Entity Framework in .NET 4. This release marks a significant advancement from the first release that shipped with .NET 3.5 SP1. I’m not going to spend time here talking about what’s new, but you can check here to see for yourself. With all that said, there are still a number of things we can do to simplify the process of writing data access code with the Entity Framework. We’ve been paying attention to the most common patterns that we see developers using with the EF and have bee...
Troubleshooting Errors When Embedding Type Information (Doug Rothaus)
Visual Studio 2010 has a new feature, Embed Interop Types, that can simplify application deployment and solve those pesky issues that can arise when using COM Interop and Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). If you’ve ever had to ship multiple versions of an application that automates Microsoft Office where the only difference between your published versions is the version of the PIA (to match different Office versions), then this feature is for you.You enable type embedding when you reference an assembly. In Visual Studio, you set the Embed Interop Types property to true (the default). The command-line compi...
Removing duplicate namespaces in XML Literals (Shyam Namboodiripad)
A common problem that one often runs into with XML literals and the LINQ to XML API is duplicate XML namespaces. Consider the following example. The code imports a default XML namespace - “hello”.Code: Imports <xmlns="hello"> Module Module1 Sub Main() Dim x = <A> <%= <B></B> %> </A> &n...
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus)
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus)It’s been a while since I wrote one of these XML cookbook entries. Here’s some info on a common problem: Really big XML files.I’m going to show you two things in this recipe. The first is a tip on reading very large XML files while still being able to use XML Axis Properties. The second is how to do make it available to LINQ queries by exposing it as IEnumerable.Reading a Large XML FileIf you’re new to working with XML, there’s something important that you need to know. That is, when you load an XML file into an in-...
Using HTML entities in XML Literals (Avner Aharoni)
One of the common use-cases of XML literals is creating HTML. However, HTML entities cannot be used in XML literals since LINQ to XML directly supports only the Data type definitions (DTD) defined in the XML 1.0 spec. You can read more about it here. The workaround is to use the Unicode representation of the entity, although it’s not as readable as the HTML entities, the output is the same. Here are two examples of HTML entities from the XHTML spec : And here is a small test program to show you can substitute the HTML entity with the Unicode representation: The output looks like this:
Channel 9 Interview: Array and Collection Initializers in Visual Basic 2010 (Beth Massi, Spotty Bowles)
I’ve written about collection initializers on my blog before, but I thought I’d catch up with the VB Team to tell me more about how they really work.In this interview Spotty Bowles, a tester on the VB Compiler team, shows us a couple of new language features: Array and Collection Initializers. He gives us insight into how they are implemented in the compiler and best practices on how to use them in our code. Additionally, he discusses how to extend Collection Initializers with your own extension methods. Channel 9 Interview: Array and Collection Initializers in Visual Basic 2010For more new Visual Bas...
Visual Basic 2010 is here!
It was a very exciting time this week, with the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. On April 12th, 5 launch events took place around the world in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, London and Las Vegas. The video from Bob Muglia’s VS 2010 Launch keynote is now available on-demand. The agenda for day was VS 2010 sessions, including Windows Development, SharePoint and Office, Dev & Test Collaboration, and Project Management. Follow the “Visual Studio 2010 Launch” tag on Channel9 for more… There are also a number of session recordings available now on The Code Project. Tim, Alexandra, and I recorded a li...
Back to the future! – New version of the VB6 InteropForms toolkit is released!!
Along with all the new goodies that we released yesterday as part of Visual Studio 2010, one additional thing we did yesterday as well is release an update to the popular interopforms toolkit. This update brings VS 2010 (and VS 2008!) support to the toolkit and fixes a smattering of reported bugs. As many of you are aware, VB6 applications are alive and well in the community and this toolkit has proven to be quite successful in helping developers evolve these apps with .net functionality. It works by allowing developers to create ActiveX controls in .net that can be...
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010
Crystal Reports has been a part of Visual Basic since 1993, and a part of Visual Studio since its first release in 2002. Crystal Reports has been a very successful component of these products. With the release of Visual Studio 2010, SAP and Microsoft have mutually decided to change how we deliver this important component to the .NET developer community going forward. Starting on Friday, April 16th, the beta version of Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 will be available as a separate download from this site. Just like when Crystal Reports was integrated into the Visual Studio installation,...
Editing XML Literals Embedded Expressions in Visual Basic 2010 (Avner Aharoni)
The implicit line continuation feature in Visual Basic 2010 provided an opportunity to improve the code editing experience in XML literals embedded expressions. In Visual Studio 2008, pressing Enter inside an embedded expression would result in the cursor being positioned to the left of the end embedded expression tag. In Visual Studio 2010, pressing Enter inserts a newline for the cursor, and the end embedded expression tag moves to the line below. This minimizes the number of key strokes needed to nicely format an embedded expression. Example 1: Pressing Enter in an empty embedded expression 1) Starting poin...
On The Blink (Matt Gertz)
One of the really fun things about being associated with the Visual Basic team is getting to see all of the varied usages to which our customers put it. From enterprise software to games, our customer base covers a wide range. The most fun to see, however, are the hobby applications, because the writers of that code come up with some pretty off-the-wall (but very cool) uses for it.Case in point: I was contacted two weeks ago by a gentleman named David Swoboda (name used with permission), who was working on a magic trick that required him to blink the LED on an old iPac smart device. He&rsq...
New Learning Resources on the Visual Basic Developer Center (Beth Massi)
Today we revamped some of the Visual Basic Developer Center Learn pages with more content that allows you to pivot on more fine-grained topics and tasks related to Visual Basic programming. We’ve started with the Introductory Topics and Language Syntax pages. To get there, head to http://msdn.com/vbasic and then click the Learn tab. There you will see a set of general topic areas to explore. If you select Introductory Topics or Language Syntax you will be taken to a new set of pages that lets you browse on more sub-topics and tasks. Select a topic from the list on the left and the content will change on...
What didn't get into VB10: a wish-list for future versions of VB
Visual Studio 2010 is almost out the door. Now is a good time to look back at what we didn't get into the language in this release, but would have wanted to, and so will consider for future releases.Over the coming weeks, each day, I'll blog on blogs.msdn.com/lucian about the ideas on our wish-list, along with our evaluation of them. We have our own thoughts about what are the priorities for the VB language. You'll have your own thoughts - please tell us!The series starts here:The Wish-List Introduction...Req0: Don't add to (or change) the languageCore1: IteratorsCore2: Inline and multi-l...
The many cases of ByRef
One of the overlooked or simply misunderstood features of the VB language is calling a function which has a ByRef parameter. Most languages support only a single method of passing parameters by reference [1], that is the scenarios directly supported by the CLR. The CLR has a lot of restrictions on the type of values it supports for ByRef parameters and these restrictions get in the way of VB’s goal to be a flexible language that strives to get out of the way of the user. Hence the compiler goes to great lengths to be flexible and support multiple avenues of ByRef passing, much beyond what the CL...
Fun With Dynamic Objects (Doug Rothaus)
A while back, I remember being asked if there was a simple way to expose a source XML document as an object with properties. That is, if the root XML element had a child element <Name>Doug</Name>, then the object would have a Name property that was a string and returned “Doug”. The catch was that the XML document did not conform to a specific schema. Hence, you could not simply create an object with a Name property, because you did not know if the source document had a <Name> element. While there are ways to expose the XML data dynamically, you couldn’t quite do what was being ...
There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Euchre! (Matt Gertz)
“Oh, no!” I hear you cry, “not another blog about Euchre!”Well, I do like the game, to be sure. But, more importantly, the Euchre scenario enables me to try out any new technologies on a reasonably complex problem (using Visual Basic, of course). It’s my way of checking out our product to make sure that it works before we ship it out to you guys. For my app building this time around, I chose to focus my energies in two areas – WPF, and Windows Mobile. Porting my Euchre game to these platforms was challenging in several different ways, and I thought that ...
Hidden Gems in VB2010 – Serializing Objects that Raise Events (Jonathan Aneja)
By now you've likely heard about the major new features coming in VB 2010, but there's also a number of smaller additions in the language and IDE that might not be as readily noticeable. "Hidden Gems" will be a multi-part series where we'll explore some of these smaller enhancements. First up - serialization! Let’s say you have a simple entity class that you need to serialize and send over the wire. This class implements INotifyPropertyChanged which contains an event. When attempting to serialize an instance of this class, if the delegate which backs the event has its Target property ...
Spot the Bug! – The Key to using Anonymous Types (Jonathan Aneja)
This one’s going to be long, but for those of you who’ve felt the first 3 in this series were too easy I promise this one’s tougher J. Let’s say you want to list all the customers from a table in a ComboBox, and update the UI based on which one is selected. To do this we’ll need to bring back two fields from the database – the customer’s name and the customer’s ID. When a customer is selected we want the ComboBox’s SelectedValue property to equal the customer’s ID. Here’s some quick code that gets us up and running (using Nort...
Spot the Bug! – Is it in VB or XAML? (Jonathan Aneja)
What’s wrong with the following WPF code? Class Window1 Sub OK_Click(sender As Object, e As RoutedEventArgs) Handles OK.Click MsgBox("Button Clicked") End Sub End Class <Window x:Class="Window1" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300"> <Grid> <Button Name="OK" Click="OK_Click">OK</Bu...
Linking Zune media items with LinQ, Part 2 (Matt Gertz)
In this post, I’ll continue on with coding the new playlist shuffler. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, I highly recommend it so that this post will make more sense. JCode for the controls (continued)The Title TextBoxWhen the title changes, we’ll want to indicate that the playlist has changed, and we’ll want to cache the change and update the menus. This is pretty simple: Private Sub edtTitle_TextChanged(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles edtTitle.TextChanged playlistTitle = edtTitle.Text...
Linking Zune media items with LinQ, Part 1 (Matt Gertz)
Way back in October 2007, I wrote up a few posts (here and here) on my experiments with the Windows Media Player object model. The problem I was trying to solve was that, when I had a playlist set to “shuffle,” WMP would break up songs that should always play together (for example, Jackson Browne’s “The Load-Out” and “Stay”, or Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” and “Total Eclipse”). In those posts, I worked around this by building my own shuffler which would emit a new randomized playlist which preserved those links, and then playing th...
Spot the Bug! – Much ado about Nothing… Part 2! (Jonathan Aneja)
In yesterday’s post we saw that the use of the wrong comparison operator with Nothing in an If block can lead to surprising results. Let’s look at a slightly different case today: Dim x As Integer = Nothing If x = Nothing Then MsgBox("A true statement - we land here") Else MsgBox("The statement is a lie - we land here")  ...
Spot the Bug! – Much Ado about Nothing… (Jonathan Aneja)
Microsoft has this neat mailing list called “Spot the Bug” where developers can send interesting snippets of code that look correct but actually have subtle bugs in them. The puzzles are a lot of fun and I’ve always thought it’d be a fun thing to try here on the team blog. Over the past year or so I’ve been keeping a list of interesting bug reports and emails where people have been tripped up by some of VB’s hidden subtleties (though admittedly many of these could apply to C# as well). The format’s gonna be a bit of an experiment – let me know if you prefer to see the answer in the same post or...
Visual Basic “How Do I” Videos
We’ve started two new “How Do I” videos series on the Visual Basic Developer Center. More to come, but here’s the latest!
Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2!
There were a lot of Microsoft announcements that happened yesterday! Many of these happened during Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the SharePoint Developers Conference (Video, Twitter). Here is the list: MSDN subscribers can download Beta 2 now! We will be opening up Beta 2 for everyone to download starting this Wednesday. In honor of VS 2010 Beta 2, we have a lot of great content prepared. The following MSDN page aggregates our VB 2010 content. We hope you will enjoy trying out the next release! We definitely look forward to hearing your feedback. Here are some places where you can contact us: Than...
I'm A VB: Lluis Franco
Website: http://geeks.ms/blogs/lfranco · How long have you been using VB?Visual Basic? Since VB 3.0, but I have been using other Basic in the 80's ;-) · What industry do you work in?Currently I work in a Financial company · How big is your development team?We're only 5 in the team, but we're a big team! · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Finantial, portfoli...
I'm A VB: Jorge Serrano, Visual Basic MVP
Website: http://geeks.ms/blogs/jorge/ · How long have you been using VB?In the University had the opportunity of use VB 1 (one floppy disk of 3 1/2 1.44 Mb). It was a little bit odd in a first moment, but a few time later I used VB 3 (7 or 8 floppy disks, I don't remember now how many) and it was a fantastic experience. In my University nobody were using VB, only Cobol, Fortran and a little bit of C and C++, but nothing of VB or Turbo Pascal or Delphi. Since then, I have been using Visual Basic always... forever. · &nbs...
I'm A VB: Earl Vella
· How long have you been using VB?9 years, hah saying it makes it look like it was yesterday. started with Basic on my father's massive ... well you cant really call something that big a 'PC'. was introduced to Visual basic 6 by a friend and was addicted to it. Just as a modern console or an addictive FPS i was cought by VB6 Then when starting Uni .net came out. Coding was now becoming easier and more powerfull than ever. · What industry do you work in?System development a...
I'm A VB: Bob Swan
· How long have you been using VB?12 years · How big is your development team?4 · Please tell us about an app that you’re working on at the moment.App used to track REO property services · What other technologies do you most commonly use?SQL Server · What do you like most about VB as a programming l...
I'm A VB: Naveed Iqbal
· How long have you been using VB?Since 1998 (VB6), its the first language I learnt. I took a free 'learn VB in 24 hours' course online during my free time in highschool · What industry do you work in?I'm a software engineer/Applied Mathematician in the relocation industry · How big is your development team?There are 6 of us, we're all VBs! · What kind of apps do you most commonly...
I'm A VB: Abbass El-Outa
Website: http://www.abbass.tk · How long have you been using VB?I have been using VB for 7 years. I started with Visual Basic 6, and 3 years later I learnt VB.net. · What industry do you work in?-Computer hardware and software maintenance. -Web Design and Windows-based software development. · How big is your development team?Only me. · What kind of apps do y...
I'm A VB: Anders Borg
Website: http://www.abiro.com · How long have you been using VB?Since 1998 I think (starting with VB6). · What industry do you work in?None in particular · How big is your development team?1 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Applications controlling hardware or doing calculations or both. · What’s the mo...
I'm A VB: Mohamed Jbeli
Website: http://www.tunisia-sat.com · How long have you been using VB?2 years · What industry do you work in?electronics · How big is your development team?6 devs · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?telecommunication monitoring · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Pix Upload...
I'm A VB: Besnik Belegu
· How long have you been using VB?Since vb 4 · What industry do you work in?Banking and Finance · How big is your development team?2 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I developed a lot of apps and solutions. I have an SMS banking solution that's currently working made on VB9. I am working on an Internet Banking solution also on VB9. · &nbs...
I'm A VB: Daniel Rolfe
· How long have you been using VB?I have been using VB since version 4.. too long ago to remember. I started out building basic form widgets, familiarizing myself with all the controls. · What industry do you work in?I am a solutions developer at a Collection Agency. · How big is your development team?Three, me myself and I ;) · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I...
I'm A VB: Gaurav Khanna
Website: http://gauravkhanna.blog.co.in · How long have you been using VB?My first language was VB6 in 2001 and working on VB.NET since it's first release · What industry do you work in?Software development and consulting · How big is your development team?A small team of 4 developers · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Window Applications, ASP.NET Applications, WCF &am...
I'm A VB: Kenneth Wong
· How long have you been using VB?8 years · What industry do you work in?Portal, Financial Consolidation and ERP · How big is your development team?8-10 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?windows and asp.net · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Financial Consolidation ·&nb...
I'm A VB: Lieutenant Commander Mohd Nazri Mohamed Nasir (R)
Website: http://www.GuidedMissileDesign.com · How long have you been using VB?12 years · What industry do you work in?Programming in Military Engineering Design. · How big is your development team?5 to 10 personal · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Application and Database. · What’s the most interesting ap...
I'm A VB: Greg Rothlander
Website: http://www.pbsilink.com · How long have you been using VB?Since around 1998. I think I started with VB3. · What industry do you work in?Consulting · How big is your development team?We are an R&D team with 3 core software developers and an additional 3 to 5 developers that are involved part time and as needed. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?...
I'm A VB: Macario F. Pedraza
Website: http://mfpedraza.wordpress.com/ · How long have you been using VB?Since 1993, starting with VB3, but used QuickBasic before that and started programming in BASIC in 1981 (yeah I know, I'm old) · What industry do you work in?Software Development · How big is your development team?8 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Mostly infrastructure/framework apps, anythin...
I'm A VB: Ryan Hollings
· How long have you been using VB?1 year · What industry do you work in?Land surveyor · How big is your development team?1 person - ME! · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?If anything needs a quicker way to do something I build an app, generally ones to speed up processing in land surveying, currently working on an app to process GSI files ·  ...
I'm A VB: Raja Venkatesh Ramasamy
Website: http://www.rajavenkatesh.com · How long have you been using VB?Since 1995. · What industry do you work in?Currently Banking · How big is your development team?70 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web service · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Linq to Entity debug visualize...
I'm A VB: Andrew Turner
· How long have you been using VB?3 Years · What industry do you work in?Gaming and Windows Development · How big is your development team?Just me :( · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Apps to make stuff and help everyday life. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?I have made a shoppi...
I'm A VB: Shahriyar Yazdipour
Website: http://shery1.web.officelive.com · How long have you been using VB?about 3 years · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Smart Device · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Windows For other interviews in this series, please visit http://imavb.net.
I'm A VB: Ignacio Alvarez N.
· How long have you been using VB?6 years · What industry do you work in?Software Development oriented to ASP.NET Web Applications · How big is your development team?7 people · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web applications with Ajax and third party components like DevExpress and MSSQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 Database Engine. · ...
I'm A VB: Josselin Jouannet
Website: http://www.josselinjouannet.com · How long have you been using VB? 10 years · What industry do you work in? Telecomunication Aerospace industry · How big is your development team? 3-5 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Windows forms and web forms · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built? Gps tracking beacon ...
I'm A VB: Diego Cattaruzza, Visual Basic MVP
Website: http://community.visual-basic.it/Diegohttp://www.visual-basic.it · How long have you been using VB?since version 4.0 (1995) · What industry do you work in?Public Administration (City od Trieste) · How big is your development team?1 person (myself) · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Access, Excel, Word little application to substitute big application...
I'm A VB: Carlos Ferreira
Website: http://www.flash.i.ph/ · How long have you been using VB?8 years ago I started using VB6.. I have programmed with VB.NET 2002/2005 and I am currently programming with 2008. · What industry do you work in?I work in the Telecommunications Industry · How big is your development team?2 developers (me and my boss..) · What kind of apps do you most commonly bu...
I'm A VB: Yelinna Pulliti Carrasco
Website: http://toyscaos.tripod.com · How long have you been using VB?I started with a VB6 course I took in 2000 during two weeks and I played with it during few months. Then I left it until 2006, when I took a free short VB6 course at university. Then I left it until mid 2007 because our thesis project is made in advanced VB6 (at that time I just knew the very basics). Since then, I haven't left it again ;) · What industry do you work in?I work in an enterprise of security for documents, access ...
I'm A VB: Charlie Mun (whitebono)
Website: http://www.vbholic.co.tv/ · How long have you been using VB?almost two years · What industry do you work in?I'm a Student... and 17 years old. I'm not working for industry... · How big is your development team?Only me(?) Cause, I'm developing by myself. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web-browser, Calculator, Note-pad, Games and Security Program which...
I'm A VB: Usman Ahmed
Website: http://usmanahmed.info/blog · How long have you been using VB?6 years · What industry do you work in?Web Development · How big is your development team?11 developers · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Rich Internet Applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?RIA for web servi...
I'm A VB: Mohammed Mujtaba Siraj
· How long have you been using VB?Since 1994 · What industry do you work in?Information Technology · How big is your development team?3 member · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Data driven web applications and desktop applications. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?SQL Script Patc...
I'm A VB: Essam, Binzghayo
Website: http://www.Leaderstechnology.com · How long have you been using VB?since 1999 i have started writting applications by using my lovely language VB · What industry do you work in?Information Technology software house (EBLA) · How big is your development team?more than 20 persons · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows Applications (Database systems...
I'm A VB: John Kotronis
· How long have you been using VB?Since VB 6 begun · What industry do you work in?Hotels, Insurances, Databases, IT, ERP, CRM · How big is your development team?1 to 10 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?WinForm application · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Dynamic ERP that is divi...
I'm A VB: Jung Hwan, Woo.
Website: http://www.jumptovb.net · How long have you been using VB? 10 Years · What industry do you work in? Entertainment · How big is your development team? 20 peoples · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Web, Windows, Windows Mobile Applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built? Mobile + Web & Windows Applicat...
I'm A VB: Jabbar
· How long have you been using VB?9 Years · What industry do you work in?SCADA And Programing · How big is your development team?9 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?e-Systems · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Laptop tracking system (AsseTrax) · &...
I'm A VB: Brian Bierie
· How long have you been using VB? I started off with Access 03 back in 1994 and moved into Visual Studio just last year when it was suggested to me. · What industry do you work in? I work in the Emergency Communications Area. We handle many hospital calls for security, in-house emergencies, Air and ground patient and scene responses, and most of the different types of hospital responses including engineering and housekeeping, and HAZ-MAT. ·  ...
I'm A VB: Ejaz Lateef
Website: WWW.TAKAFUL.COM.PK · How long have you been using VB?LAST 6 YEARS · What industry do you work in?IT · How big is your development team?20 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?ERP,INSURANCE,ACCOUNT · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?ACCOUNT,INSURANCE,ERP · &nb...
I'm A VB: Ali Bidar
Website: http://www.alibidar.com · How long have you been using VB?4 years · What industry do you work in?web developing · How big is your development team?i work alone , all works is on me. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?CMS systems , and News services. · What’s the most interesting app y...
I'm A VB: Sven Knoch
Website: http://www.divinglog.de · How long have you been using VB?Since 1996 · What industry do you work in?Software Developer · How big is your development team?1 (myself) · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?My main application, a logbook software for scuba divers. People can log their dives, download data from their dive computer and create their own printouts for th...
I'm A VB: Imran Khan
· How long have you been using VB?5 years · What industry do you work in?Accounts, Procurement, Payroll, Management Systems. · How big is your development team?more than 30 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Accounts Based · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Insurance Accounting System&nbs...
I'm A VB: Mike Hillman
Website: http://www.mikehillman.com · How long have you been using VB?18 years · What industry do you work in?IT Consulting · How big is your development team?1 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?N-Tier Client Server WinForm applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever buil...
I'm A VB: Michael Parker
Website: www.ece.rutgers.edu/~maparker · How long have you been using VB? I have used VB since2003 for scientific applications in the laboratory. Up until about 1994, I had primarily used the 'structured languages' (and assemly) and decided it was time for an update after a 10 year hiatus. · What industry do you work in? The education related areas for the engineering/physics of optoelectronics, device fabrication, and quantum devices/processes for optical computing and communication. · ...
I'm A VB: Oscar Martin
Website: www.oscarmartin.org · How long have you been using VB?More than 10 years For other interviews in this series, please visit http://imavb.net.
I'm A VB: Michael Becht
Website: http://cracklinhot.com · How long have you been using VB?I think it was VB.3 that I started with. As I recall you weren't even able to connect to a DB back then. Its amazing how much I've had to discard over the years as VB evolved into its current rendition. · What industry do you work in?I'm currently unemployed because of the downturn of the automotive industry. Things are xtra-tuff here in Michigan. · ...
I'm A VB: Frank Buchan
Website: http://frankbuchan.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?Since about 1992, I believe, though I recall playing with something even earlier. · What industry do you work in?My company provides highly integrated operational risk management software for enterprises ranging from oil & gas, to manufacturing, to soft services. · How big is your development team?It varies depending on the build cycle, since I tend to hire co...
I'm A VB: Júlio Ködel
· How long have you been using VB?BASIC since 1986, Visual Basic since 1995. · What industry do you work in?(Really) Generic Software Development · How big is your development team?Around 4 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Development frameworks, as a back-office (like services) or critical solutions (performance, for example) · &nb...
I'm A VB: Luke Burri
· How long have you been using VB? for 7 Years · What industry do you work in? Library Systems · How big is your development team? 2 Persons · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Windows Database Applications, WebServices · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built? Client / Server A...
I'm A VB: Dattaprasad Kulkarni
Website: http://getdotnet.wordpress.com · How long have you been using VB?I am using VB.NET since last 3 years, have used Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 as well. · What industry do you work in?I've worked with Healthcare Domain before, and these days I am working on custom software development. · How big is your development team?We've 10 developers in the team. · &nb...
How do I deploy an application and its prerequisites? (Mary Lee)
Let me count the ways: xcopy, ClickOnce, Windows Installer (.msi), Windows Installer XML, Group Policy, Active Directory, Systems Management Service or System Center Configuration Manager, login scripts, CD, USB drive, and many more third-party software options. Despite the many options, one common requirement is that applications typically have prerequisites to install before the application can run. Prerequisites can include the .NET Framework, Visual Basic PowerPacks, SQL Server Express, Windows Installer, runtime libraries, or maybe even a custom prerequisite. There are three concepts in deployment r...
I'm A VB: Mohammadhani Toutounchi
Website: http://honeyos.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?10 years · What industry do you work in?Software Consulting.E-Comerce(Forex) · How big is your development team?3 Engineers · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?OpenSource And Mono Development As a consultant, I get called upon to build a pretty broad variety of things. ·  ...
I'm A VB: Ambarish Joglekar
· How long have you been using VB?6 Years · What industry do you work in?Software Consulting.IT · How big is your development team?10 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web Portals, B2B Apps As a consultant, I get called upon to build a pretty broad variety of things. · What’s the most interesting app you...
Getting Loopy (Matt Gertz)
In my last post, I talked about the hidden costs that can occur whenever you call out to methods, particularly in loops. In looking at my examples, reader KG2V commented that another thing that folks need to be aware of is avoiding the assumption that the world (or, in this case, a list) is a static thing. It’s a good point and it deserves some attention, particularly given that different languages will react in different ways to change.To illustrate this point, let’s assume that we have a form with a ListBox on it, and that we also have a button on the form that, when clicked, runs the fo...
Hidden Costs (Matt Gertz)
(Note: there was a grievous error in this post based on a bad assumption on my art regarding VB. Not feeling the need to hide my ignorance :-), I have instead made a number of edits in this post to bring it back to some semblance of reality.)One thing that gets me annoyed with myself is realizing that the product or service I’ve just bought has some hidden costs that I didn’t anticipate. It might be as complicated as realizing that my plane ticket has all sorts of byzantine surcharges and luggage costs, or as simple as making budgeting for a new killer gaming PC and forgetting about the sa...
Free SQL Server 2008 Express How-To-Guide Series
Thanks to the SQL Server Team we just released a free SQL Server 2008 Express How-To-Guide Series on msdev.com. During the next weeks we’ll also integrating parts of the series into the Visual Basic Developer Center, C# Developer Center, the Beginner Developer Learning Center, etc.One video of the series: How do I query data in a database?Given the fact that we don’t have unlimited resources (yeah, I know… that was the biggest surprise for me as well when I started working at Microsoft. “Where are all the bags with money standing around in each corner? What? There are none? D’oh!&rd...
Testing Events for Nothing/Null (Doug Rothaus)
While helping some Windows API folks with some sample code this week, I stumbled upon...uh...I mean “carefully researched” an issue that you might find handy.You may be aware that the RaiseEvent statement automatically checks to verify if an event handler exists before raising the event. If the event is Nothing, then there’s no event handler and RaiseEvent terminates. If the event is not Nothing, then RaiseEvent triggers the event.However, what if you want to follow a different code path if the event is Nothing? Unfortunately, the RaiseEvent statement doesn’t return a value that could indi...
Properties vs Fields – Why Does it Matter? (Jonathan Aneja)
The other day I got an email from a developer asking an interesting question about VB10’s Auto-implemented Properties feature. “I am, however, somewhat confused regarding the properties feature you mentioned - i.e. turning 11 lines of get/set/backing variable into one line. Wouldn't this be exactly the same as the existing functionality of creating a public variable? I see no benefit for using a property in this case, except perhaps for the sake of what some would consider best practice.” On the surface there doesn’t seem to be a big difference between this: Public Property Name() As String And this: P...
It’s a Small World, After All, part 2 – VB, C#, and GPS (Matt Gertz)
In my previous post, we fixed up a C# GPS library to provide more support, and wrote all of the UI for a VB GPS application, all based on (but modified from) a Mobile GPS sample in the Windows Mobile 6.0 SDK. In this post, we’ll finish up the app by enabling a bunch of cool functionality not exposed in the original sample.The C# sample uses a helper function called UpdateData – I will too (as noted above), except that the code is going to deviate significantly. We’ll start out by checking is the GPS is actually running, just in case we called outside of an event: Pr...
It’s a Small World, After All, part 1 – VB, C#, and GPS (Matt Gertz)
The title of this blog post has sort of a triple meaning for me. First of all, I just got back from a long (and wonderful!) cruise in the Caribbean, followed by a stop at Disney World. And of course, if you go to Disney World with kids, it’s the law that you have to go through the “It’s a Small World” ride, thereby having the accompanying song burned into your brain for the next six months.Secondly, “It’s a Small World” also reminds me of how new technologies are bringing us closer together. It’s amazing to me that I can do a full presentation in (...
I'm A VB: Juan Rafael
Website: http://juanrafael.wordpress.com · How long have you been using VB?7 years (7 años) · What industry do you work in?Software Company - ISV (Compañia de Software – ISV) · How big is your development team?I work in a development team that creates large solutions for several countries of the Andean region. (Equipo de desarrollo grande para soluciones en varios países de la regi&oacu...
I'm A VB: Hassan SadeghiOrang
· How long have you been using VB?7 years · What industry do you work in?Software Development · How big is your development team?5 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows applications and web applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?SAF ·  ...
I'm A VB: Anup Warade
· How long have you been using VB?7 years · What industry do you work in?IT · How big is your development team?5 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web products, portals. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Most are related to ERP, banking, web services, portals and products. ·...
I'm A VB: Mehmet Şahin
Blog: http://mehsah.spaces.live.com/ · How long have you been using VB?20 Years · What industry do you work in?Food For other interviews in this series, please visit http://imavb.net. Are you a VB, too? Submit your story here!
I'm A VB: Russ Yeagley
Website: www.EagleSecureSolutions.com · How long have you been using VB?I'm one of the extremely lucky developers who did beta work for Microsoft on Project Thunder - Visual Basic 1.0. While attending a symposium in Chicago, Tom Button (from Microsoft at the time) and I were talking about what, if any, future Microsoft Professional BASIC would have. He told me that its future is going to be truly amazing, both for Microsoft and for the BASIC computer language. He also mentioned that he'd be passing out forms to anyone in attendance who would be interested...
I'm A VB: Manoj Kumar
· How long have you been using VB?2002 - VB 6.0. 2004 - VB.NET · What industry do you work in?Environmental Services - MIS Department · How big is your development team?50 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web Apps, Web Services, Window Services · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever b...
I'm A VB: James Kahl
· How long have you been using VB?I have used every version of Visual Basic since its inception. So I guess for about 20+ years. · What industry do you work in?Manufacturing/Engineering · How big is your development team?There are about 20 of us, but most development is done individually rather than a group effort. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I mainly writ...
I'm A VB: Bruce Meeker
· How long have you been using VB? 15 years · What industry do you work in? Utility/Nuclear · How big is your development team? We have about 8 actual developers in an application group of 20. We rarely have more than 2 working a project at a time. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Client Server applications and interfaces to third party software. · &n...
I'm A VB: Sinhue Baez
Website: http://zingo.tumblr.com/ · How long have you been using VB?I've been using VB since version 5, when I started to work in my current job, 9 years ago. Then I moved to 6, then to VB.NET first with Framework 1.1, and I'm currently developing in 2.0 (VS 2005). · What industry do you work in?I work in the foods industry. I work for the biggest poultry producer in Mexico. · How big is your development team?We are 2 guys here, who curren...
I'm A VB: Amin Choroomi
Website: http://vanda-dev.com · How long have you been using VB?Since ‘99 · What industry do you work in?Government Organizations, Cement Factories · How big is your development team?3 people · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Data Driven Applications, Information Systems · What’s the most interesti...
I'm A VB: Sameer Tripathi
· How long have you been using VB?For the last 9 years · What industry do you work in?Real estate, Utilities, Sports · How big is your development team?From 1 to 18 people · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web sites, intranet applications, mobile applications · What’s the most interesting app you’v...
I'm A VB: Jorge Paulino, Visual Basic MVP
Blog: http://vbtuga.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?10 years ago I started using VBA with Access and Excel. 6 years ago I discovered VB6, and it was love at first sight! After that I never stopped, and I jumped to VB.NET 4 years ago. I have programmed with VB.NET 2002, 2005 and I am currently programming with 2008. I hope to start programming with 2010 soon! · What industry do you work in?I work in the Automobile industry, for an international corporation. I...
I'm A VB: William "Bill" Sheldon, Visual Basic MVP
Blog: http://www.nerdnotes.net/blog · How long have you been using VB?I picked up a VB for Dummies book back in '98 and taught myself the language. At the time I was doing my main work in C++ and Mumps, and I knew I was leaving Mumps. The syntax was simple and I could quickly create GUI's but I still preferred the C++ structure. With the launch of .NET I learned both C# and VB.NET, which was now a first class language. Over time I've grown to really like the VB programming model in .NET · &n...
I'm A VB: Erick Kurniawan, Visual Basic MVP
Blog: http://geeks.netindonesia.net/blogs/erickkurniawan · How long have you been using VB?I've been using VB for about 4 years now. I used VB since VB6. Now I use VB9 for my current project. · What industry do you work in?Academic, I am working as lecturer. I also developed several projects for the Academic Information System. · How big is your development team?2-3 people, including me. · &nb...
I'm A VB: Rambod Taati
Website: www.secure-kernel.com · How long have you been using VB?About 7 years. (Since 2002) · What industry do you work in?Software house, Web and Windows programming, Developer · How big is your development team?7 people. (3 developers, 2 designers, 1 graphic artist, 1 manager) · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web, WPF and Windows · ...
I'm A VB: Burak Dikici
Website: www.minor.com.tr · How long have you been using VB?I’ve been using VB for 3 years. · What industry do you work in?Software development and consulting. · How big is your development team?Now we are three people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows apps. Web apps. Mobile apps. · What’s ...
I'm A VB: Thanigainathan Siranjeevi
Website: http://geekswithblogs.net/Thanigai · How long have you been using VB?6 years · What industry do you work in?Information technology - Retail currently · How big is your development team?2 members · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web applications - Elearning & retail marketing · What’s the mos...
I'm A VB: Khor Eng Boon
Website: http://engboonspace.spaces.live.com/ · How long have you been using VB?1-2 Years · What industry do you work in?Student - Business Information Systems · How big is your development team?2 or 3 people · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Assignments (Homework), Tools · What do you like most about VB as a p...
Dynamic Searching using LINQ – Dataset + Joins
About two years ago I posted some code that shows how to dynamically construct LINQ queries at runtime. On average there's a couple questions per month about trying it in some edge case, and usually the support already exists within the API. Recently though someone posted a question that has to do with Datasets and Joins that raised some interesting issues: I have a dataset with two datatables (One Loaded From A CSV file) and (the other loaded from a query) what I would like to be able to do is set the criteria (i.e dtCSV.Field1=dtQuery.Field7 AND (dtCSV.Field5 != dtQuery.Field4 or dtCSV.Field5 != dtQ...
I'm A VB: Uday Gupta
· How long have you been using VB?For the last 4.5 years. · What industry do you work in?Software development, Student. · How big is your development team?Single. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows and Web. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?The Offliner. · ...
I'm A VB: Daron Yondem
Website: http://daron.yondem.com · How long have you been using VB?Basic is my native programming language. Starting from QBasic 1.0 it's a story of love and excitement. I jumped in the VB world with version 3.0 and the story goes on with 4.0, 6.0. Finally .NET saved us all and now we have one of the most powerful programming languages ever: VB.NET! · What industry do you work in?Software development and consulting. User experience is our special focus, with Silverlight and WPF. · ...
I'm A VB: Mark Harr
Blog: http://www.harr.us/markblog · How long have you been using VB?Since shortly after VB 1.0 came out. I was looking for a new development environment to rewrite an application written in Easel that did not cost $12K and have a $600/PC runtime license. · What industry do you work in?Software Development Consultant. I work in whatever industry my client does. ;) · How big is your development team?Depends on the client, b...
I'm A VB: Blake Pell
Blog: http://www.blakepell.com/Main/Blog.aspx · How long have you been using VB?Since VB1 for DOS (yeah, it still works too, I just fired it up on Windows 7). After starting Basic on my Commodore 64 and TSR-80 (GWBasic), I found I loved that I could make forms applications easily (even in DOS). When VB3 came out, I begged my mom to drive me to the nearest Best Buy to get a copy. I'm not sure if she realizes that set me on my career path. · What industry do you work in...
I'm A VB: Waleed El-Badry
· How long have you been using VB?I started with VB 6 in 2003. I developed a real time temperature monitoring system of 25 channels as my graduation project. In 2005, I migrated to VB.NET. · What industry do you work in?I'm a teaching assistant in the Mechatronics Engineering Department. We teach young engineers how to build fully automated electromechanical systems, based on embedded processors or PCs. · How big is your development...
I'm A VB: Hefin Dsouza
Website: http://dotnetworld.in/forum · How long have you been using VB?For the past 6 Years. · What industry do you work in?Software Development and Training. · How big is your development team?I am a Freelance Developer. I develop projects on my own. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Business Automation Applications like Billing Systems, Employee Management Systems, E...
I'm A VB: Fuzz Box
· How long have you been using VB?I’ve used VB since VB4, and I’ve used VB.NET since the Beta version of 2002/2003. · What industry do you work in?IT industry. · How big is your development team?I'm a contractor that works on big and small teams. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I build mainly desktop Windows apps with dips into control and automation.&nb...
I'm A VB: Alex Dybenko
Blog: http://accessblog.net/ · How long have you been using VB?Since version 3. · What industry do you work in?Software. · How big is your development team?Up to five persons. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Business automation. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?VODKA...
I'm A VB: Veeresh Athimamula
· How long have you been using VB?Since 2001, Started with VB 6.0 · What industry do you work in?Business Service Industry · How big is your development team?10 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Internal Web Applications (Web Profile, Inventory Management and Profile Approval) · What’s the most interesti...
I'm A VB: Saul Ortiz
Website: http://www.softwarereflections.com · How long have you been using VB?8 Years · What industry do you work in?Government Entity · How big is your development team?2-3 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Database Applications/Smart Clients · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Heal...
I'm A VB: Dave Campbell
Blog: http://bciamthedad.blogspot.com · How long have you been using VB? My first language was BASIC, starting in 1984. I have been using VB since 2000, when I started using VB6. · What industry do you work in? I work in the Public Sector for a political subdivision of the state. · How big is your development team? Including me, one. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? I write progr...
I'm A VB: Dylan Borg
· How long have you been using VB?About a year and a half. · What industry do you work in?I am still a student. · How big is your development team?I am a one man team. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows Applications, Console Applications and Class Libraries. · What’s the most interesting app you&r...
I'm A VB: Abdul Aziz
Website: http://www.azizm.zoomshare.com · How long have you been using VB?8 Years · What industry do you work in?Software development · How big is your development team?10 people · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Account keeping, Inventory, etc.. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?I...
I'm A VB: Mostafa El-Barky
· What industry do you work in?Media and Content. · How big is your development team?Just Me in my company. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows Application and some ASP. I've been using VB for a wide variety of applications, including media and broadcasting applications. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Adding a dynamic Layer ...
I'm A VB: Jaspreet Dhillon
Blog: http://dhillonjaspreet.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?12 years, since VB 4.0 · What industry do you work in?Insurance, IT, Manufacturing, Pharmaceutical, Oil & Gas · How big is your development team?25 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I recently involved in developing Rate Quote Issue-RQI, BPM solutions and some other web application fo...
I'm A VB: TB
Website: http://phynat.de.tl/ · How long have you been using VB?I´m 13 years old and from Germany. I´ve been using VB over one and a half years. I like VB very much!! · What industry do you work in?I develop applications for my own use, and for some special directions (for teachers). Of course, I don't have my own company. · How big is your development team?Only me. · W...
I'm A VB: Greg S.
· How long have you been using VB?10+ years, starting with VB 3. · What industry do you work in?Software, Financial, Energy over the last 10+ years. · How big is your development team?5. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Back end processes without GUIs for processing database data coming from end user web applications, OCR'd documents, and legacy data. ·&n...
I'm A VB: Jim McDevitt
· How long have you been using VB?A few years, GW basic since 1979. · What industry do you work in?Promotion. · How big is your development team?4 of us. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?"How to Improve". · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Bowlers Improve Your Average. &...
I'm A VB: Steve Kellaway
· How long have you been using VB?Since I couldn't find any decent examples for basic windows development in Delphi, which I had just bought, but could for VB. So, that must be 1995. · What industry do you work in?Whatever my client tells me :) Insurance, banking, process control, etc. · How big is your development team?Depends on the client or who is cooperating on internal projects - so between 1 and 5. · &n...
I'm A VB: Carlos R. Nobrega
Website: http://www.webauditor.com.br · How long have you been using VB?6 years. · What industry do you work in?SaaS for "Engineering Safety at Work". Brazilian standards audited by the Ministry of Labor. · How big is your development team?Just 1. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web applications. · What&...
I'm A VB: Charles Stratton
· How long have you been using VB?10 Years · What industry do you work in?Insurance, Education, and many others. · How big is your development team?4 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?ASP.Net, Sharepoint, Webparts, AJAX, Silverlight. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?I built...
I'm A VB: Adam Leyshon
Website: http://www.coland.co.uk · How long have you been using VB?5 years · What industry do you work in?Bespoke programming · How big is your development team?3 People · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Mostly retail applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?I've written a pr...
I'm A VB: Charl Adrian Klein
· How long have you been using VB?I have been using VB.Net for approximately 3 years, Before that I was using Borland Delphi. · What industry do you work in?I work in the IT industry. Primarily with small - medium businesses. · How big is your development team?Less than 5 people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I build distributed data access, control and reporting ...
I'm A VB: Soumya Sengupta
· How long have you been using VB? 11 years · What industry do you work in? HR/Financial software development. · How big is your development team? 50 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Windows desktop/distributed applications in an n-tier model with various back-end platforms. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built? It's hard t...
I'm A VB: IIS MATT
Blog: www.iismatt.com/iismatt · How long have you been using VB?10 Yrs · What industry do you work in?Comercial Real Estate · How big is your development team?1-5 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Ecommerce Site · &...
I'm A VB: Daniel Seara, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=918755FC-EE78-462E-B546-8C03ADB85982Blog: http://blogs.solidq.com/ES/dseara · How long have you been using VB?Oh.. since the previous century, maybe sometime in the middle of it. :) I knew Visual Basic when he was three floppy-disks old :) · What industry do you work in?Software and database consultant. · How big is your development team?We are more consultants than a...
I'm A VB: Dat Nguyen
· How long have you been using VB?More than 15 years. · What industry do you work in?Contract Manufacturing Services. · How big is your development team?I am the only developer! · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows smart client and ASP.NET applications. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve...
I'm A VB: Ed Lance
Website: http://sandiegodatapro.com · How long have you been using VB?I have been using VB since around 1995 when I started developing with Access. · What industry do you work in?I own a software development company. We develop custom, data intensive, corporate software for many industries, including manufacturing, construction, retail and insurance. · How big is your development team?Around three people. We use subcontractors ...
I'm A VB: Subair Ayobami
· How long have you been using VB?5 years · What industry do you work in?ICT · How big is your development team?5 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Distributed Applications · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Biometrics · Pl...
I'm A VB: Walter Sassano
· How long have you been using VB?Since VB4.0, so that's about 13 or 14 years. · What industry do you work in?I work for a Fortune 500 cosmetics company. · How big is your development team?Our development teams tend to be small, from single developers to 4 or 5 developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I build a lot of infrastructure / middleware applications and ...
I'm A VB: Sameh Fakoua
Website: http://www.osdservices.com · How long have you been using VB?Since 2001. · What industry do you work in?Software Development. · How big is your development team?18 Computer Engineers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Desktop/Database Applications, Web portals. · What’s the most inter...
I'm A VB: Javier Sanchez
· How long have you been using VB?Since the late 80s. · What industry do you work in?Own Agilisa Technologies. Software Development. · How big is your development team?8. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?ASP.NET / Windows Services. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Pr...
I'm A VB: Shawn Greer
Website: http://vbstyler.codeplex.com/ · How long have you been using VB?I believe 4 years. · What industry do you work in?None currently. I am just a hobbyist right now. · How big is your development team?I currently have no team. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?I like to make user controls on the visual side. I like games and go deep into p...
I'm A VB: Muhammad Rashed Nadeem
Blog: http:// · How long have you been using VB?Since 1999. · What industry do you work in?Banking. · How big is your development team?Very little. Only me, VB.Net, and my computer. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Helpdesk, Human resource managment system, and network monitoring utilities. · What’s the ...
I'm A VB: Alexey Mastjuk
Website: http://www.alexmsoftware.tut.su/ · How long have you been using VB?11 years. Since 1998, (Visual Basic 5.0). · What industry do you work in?Windows Applications Development for Zhitomir Branch of Ukrainian State Enterprise of Posts “Ukrposhta”. · How big is your development team?1 person. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows Forms Applications...
I'm A VB: Moonhyuk Choi
Website: http://dotnetpower.kr · How long have you been using VB? About 10 years. · What industry do you work in? Software/Web Development. · How big is your development team? 7 Developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Web, Windows, Services, all of the above. Working as a technical engineer. · What’s the most interesting app y...
I'm A VB: Gary Lima, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=B2255B06-7323-40CB-8968-F95F8B0B3B53 Website: http://www.visualbasicrocks.com · How long have you been using VB? I've been using Visual Basic for about 8 years now. I started out with VBA, programming in Word, PowerPoint and Access, and moved into VB6. However, Access quickly became my primary IDE. I started creating simple databases for our company, then complex databases, and finally started writing automation applications. Today I'm a hardcore VB.NET enthusiast! I've programm...
I'm A VB: Ustes Greenridge
· How long have you been using VB?Since VB 5.0. First VB job was in 96... · What industry do you work in?Financial. · How big is your development team?4 Developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Asp.net, Silverlight, WCF Services. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?ps template ...
I'm A VB: Cihan Yakar
Blog: http://www.cihanyakar.com · How long have you been using VB? After QBasic, I used VB4 for a short time. Altogether, I've been using some version of Basic for about 10 years. · What industry do you work in? IT, Tourism. · How big is your development team? 1 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Mostly Web Applications. Sometimes I build Windows ...
I'm A VB: Carl Boudreau
Website: http://www.kite-cam.com · How long have you been using VB?12 years. · What industry do you work in?Contractor, so almost all of them. · How big is your development team?Currently 20 people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Windows apps, services, and web applications. · What’s the most interest...
I'm A VB: Christopher Deweese
Website: http://christopherDeweese.com/ · How long have you been using VB?7 years in VB.Net, prior to that 3 years of VB Script Classic ASP and a little bit of VB 6. · What industry do you work in?Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. · How big is your development team?10 developers on our law enforcement team including both .NET and mainframe developers. · What kind of apps do yo...
I'm A VB: Jens Burup
Website: www.nectosoft.dk · How long have you been using VB?Since it was published; I think it was in 1978. · What industry do you work in?Manufacturing of industrial machinery and equipment. · How big is your development team?Myself + .Net. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Quotation and configuration sales tools, including CRM and data mining. &midd...
I'm A VB: Jackie Goldstein, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=8DCDBC52-511A-4A36-B035-B15A5E4E6F98 Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/jackieg/ · How long have you been using VB? I first started with VB3 when it was released in 1993. After working many years in the real-time / embedded space, I had spent the previous half year learning Windows programming in C (Petzold). When a friend of mine told me that VB3 was "the greatest thing since sliced bread" I checked it out and haven't looked back since. · What ...
I'm A VB: Leonardo Omar Sailer
· How long have you been using VB?8 years. · What industry do you work in?Telecommunications. · How big is your development team?Currently I'm alone. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web applications, SOA, Silverlight. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?It is an application based on Sil...
I'm A VB: Alex Pfrogner
Website: http://www.SpidersWS.com · How long have you been using VB? Approximately 5 years. I taught myself to program with it the summer before my 9th grade year. · What industry do you work in? Web Application Development for a custom metals company. · How big is your development team? 2 people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Most commonly web apps, but we do some useful tools lik...
I'm A VB: Paulo Santos
Blog: http://pjondevelopment.50webs.com · How long have you been using VB?Geez... I've been using Visual Basic ever since VB for DOS 1.0. It has been a long while. · What industry do you work in?Currently I'm working in an educational company. · How big is your development team?My development team has 9 people. A project manager, a solution architect (me), four VB developers, and three testers. · &...
I'm A VB: José Batista
Website: http://www.fatorar.com.br · How long have you been using VB?Since VB 3.0. · What industry do you work in?Construction and mobile services. · How big is your development team?Three people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Mobile services, CRM and intranets. · What’s the most interesting app you&...
I'm A VB: Mohammad Reza Moasherati
· How long have you been using VB?13 years. · What industry do you work in?Software Industry Company. · How big is your development team?6 persons. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?More than 30 apps. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Everything about that app is interesting. ...
I'm A VB: Ramesh Pujeri
· How long have you been using VB? 6 years. · What industry do you work in? Product Development. · How big is your development team? 50. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? ERP. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built? SmartClient. · Please tell us about an app th...
I'm A VB: Milind Sawde
· How long have you been using VB?Since 2001, with VB 6.0. · What industry do you work in?IT - Software Development. · How big is your development team?4. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Inventory Management Systems, Vessel Tracking Systems. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Ves...
I'm A VB: Adam Hall
Website: www.hitched.co.uk · How long have you been using VB?5 years. · What industry do you work in?Wedding industry. · How big is your development team?2 devs inhouse, with 5 extras outsourced for various projects. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Large, dynamic SEO-friendly web pages. · What’s the mo...
I'm A VB: Roman Sallin
Website: http://www.alcoda.ch · How long have you been using VB?12 years. · How big is your development team?2 developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Software for libraries (public and private). · Please tell us about an app that you’re working on at the moment.It is a library management system. For the staff: a WindowsForms applicationFor the public user...
I'm A VB: Jason M. Hirst
· How long have you been using VB? Since Visual Basic 2, way back in 1992!! I've seen it grow from a child, to its teenage years in VB6 (and the tantrums it sometimes had!) to it's now young adult years, and loving every release! · What industry do you work in? A mixture: Industrial, Commercial and educational. You name it; I've probably done a solution (in VB) for it. · How big is your development team? 4 People. Myself as senior developer for Windows a...
I'm A VB: Franklin Garzon
· How long have you been using VB? Six years. · What industry do you work in? Satellite Location, Education Institute, Military Education, Food Factories, Supermarkets. · How big is your development team? 18 members. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Satellite Location and Commerce Apps. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve...
I'm A VB: Faisal Ghaznavi
Blog: http://ghaznavies.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?From last 10 years. · What industry do you work in?Textiles, Medical, Oil, Government. · How big is your development team?100 Developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Database related + Imaging system + Document managements system. · What&r...
I'm A VB: Nolan Sunico
· How long have you been using VB?Five (5) years now. · What industry do you work in?System Development. · How big is your development team?Small. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Database Systems. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Accounting System. · &nbs...
I'm A VB: Anthony Papillion
Website: http://www.cajuntechie.com · How long have you been using VB? I've been using VB since its earliest DOS version but I left and went to C++ shortly thereafter. I came back around version 6. · What industry do you work in? Software development and healthcare infomatics. · How big is your development team? 2-5. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build? Records k...
I'm A VB: Sachin Palewar
Website: http://www.palewar.com · How long have you been using VB?Since 1998, VB 5.0. · What industry do you work in?IT - Software Development, Consultancy, Field Force Automation. · How big is your development team?8. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Field Force Solutions, Windows Mobile Applications, Document Management System. · ...
I'm A VB: Mark Wisecarver
Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/markwisecarver/ · How long have you been using VB?Late 80's. · What industry do you work in?Own Solomon Technologies Intl. Create Webcasts for DiscountASP.NET and Microsoft. · How big is your development team?Just me. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?ASP.NET, Silverlight, Expression Studio. ·  ...
I'm A VB: Mayur Tendulkar
Blog: http://blog.mayurtendulkar.com · How long have you been using VB?From 2001. I'm in love with Visual Basic, because of its simplicity and magic… · What industry do you work in?Academic and IT Industry. · How big is your development team?College Project team: 5. In company: 4. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Web, mobile and mobile-web applications. &...
I'm A VB: Ehsan Valizadeh
· How long have you been using VB?5 years. · What industry do you work in?Oil & Gas Industries. · How big is your development team?4 people. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?ASP.NET & Windows Applications. · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?It's a search application!! ...
I'm A VB: Duncan Jones
Website: http://www.merrioncomputing.com · How long have you been using VB?I started with VB3 in 1992, having got hooked on programming thanks to BBC Basic in the preceding years. · What industry do you work in?Financial Services. · How big is your development team?3 developers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Financial reconciliation and risk management application...
I'm A VB: Zafer Kafkas
· How long have you been using VB?4 months · What industry do you work in?Education · What do you like most about VB as a programming language?Programming games For other interviews in this series, please visit http://imavb.net. Are you a VB, too? Submit your story here!
I'm A VB: Steele Price, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=DD672B90-7677-4A03-968D-3407491C3860 Website: http://steeleprice.net · How long have you been using VB?Since V1. In 1992, I was looking for a replacement to QBasic when developing a Point of Sale Application for Windows. · What industry do you work in?Software Development. We are very diversified in our client base, touching Medical Records, Financial Services, Home Automation, Factory Floor Control, Online Gaming, Media and Training. &m...
I'm A VB: Leonardo Testa
Blog: http://leonardostudio.blogspot.com/ · How long have you been using VB?It’s been 6 years since I started with VB6. After 3 years, I switched to the Visual Studio environment. (Hace 6 Años que comencé con VB 6, después de tres años me pase al Visual Studio 2008.) · What industry do you work in?I’m working in a company that sells appliances and furniture’s in Paraguay. In this company, I have learned everything I know about VB. It also served ...
I'm A VB: Alberto De Luca
Website: http://www.dotnetwork.it/ · How long have you been using VB?Since 1994. · What industry do you work in?My own business. I'm a Ferrari consultant. · How big is your development team?1 developer: Myself. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Management systems, data oriented. · What’s the most interes...
I'm A VB: Biser Dimitrov
Blog: http://ajaxus.net · How long have you been using VB?I started with VB.NET in 2005. · What industry do you work in?Our company is UK based and operates with UK's NHS. · How big is your development team?We are relatively small team - 10 programmers. · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?We develop only web based systems. · &nbs...
I'm A VB: Ennio Della Lucia
Website: http://www.eelimedia.it/ · How long have you been using VB?15/16 years · What industry do you work in?Internet Service Provider - ISV · How big is your development team?Three developers · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Vertical - SaaS - Industry · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ev...
I'm A VB: Kristof Zerbe
Website: http://www.zerbit.de · How long have you been using VB?First version was 5.0, after years of programming with Access-Basic (since version 1.0) and later VBA · What industry do you work in?Software-Development, Consulting · How big is your development team?4 Developers · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?In my business, I'm developing applications in Access, VB,...
I'm A VB: Yemi Ajibabi
· How long have you been using VB?5 years · What industry do you work in?Institution · How big is your development team?2 · What kind of apps do you most commonly build?Database · What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?Estate Manager · Please tell us about an app t...
I'm A VB!
Who’s the “typical VB.NET developer”? Is there one? There are millions of VB.NET developers in the world, and they each have their own unique story. We decided to talk to some of them to find out what kinds of applications they’re building, what technologies they’re using, and what their favorite features are. Watch the interviews and find out for yourself who today's VB.NET developers really are! View the interviews Are you a VB, too? Tell your story here or leave a comment below.
I'm A VB: Chris G. Williams (VB MVP)
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=D81FAC63-665A-44BA-AEF7-8CFE3588E7EF Blog: http://www.blogusmaximus.net · How long have you been using VB?I've been using VB since version 3.0, way back in 1993. It was love at first sight. · What industry do you work in?Software Consulting. We serve pretty much every industry. · How big is your development team?It varies from project to project, anywhere from 1 to many, with local an...
We Need to Talk (Matt Gertz)
By now, many of you will have downloaded the recent beta that we posted to the net, and (hopefully) are getting excited about the features that we’ve been developing. Recently, Beth Massi interviewed me about some of the work that I’ve been doing as a part of that effort. I always enjoy interviews, and Beth is great at pulling out some of the more interesting aspects of a person’s work, but I’m always somehow left with the feeling afterwards that there’s something more that I wanted to say -- some different issue to which I forgot to draw folks’ attention. You...
I'm A VB: Joacim Andersson, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=56643689-ABE7-4313-A865-442BCBE05B54 Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/joacim · How long have you been using VB?I've used VB since '91. Starting with VB1. · What industry do you work in?I currently work for a company that creates SaaS solutions for the pharmaceutical industry. · How big is your development team?We are a small team of 5 developers working on new development. We also have a ...
I'm A VB: Wilson Kutegeka, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=8BAFA316-058B-44A9-84F0-F8228EAB6379 Blog: http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/wilson/ Website: http://www.clinicmaster.net/ · How long have you been using VB? Well, despite the fact that I was already a physics graduate, I learned how to switch on a computer in 2000, the same year I wrote my first program in C. C-language made me learn DOS before windows. However, I could not produce a window in C and that’s when I jumped onto VB 6/MS Access and did lots of work out of self-drive and self-train...
I'm A VB: Vishal Shukla, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=97E0CC61-BECF-4CDE-A994-5BAA1533A258 Blog: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/vishal · How long have you been using VB? 18 years, started with GWBasics · What industry do you work in? Application Development for Local Government · How big is your development team? Around 150 developers · What kind of apps do you most common...
History of Microsoft Video: Bill Gates Talks about Altair Basic (Lisa Feigenbaum)
A few months ago, Tina started a great series on Channel9 that walks through the history of Microsoft, year by year: The History of Microsoft In the first episode, Bill Gates talks about what it was like to build Altair Basic. He actually shows the tape that represents the instructions for Basic! Lots of rare footage, and an entertaining show on how it all started. Episode #1: The History of Microsoft - 1975
InfoQ Article on the Future of VB.NET (Lisa Feigenbaum)
For those of you who prefer text over audio, here's a recent InfoQ article that was released based on the podcast I did with Joe Stagner:InfoQ: Is There a Future for VB.NET?
I'm A VB: Dave Noderer (VB MVP)
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=339A9F64-818D-46B8-A984-9DB6D89B4968 Blog: http://geekswithblogs.net/dnoderer/ Business Website: http://www.computerways.com Community Website: http://www.fladotnet.com · How long have you been using VB? I jumped in with Access 1.0 in 1993 then converted a couple of apps from VB 1.0 to 3.0 in 1995 or so. Previously used the Microsoft Basic interpreter on the Altair 8800 which came on paper tape in 1975/76. · What industry do you work in? Whiche...
I'm A VB: Pep Lluís Baño, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=AAF2211D-2C08-4B28-8401-D356C20ECAD7 Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/peplluis/ · How long have you been using VB? Since the first version of VB-DOS in 1992 J and earlier Basic Interpreters from 1986/1987 http://msmvps.com/blogs/peplluis/archive/2008/04/15/when-vb-becomes-oop-cuando-vb-se-convirti-243-en-poo.aspx · What industry do you work in? Automation & industrial environments like food, Wood, Concrete, Measuring instrumentation...
TechEd Video: Future Directions for Visual Basic, by Anders Hejlsberg and Jonathan Aneja
As part of the new VB/C# co-evolution strategy, Visual Studio Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg has broadened his role. In addition to being Chief Architect for C#, he now sets the direction for both the VB.NET and C# languages. At TechEd, Anders participated in both the VB.NET and C# language presentations. In watching these sessions, you can see that the future trends and directions for the VB.NET and C# languages are now the same. TechEd NA 2009 Session Video: "Future Directions for Visual Basic" by Anders Hejlsberg and Jonathan Aneja In this talk, we discuss the future direction of the Visual Basic language ...
I'm A VB: Antonio Chagoury, Visual Basic MVP
MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=F68AA8DD-FBAB-460C-813B-BB9C990EA4AA Blog: www.cto20.com Website: www.inspectorit.com · How long have you been using VB? My first language was BASIC. I have been using VB in the true development sense since 1997. · What industry do you work in? Software Development and Consulting, primarily Web. · How big is your development team? The current size of the development team is 11, and they ar...
Implicit Line Continuation (Kathleen McGrath)
In the second part of my interview with Doug Rothaus, he describes the new implicit line continuation feature in Visual Basic 2010. Learn about the most common scenarios that no longer require the underscore character (_) in the topic, Statements in Visual Basic. See the Video: implicit Line Continuation --Kathleen McGrath http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen
Misfit Geek Podcast – Episode #2 "Does VB have a Future?" (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The Misfit Geek, Joe Stagner, asked me this provocative question in a recent episode on his new podcast series: "Does VB have a Future?". Tune in to hear more details on my answer, which of course is YES! :) We talk about plans for increasing the VB.NET content across Microsoft, the great innovations that are happening in VB.NET, idea sharing that's been happening between VB.NET and C#, the similarities and differences between VB.NET and C# developers, and more! Episode #2 - Lisa Feigenbaum from the .NET Managed Languages GroupIn this episode - The Misfit Geek talks with Lisa Feigenbaum from the .NET Managed...
VB Entity Framework Samples Now Available (Lisa Feigenbaum)
There are a lot of great Entity Framework samples on Code Gallery that you can now find available in Visual Basic .NET. This was recently announced on the ADO.NET team blog. Browse through the list below and start downloading! ADO.NET Entity Framework Query Samples (Download)ADO.NET Entity Framework Query Samples is a small Windows Forms program which contains several basic Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities queries against that NorthwindEF Entity Data Model (a modified version of Northwind). Its goal is to help you learn the features of the different query languages available in the Entity Framework, and to le...
Auto-Implemented Properties (Kathleen McGrath)
In this interview, Doug Rothaus, a programming writer on the Visual Studio User Education team, describes the auto-implemented properties in Visual Basic 2010. He also demonstrates some of the code examples in his Help topic: Auto-Implemented Properties. See the Video: Auto-Implement Properties. --Kathleen
Try Out Dotfuscator in VS 2010 Beta 1!
The team at PreEmptive Solutions recently posted a great blog article that walks through all the latest features in VS 2010's Dotfuscator Software Services - Community Edition (previously known as Dotfuscator CE). Browse through the article to learn what's new, or download the beta to follow along in the IDE.What's New with Dotfuscator in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 by Bill Leach
VS2010 Beta1 Extensibility News (Lisa Feigenbaum)
I recently received this letter from the Visual Studio Extensibility team, that I thought would be interesting to readers of this blog. Whether you're building Visual Studio extensions or downloading them from others, there's news here for you. News from the Visual Studio Extensibility team… Are you building new tools to simplify your life or change the way people work? Check out the opportunities to create innovative extensions for Visual Studio 2010. Examples of cool things you can do: ·...
How We Do It: Building the Visual Studio Product Line (Beth Massi, Matt Gertz)
Ever wonder how we build Visual Studio and the .NET Framework? I mean literally. You know, the build process that spits out a product at the other end? Well I sure did and it's not just hitting F5 people ;-). In this interview I sit down with Matt Gertz, frequent VB blogger and also the guy in charge of the builds in Developer Division (he has a long title, but I forget what it is :-)). He explains how the build and test processes work on a team of two thousand people all on Team Foundation Server. I must say it's pretty darn impressive. Many thanks to Matt for taking time out of his busy schedule to do thi...
Learning about Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 (Mary Lee)
To learn more about Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, Kathleen McGrath is highlighting new documentation about these products with a weekly blog post and a daily tweet. If you want to learn more about the new features and scenarios, check out her blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen and her twitter feed at https://twitter.com/kathleenmcgrath. Mary Lee, Programming Writer.
Phoning Home, revisited (Matt Gertz)
In my post “M. G. Phone Home,” I discussed how to write a simple phone application for Windows Mobile, using Visual Basic, which accesses the Bluetooth service. What I didn’t discuss was how to deploy it to the phone via CAB. Since I purchased a new phone yesterday (a Samsung Saga, running Windows Mobile 6.1), and I’ve discovered that I need the same app on it, I thought this would be an opportune time to discuss how to do this, since it’s not obvious and slightly different from the distribution of “normal” applications. If you want to follow along, you ...
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 Released Today! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The public availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1 was announced today on Jason Zander's blog:http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/05/20/general-download-of-vs2010-net-framework-4-0-beta-1.aspxBelow are some resources to use as you download and start using the Beta. Cheers, Lisa Feigenbaum | Program Manager | VS Languages VB, C#, and F# 2010 on MSDN These are the best one-stop shops for information on what’s new in VB, C#, and F# in VS2010: VB: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/dd819153.aspx C#: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/dd819407.aspx F#: htt...
Channel9 Interview with Luca Bolognese: VB.NET and C# Co-Evolution (Lisa Feigenbaum)
There was a great Channel9 video posted last week on the future directions of VB.NET and C# and how they are related. Charles Torre interviewed Luca Bolognese, who is currently the Group Program Manager for VB.NET, C#, and F#. Please see below for more details. Luca Bolognese: C# and VB.NET Co-Evolution - The Twain Shall Meet by Charles Torre For most of their lifetimes, C# and VB.NET have evolved at their own pace and in their own ways (C# added iterators, VB.NET didn't. VB.NET added XML Literals, C# didn't. etc, etc...). Today, Luca Bolognese and team have embarked on a new approach to how .NET's premiere langu...
CodeRush Xpress Released Today! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
CodeRush Xpress is a FREE Visual Studio 2008 add-in containing 60+ refactorings, 7 editing features, and full support for C# and Visual Basic. Download hereCodeRush Xpress includes the following features. In addition, you receive the following refactorings.Add Parameter Create Overload Create With Statement Encapsulate Field Encapsulate Field (read only) Extract Interface Extract Method Extract Property Extract XML Literal to Resource Flatten Conditional Introduce Constant Introduce Constant (local) Introduce Local Introduce Local (repl...
CodeCast Episode 20: Biz Apps Team and VB with Beth Massi (Lisa Feigenbaum, Beth Massi)
Code Cast Episode 20: Interview with Beth MassiThis show's interview is Ken interviewing Beth Massi, Microsoft, program manager on Microsoft’s BizApps team in the VS group. Beth discusses her work over the past two years at Microsoft on the VB team and now on the BizApps team, and chats about some cool new features and content in Visual Studio 2010.Topics· Beth Massi (@ 27:28) – Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassiLinks· VB Team Blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam· VB Developer Center – http://msdn.com/vbasic· VSTO Developer Center – http://msdn.com/vsto&...
How Do We Learn to Be Good Programmers? (Matt Gertz)
I’ve always enjoyed writing. Putting pen to paper (or, these days, fingers to keyboard) is something that brings a lot of joy into my life, even more than music or any other hobby that I have. I’ve been writing stories since earlier than I can remember, have faithfully kept a daily diary for many years, and have published countless journals, conference papers, and other articles on this or that technology. So, when I was in my early twenties, it seemed the most obvious thing to try start writing professionally. I wrote out a number of stories (mostly science fiction), which I s...
Ask Kathleen: Working with MEF (Lisa Feigenbaum)
MEF stands for Managed Extensibility Framework. MEF is a new .NET library that enables greater reuse of applications and components. Using MEF, .NET applications can be dynamically composed. Kathleen has a great article on MEF in last month's edition of Visual Studio Magazine. She explains what it is, how to use it, and outlines the application scenarios MEF is designed to enable. Visual Studio Magazine "Ask Kathleen" Column: Working with MEF
CodeRush Xpress 9.1 Beta: 59 Refactorings, 17 Consume-first providers, and Much more! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Very exciting news! Developer Express is coming out with a new version of the FREE add-in we all know today as Refactor!. The new product, CodeRush XPress, builds on Refactor! by increasing the refactoring count to 59! It also includes a host of other editing functionality, making it a much richer tool for all-around IDE productivity. Consume-first providers enable a different way of programming, whereby you can refer to variables, properties, classes, and other members before they are defined. Then the IDE tools insert the definition for you, so you don't need to write all that plumbing code, or break your thoug...
CodeCast Episode 17: Visual Basic 2010 Preview with Lisa Feigenbaum
I recently recorded a CodeCast interview with Ken Levy. We discussed the VS2010 Editor, VB.NET line continuation removal, interop with dynamic languages, the Microsoft languages strategy, and the upcoming VS2010 Beta1 release. Recording: CodeCast Episode 17: Visual Basic 2010 Preview with Lisa Feigenbaum This episode includes Ken Levy with a part 2 interview with Microsoft’s VB community program manager Lisa Feigenbaum. Lisa discusses many of the cool new features coming in the VB 2010 language and compiler, and some new VS 2010 IDE features. Also discussed is VB within Microsoft’s family of various...
XML Literals, WCF and LINQ Article by Steele Price (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Steele wrote a great article in last month's issue of Visual Studio Magazine on XML Literals, WCF and LINQ. He shows how to use these three technologies together to produce more responsive ASP.NET pages, and more readable code. Lots of great tips for VB 2008.VSM's "On VB" Column: XML Literals, WCF and LINQ by Steele Price
.NET Rocks! with Beth Massi on the Open XML SDK and XML Literals (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Beth Massi shot a couple of great episodes last month on dnrTV! If you are interested in learning more about the Open XML SDK, and how to easily access it using VB.NET XML Literals, be sure to check them out. dnrTV Show #137: Beth Massi on the Open XML SDK Our good friend Beth Massi returns to dnrTV to introduce us to the Open XML SDK, Microsoft's tool kit for creating and manipulating Office 2007 documents. dnrTV Show #138: Beth Massi on Open XML and Office Beth Massi is back to talk about how to generate custom Word documents and Excel spreadsheets with LINQ to SQL and XML Literals in Visual Basic .NET....
TechEd North America, here we come! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
TechEd North America 2009 is right around the corner. For those of you attending, we look forward to spending time with you at the VB.NET sessions and Technical Learning Center (a.k.a. booth). I've pasted the VB.NET session list below. See you in LA!
When using LINQ to XML why don’t I get results if I don’t import a XML namespace (Daniel Walzenbach)?
Hi,I posted a bit of code the other day which I used to get a list of all Code Snippets we ship in Visual Studio. In a nutshell, I used XElement.Load to create a new XML document from a filename from which I then read elements from (There are way to many ‘”from” in this sentence ;-) ). Unfortunately, I forgot to import the XML Namespace in the code I posted which caused my code not to return any results (but instead provided me with a brilliant opportunity to write another post. hehe :-) ).Let’s have a look at the code which is causing trouble and a Code Snippets to understand what’s...
Luca Bolognese on Asynchronous HTML caching in VB.NET (Lisa Feigenbaum)
You may know Luca Bolognese from his well-known work on C# LINQ. Luca is now the Group Program Manager for VB.NET, C#, and F#. You can check out his blog here. Luca recently blogged his first VB.NET post. It is about asynchronous HTML caching, and is part of a longer series in which he is converting a financial VBA Excel add-in to .NET. The code uses the .NET Parallel Extensions that will be shipping in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Check it out at the link below:An Async Html cache – part I
How to get a list of all files of a directory (subdirectories included) (Daniel Walzenbach)?
I needed to create a list of all Code Snippets we ship in Visual Studio the other day containing their title, description and path on disc and size. As you might know, Code Snippets are stored in multiple directories below "%ProgramFiles%Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0" so I had to traverse all the subdirectories of the aforementioned path to find all snippets. Fortunately – linq to the rescue – this came down to a few lines of code :-)This statement gives you a List of Strings (or, to be a bit more precise, a System.Linq.IOrderedEnumerable(Of String)) which you can walk over to do all kinds of crazy thi...
Two free e-books available till April 22th to celebrate MS Press’s 25th b-day (Daniel Walzenbach)
2009 is the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Press! To celebrate their b-bay they’re giving away two free e-books, namely Before opening one of the links make sure that you disable your Pop-Up blocker as the window containing the book will be opened in a new window. Additionally, when the new window gets opened give it some time to show the content as the VB book is roughly 8MB and the Windows Small Business Server book is around 24MB. To download the book click "Page >> Save As..." and rename the download in the Save window. Get them as soon as the offer lasts (April 22nd) :-) Daniel Edited April 22...
Keep the Customer Satisfied (Matt Gertz)
As I’ve written elsewhere, the toughest critics for any work you do can always be found in your own family. Pleased at the immense work that I’d done in scanning in and tagging all of my photos and media (as noted in this post), and with my ego sufficiently boosted by writing a screensaver in VB that would display not only the pictures but the tags associated with them, it was a deflating experience to have my middle child, Aidan, pepper me with comments like “That’s not me; that’s Brandon” or “You didn’t include Grandpa in the tags, but I can see his ear in t...
Negative delays: not in VB (Lucian Wischik)
Our recent post on "negative sleeps in VB" was an April Fool's joke. VB doesn't have negative sleeps, and isn't going to. But the joke's on me! Several readers wrote back to say that other languages do have negative sleeps. Tony Hoare, inventor of "Quicksort" amongst other things, wrote: Did you know that negative delays have long been used in practice in the design of systolic circuits? The negative delay is used to synchronise signals in the middle of the network, just like a positive delay. There are a series of commutation laws that allow delays to be moved before or after a circuit element....
Using "negative sleeps" to improve responsiveness in VB web apps
[NOTE: please also read the followup to this article] .NET 4.0 will introduce many new threading and concurrency classes -- SpinLock, Parallel Linq, and ConcurrentDictionary to name but a few.The new feature that excites me the most is the ability to pass a negative argument to Thread.Sleep. This article describes how you can use it to speed up a program by compensating for internet latency.Let's start with a simple VB program which retrieves an RSS feed and produces from it a new feed with only those items from a particular date of the year:Option Strict OnImports System.NetImports...
CodeCast Episode 12: Visual Basic and the VB Community (Lisa Feigenbaum, Dustin Campbell)
Be sure to check out the latest episode of CodeCast with two VB interviews, including myself and VB program manager Dustin Campbell!Thursday, February 19, 2009 CodeCast Episode 12: Visual Basic and the VB CommunityIn this episode of CodeCast, Ken Levy, Markus Egger, and Gary Short discuss Internet Explorer 8, Windows 7 beta, Kindle and Sony eBook readers, and Visual Studio 2010. Ken has two in-depth interviews on the topic of Visual Basic, .NET languages, and the VB community. The first interview is with VB community program manager Lisa Feigenbaum and the second is with VB program manager Dustin Campbell.&mid...
Implicit Line Continuation in VB 10 (Tyler Whitney)
Things are always changing. I was at the Washington State History Museum with my daughter a couple weeks ago. One of the exhibits features pictures of various sites that were taken many years ago. Then it contrasts them with contemporary pictures taken of the same locations. It was really interesting how much things changed and how quickly. I have a couple computers in my office that I had when I was a kid. My wife suggested that I move my little museum to a place where it would be more appreciated—which meant out of the house ;-) So here they sit in my office. I ha...
Channel 9 Interview: No More Underscores in Visual Basic 10 (Beth Massi, Tyler Whitney)
I just posted a new Channel 9 interview. This time it's with Tyler Whitney, a developer on the Visual Basic compiler team. Here he demonstrates how line termination has changed in the Visual Basic 10 compiler making underscores unnecessary as line continuation indicators. This makes your code more readable especially when writing multi-line LINQ queries. Yes it's true, many underscores are unemployed so the team has created a support group for them at www.unemployedunderscores.com :-)Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
The Silverlight Toolkit Adds Visual Basic Samples (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The Silverlight Toolkit March 2009 release is enhanced with Visual Basic source code. Please follow the links to view these samples for both Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3. Silverlight 2: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html Silverlight 3: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl3/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle. It includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 18 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and ...
Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight: VB QuickStarts, Hands-On-Labs, and How-To Topics released! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Today the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team released a download aimed to help Visual Basic developers use the Composite Application Library. It includes VB versions of the QuickStarts, Hands-On-Labs, and How-To topics: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=537da1cd-43e1-4799-88e7-a1da9166fb46 I've included some more information about the Composite Application Guidance below . You can also find more resources on MSDN and on CodePlex. Please post feedback on the current VB release to Blaine's blog. (Blaine is a Program Manager on the Microsoft Patterns & Practices te...
Channel 9 Interview: WPF Improvements in VS2010 for Business Apps (Beth Massi, Milind Lele)
Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on WPF Improvements in Visual Studio 2010 for Building Business Apps.At the MVP Summit a few weeks ago, Italian MVP Alessandro del Sole was so excited about the new WPF features in Visual Studio 2010 that he asked me if he could interview Milind Lele himself to get the low-down -- I said sure! Milind is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team. In this interview he chats with Alessandro about the new WPF improvements in Visual Studio 2010 for building business applications. This time Milind shows off the new Visual Studio UI and the new WPF data grid as he ...
Channel 9 Interview: Using the Touchless SDK with Visual Basic (Beth Massi, Lucian Wischik)
Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on using the Touchless SDK. The Touchless SDK enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. "Touch without touching." It's actually pretty cool! In this interview I meet up with Touchless SDK creator, Mike Wasserman and Visual Basic Spec Lead, Lucian Wischik. They explain the project and show off a game they developed using Visual Basic 9 in Visual Studio 2008. I almost got my block knocked off playing the game but you'll see how it was worth it ;-)For additional information mentioned in the video check out: ...
MIX 09 Video: Making XML Really, Really Easy with Microsoft Visual Basic (Alex Turner, Lisa Feigenbaum)
Alex Turner presented VB XML yesterday here at MIX 09. Check out the video from his session! Video link: https://channel9.msdn.com/events/mix(The powerpoint slides are attached.) Making XML Really, Really Easy with Microsoft Visual Basic 9 MIX09-T72M Wednesday March 18 |11:55 AM-12:15 PM | San Polo 3401 By: Alex Turner Tags: Languages See how Visual Basic 9 makes generating rich XML orders of magnitude easier than using text concatenation or an object model. Come learn how XML literals, embedded expressions, LINQ integration, automatic schema generation, and other XML-specific Visual Basic 9.0 features will tr...
Visual Studio at MIX 09 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
MIX 09 is here! ScottGu kicks off the keynote today at 9am PST. Below is the list of Visual Studio related sessions. The full conference list is posted here. Didn't buy a pass? Don't worry. Tune in to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/locations/events to watch sessions live, or to view them on-demand within 24hrs of recording. In addition to watching the sessions, here are some other ways to stay connected this week: Keynotes and Visual Studio related sessions: Day One Keynote MIX09-KEY01 Wednesday March 18 |9:00 AM-11:00 AM | By: Bill Buxton, Scott Guthrie Day 1 keynote f...
Presentation Materials from Belgian TechDays 2009 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Last week, I gave two talks at the Belgian TechDays in Antwerp. This was my first time at the conference, and it was a great event! I've created a resource page on Code Gallery for the presentation materials from my talks: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/techdays I've included the direct links below as well. Future Directions for Visual Basic (Slide Deck, Demo Code) In this session, we'll discuss the future direction of Visual Basic both in the near and long term. Come see the exciting new language features in VB 2010, including additional LINQ functionality, syntax simplifications and dynamic lang...
Tips and Tricks for Finding Information in the MSDN Library (Mary Lee)
When you have a question about how an API works, most of you will look in the MSDN Library. There are some tips and tricks to finding what you need in this vast resource. First of all, there are two main ways you can read the content in the MSDN Library. You can also use the MTPS Web service at http://services.msdn.microsoft.com/ContentServices/ContentService.asmx to access MSDN and TechNet content. For two examples on how to use this Web service, see How to: Bind to a Web Service and Walkthrough: Binding to Data from a Service in an Application-Level Project. The offline and online ...
Veni, MIDI, Vici: Generating a simple MIDI file using VB, part 2 (Matt Gertz)
In part 1 of this series, I constructed a pair of classes to supporting persisting MIDI data to files. In this entry, I’ll now leverage that code to support an (admittedly limited) music editor experience. Caveat: As I mentioned in the first post, I’m sure many readers will be far more knowledgeable about MIDI than I am, and will justifiably roll their eyes at this code due to its limited scope. I will only be generating simple type-1 MIDI files that only use the Note On and Note Off events, and which don’t use metadata, targeting a “Save” scenario only. The idea of this exercise was to u...
Visual Studio 2008 Voted Best IDE! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The results from InfoWorld's 2009 Technology of the Year Awards are in. Visual Studio 2008 was voted Best IDE, with the following commentary:Microsoft Visual Studio 2008Visual Studio stands alone as the preferred development environment for applications using Microsoft's .Net Framework, and it's peerless among IDEs for any language. The 2008 version expands the development targets to include SOA, Web 2.0, Windows Presentation Framework, and Silverlight applications, and extends the data-handling capabilities to include language-integrated queries (LINQ). You can find the awards slideshow here. Also note the InfoW...
Veni, MIDI, Vici: Generating a simple MIDI file using VB, part 1 (Matt Gertz)
As I’ve alluded to in previous blogs, music has always been a big part of my life, particularly performance music. I’ve been a clarinet and saxophone player for many years, am an avid singer, and (with the help of friends) I’ve done my best to teach myself piano and drums. Composition of music, however, has always been a problem for me. I’ve written a few small pieces, but any attempt to write something larger has always ended up with me giving up after fifty or so measures. Programs to help a person create their own compositions have certainly come a long way, but ...
Concurrent Basic on Channel 9 (Lucian Wischik, Lisa Feigenbaum)
Concurrency is an important topic on everyone's mind, when considering future trends for computing and programming languages. Concurrent Basic is a variant of the Visual Basic language, with new constructs baked in to help handle concurrency and parallelism, in a very natural way. Watch this high-energy video with language guru Erik Meijer, VB spec lead Lucian Wischik, and MS researcher Claudio Russo, to learn more about what Concurrent Basic is all about!Expert to Expert: Inside Concurrent Basic (CB)NOTE: CB is a research project and therefore a research language. It has no ship vehicle and is not available for ...
VB XML Literals with ASP.NET MVC (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Have you been following the buzz on VB XML Literals with ASP.NET MVC?! Last week, Beth Massi posted a Channel 9 video with ASP.NET Product Unit Manager Dmitry Robsman. You can find a written description of the topic on Dmitry's blog:ASP.NET MVC View Engine using VB.NET XML LiteralsThere has been an interesting discussion about this technique on ASP.NET Program Manager Phil Haack's blog:Interesting use of XML Literals as a View EngineFinally, check out the InfoQ article that was published on this topic:VB May Get a Big Push from ASP.NET MVC
Visual Basic at MIX ’09 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
For the Visual Basic web developers, be sure to check out MIX this year! The conference will be taking place March 18-20, at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas.https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/locations/eventsThe list of sessions is posted here. Included in the agenda will be the following Visual Basic session.Making XML Really, Really Easy with Microsoft Visual Basic 9 By Alex Turner See how Visual Basic 9 makes generating rich XML orders of magnitude easier than using text concatenation or an object model. Come learn how XML literals, embedded expressions, LINQ integration, automatic schema generation...
Visual Basic 10 on the 10-4 Channel9 Series! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Check out the latest video in the 10-4 Channel 9 series, on Visual Basic 10: Episode 9: Visual Basic 10 In this ninth episode of 10-4, we introduce some of the new features and functionality coming to the Visual Basic language with the release of Visual Basic 10. We'll cover a whole range of features from Auto-Properties, to Multiline Lambdas, Statement Lambdas, Collection Initializers, Array Literals, and Implicit Line Continuation. In future episodes, we'll look at diving into features like No-PIA (No-Primary Interop Assembly) and Generic Variance.
Web-scraping using Visual Basic's XML support
We've just had a fascinating article about using VB's XML literals to produce web pages.I've been interested in the other side of the process: using VB's XML support to scrape web-pages for data. Here's the essential bit of code, which looks for something like <div class="content"><h2>Title</h2> <table><tr><td><p>Data1</p></td></tr></table></div>, and extracts the title and the data.Dim fn = Fetch(url)Dim xml = XElement.Load(fn)Dim yui = (From i In xml...<xhtml:div> Where i.GetAttr("class") = "content").FirstOrDefaultDim title...
Channel 9 Interview: ASP.NET MVC using Visual Basic XML Literals (Beth Massi)
Today I posted an interview on Channel 9 with Dmitry Robsman, the Product Unit Manager for ASP.NET. In this interview he shows us how he implemented ASP.NET MVC views using Visual Basic's XML Literals instead of .aspx pages. Dmitry shows us how this makes coding the views much cleaner using standard OOP principals. He also makes some very interesting observations about DSLs and Visual Basic XML literals. You can download the code Dmitry shows in the interview from his blog here.Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
An Updated Screensaver Example (Matt Gertz)
I’ve just completed a task that I set out to do about five years ago, and I am pretty proud (and tired)! I have just finished scanning in every single photo that I’ve acquired over my 40+ years of life, fixing up their dates to reflect the date when the picture was taken, not when it was scanned. Furthermore, I have tagged every photo on the disk drive (scanned or originally digital) with metadata saying who was in the photo and where it was taken. All of my family videos have been scanned in as well, and all of that work (plus all of my music tracks and personal documents) is now backed up weekly ont...
New WPF "How Do I" Video on Formatting Data Entry (Beth Massi)
Today we released a new How Do I Video onto the VB Dev Center on how to format controls on data entry forms using the IValueConverter like I showed on my blog here. The IValueConverter allows you full control over the display of the data as well as the editing of that data by users in the controls. Check out all the WPF Forms over Data videos here.Enjoy!
Happy New Year! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
On behalf of the Microsoft Visual Basic team, I'd like to wish all of our readers a happy & healthy new year. We truly enjoy getting to know you through your comments and emails, so here's an opportunity to say "thanks"! As we move forward to 2009, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at "the best of 2008". Here's a list of the most popular posts each month (based on the # of aggregate views): January: VB2008 Outperforms VB2005! (Lisa Feigenbaum) February: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 9: Full Outer Join (Bill H...
VB Developer? Read MSDN Magazine? You're in luck! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
MSDN Magazine Editor in Chief, Howard Dierking, announced a number of changes to the magazine in the January 2009 Editor's Note. Among that list of changes was the following excerpt: "Furthermore, we recently began moving all of our article code samples to MSDN Code Gallery. This will allow our team to be much more agile in managing and updating code samples as needed. In that agility, we are now also able to translate all C# code samples into Visual Basic." * GOING FORWARD, ALL MSDN MAGAZINE ARTICLES WRITTEN IN C# WILL ALSO INCLUDE CODE DOWNLOADS FOR VB.NET ONLINE! * So, where can you find the VB code? First c...
System.Diagnostics.Process: avoid deadlocks in RedirectStandardInput/Output (Lucian Wischik)
It's common that you want to launch an external process but supply input and capture the output. Here's one attempt: ' BAD CODE Using p As New System.Diagnostics.Process p.StartInfo.FileName = "cat" p.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = False p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = True p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardInput = True p.Start() p.StandardInput.Write("world" & vbCrLf & "hello") p.StandardInput.Close() Dim op = p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd()...
10-4 Episode 2: Welcome to Visual Studio 2010 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
It's a new week, and the 10-4 video podcast series continues! The topics for this week include an overview of VS 2010, and a special focus on the Start Page. Here's a description of the episode, from the creators:10-4 Episode 2: Welcome to Visual Studio 2010In this second episode of 10-4, we’ll take a very high-level look at Visual Studio 2010. We’ll discuss what types of features you can expect to see in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 depending on what type of developer you are. And lastly we’ll go ahead and dive into a revised area of Visual Studio: the Start Page. The Start Page in...
Video: Downloading and Using the Visual Studio 2010 September CTP (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The first episode of the 10-4 podcast series is about downloading the VS 2010 CTP. We had blogged the instructions before, but this video will take you through the process. Download now, and start trying out all the new features! :)Episode 1: Downloading and Using the Visual Studio 2010 September CTPFor this first episode of 10-4, we’ll look at how to download and use the Virtual PC image of the Visual Studio 2010 September CTP. We’ll give you tips on how to download this massive (7GB+ compressed) VPC, show you how to get past some pesky expiration issues, and get you started with the CTP walkthroughs...
Sshhh… it’s a secret (Matt Gertz)
Back in seventh grade, I had a pretty heavy crush on a girl named Melissa. She was a good friend of mine, and so I had no problems talking to her. However, being painfully shy back then, I was far too nervous to ever ask her to “go with” me. (For those not steeped in American traditions, to “go with” a girl or boy in junior high school meant that you were publicly asserting that the two of you were somehow romantically involved, whatever that actually meant when you were only twelve years old. It was always unclear to me why the term “go with” was used, since, being seventh graders, you ne...
Announcing 10-4! Weekly video podcasts on Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The Visual Studio and .NET Framework evangelism team has announced 10-4, a new video podcast. 10-4 will feature different capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 every week! To get the episodes, visit the show's new home on Channel9: https://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/ There you will also have the option to subscribe to the RSS feed of your choice, depending on the media format you’re interested in.
What's the list of new language features in Visual Basic 10.0 and C# 4.0? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This post is in response to a question we received in the blog comments last week. It's often difficult to study future versions of VB and C#, and figure out what's the same and what's different! Therefore, I've put together a chart that shows both the VB 10.0 and C# 4.0 feature lists together. (VB 10.0 and C# 4.0 are the language versions that will be included in the Visual Studio 2010 release.) One thing you may notice is that the lists look very much the same! That is part of our efforts to ensure that whichever language you are using, you will have the same functionality available to tackle your development t...
Are you a VB developer and interested in Silverlight? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
If so, vote here to see more Silverlight samples in VB:http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=1222
Join the Visual Basic team on Facebook! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Do you spend a lot of time on Facebook? Facebook is now one more way that you can connect with the Visual Basic team, and other fellow Visual Basic friends. Log on and join today! Friends of the Microsoft Visual Basic Team Facebook Group
Make sure you apply this fix before your VS2010 CTP VPC expires! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Have you downloaded and started using the Visual Studio 2010 Community Technology Preview ("CTP")? If so, you may have noticed that the Virtual PC it runs on, will expire at the end of the year. See the following blog posts from Brian Keller and Jeff Beehler, on how to turn off the synchronization between the Virtual PC and the host OS, and fix this problem!Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC: Dealing with Activation MessagesDealing with the Team System 2010 CTP expiration
Walkthrough: Quick Search for Files and Symbols in Visual Studio 2010 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Quick Search has to be one of my favorite features in the 2010 CTP. I find myself using it all the time! I hope you will find it useful in your development too. The Quick Search functionality has become a pretty common feature in development environments today. That's because it since it handles such a common scenario - needing to find something in your code! Read on to learn more about this exciting addition in VS 2010. This blog post is part of a series on the walkthroughs included in the October VS2010 CTP. Each walkthrough guides you through a series of steps, to help you experience the new features coming u...
Visual Studio: Snow Edition
There was lots of snow today. The Microsoft campus was almost empty as everyone worked from home. This picture shows what it's like to develop Visual Studio in the snow... Wallpaper sized: http://www.wischik.com/lu/programmer/vbdev/vs_snow_1600x1200.jpg (378k)Widescreen: http://www.wischik.com/lu/programmer/vbdev/vs_snow_1920x1200.jpg (445k)
Community Article: Scaling ADO.NET DataTables (Beth Massi)
We we released a new community article onto the Visual Basic Developer Center by one of our MVPs, Jeff Certain, called Scaling ADO.NET DataTables. In this article Jeff shows shows us how to query and aggregate data using the built in DataTable methods as well as LINQ to DataSets. He compares the performance on indexed and non indexed DataTables in a variety of scenarios. See for yourself what Jeff recommends on large sets of data.Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
Walkthrough: Dynamic Programming in Visual Basic 10.0 and C# 4.0 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This blog post is part of a series on the walkthroughs included in the October VS2010 CTP. Each walkthrough guides you through a series of steps, to help you experience the new features coming up in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Even if you choose not to download the CTP, you may find that you are still able to give feedback based on the descriptions and illustrations below. Please leave your feedback on this feature set at the end of this post, or at the following forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vs2010ctpvbcs/thread/afb90240-1bc1-4191-b48f-d5e3a218b520 Thanks! Lisa Walkthr...
Walkthrough: Office Programmability in Visual Basic and C# in VS 2010 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This is another walkthrough, demonstrating how to use some new Visual Studio 2010 features available in the October VS2010 CTP. It provides steps to follow in the CTP build; however, you may find that you are able to give feedback on the descriptions below without actually downloading and executing the steps yourself. Please leave your feedback on this feature set at the end of this post, or at the following forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vs2010ctpvbcs/thread/6172efc9-3075-4426-a773-cf2504f51dca Thanks! Lisa Walkthrough: Office Programmability in Visual Basic and C# This walkthrough demonstr...
Walkthrough: TDD Support with the Generate From Usage Feature in VS 2010 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
As part of the October VS 2010 CTP, we also shipped a set of walkthrough documents explaining how to use the product to experience the new features. The CTP was released as a Virtual PC image, and can be a pretty hefty download to undertake. So for those of you just interested to know what's there, reading the walkthroughs can be a good alternative! Below is the combined VB/C# walkthrough for "Generate From Usage". Please tell us your feedback on this new IDE feature, either at the end of this blog post or at the following forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vs2010ctpvbcs/thread/d37cd027-dfa0-4bb...
VB 2008 Keyboard Shortcut Posters — Download your copy today! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Some of you may be using the 2005 posters we released last year. There is now a 2008 version available as well! There aren't too many changes. We've actually tried to stay pretty consistent with the VB keybindings (going back to at least VB6), since we know there's nothing more frustrating than upgrading and finding the keystroke that used to take you to the watch window now deletes the current line. :) However, we have added a few new keyboard shortcuts for 2008 features, so you might want to download the 2008 copy to have the latest. Happy shortcutting! http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyi...
Using both VB.Net and C#? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
It's common today to switch back and forth between VB.Net and C# for different projects, jobs, teams, etc. VB MVP Kathleen Dollard and C# MVP Bill Wagner have gathered some tips to keep in mind when you make these transitions. They both write for Visual Studio Magazine, which is where these articles were released last week as part of the December edition.What C# Devs Should Know About VB by Kathleen DollardWhat VB Devs Should Know About C# by Bill WagnerEditor in Chief, Patrick Meader, also wrote an Editor's Note for this issue On the Benefits of Learning Multiple Languages. He explains that "Developers of VB and...
M. G. Phone Home (Matt Gertz)
M. G. Phone Home (Matt Gertz)I have a slight problem with my cell phone. It’s a smartphone; I love it, I use it all the time, and I don’t what I’d do without it, but I’ve been pretty aggravated with its support of Bluetooth. It will fail to pair with the Sync system in the car at random times, which drives me crazy as I’ll only notice the problem when I’m on the highway or something. Here in Washington State, it is (thankfully) illegal to drive and operate a hands-on cell phone at the same time, and so one of the whole points of getting a car with Sync was to ...
Did you know? You can unwind the call stack from exceptions (Bill Horst)
The ability to unwind the call stack from exceptions is one of the debugger features that was newly introduced in Visual Basic.NET 2005. When the debugger hits a first-chance exception, you can unwind the call stack in order to make code edits to fix the exception and continue debugging with the changes. The exception assistant UI will have an “Enable Editing” option which will unwind the debugger to the topmost call stack frame with code in the current solution.When an exception is unhandled, the unwind will occur automatically, but this can be turned on and off from the Options dialog (under Tools)....
Happy 10th Birthday to the Italian VB Tips and Tricks Community! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
"Visual Basic Tips & Tricks" is an Italian online community that was started 10 years ago today. To be exact, the first tips were actually published in 1996 on a personal web page of the founder and leader, Gianluca Cannalire. However, the group recognizes the first day of the "real community" as December 8th 1998, when a web portal was created with articles, forums, mailing lists, downloads, and tips. "Visual Basic Tips & Tricks" currently hosts 36,300 subscribers, and is the second largest Italian development community! Visit it here: http://community.visual-basic.it/ The Microsoft Visual Basic team wou...
Did you know? There are many ways to insert a snippet into your code (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Code snippets were introduced in the Visual Basic 2005 release. They provide an easy way to learn how to do a particular coding task, or to re-use a piece of code in various parts of your application. Code snippets can be inserted in a variety of ways. The method you choose will depend upon the situation. When browsing for a code snippet, use the Code Snippet Inserter: Code Snippet InserterThe Code Snippet Inserter can be invoked in the following two ways: by typing ‘?+Tab’ in your code file, or by right-clicking and selecting "Insert Snippet..." from the context menu that appears. Y...
Video: Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Tips and Tricks (Lisa Feigenbaum)
I've blogged the session materials for this presentation before, but now we finally have the video available too! Here are some section markers: Enjoy! http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/developer/tv/default.aspx?vid=79
Video: The Joy of Writing Code in Visual Studio 2010 (Karen Liu)
We've had a couple recent posts about the Code Focused development experience coming up in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE: Code Focus Announcements in the TechEd EMEA Keynote Code Focus Videos on Channel 9 Now for the ultimate coverage (a complete TechEd presentation on the subject), check out the following video by Karen Liu! http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/developer/tv/default.aspx?vid=80
Channel9 series: Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 Week! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
There's a great Channel9 series that was recently released, with lots of videos on what to look forward to in VS 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0! The landing page is here; full lineup is below.Intro (Monday, November 10th): - Visual Studio 2010 Overview, Jason Zander - Key Themes for Visual Studio 2010, Soma - Lab Management in Visual Studio Team System 2010 Languages Day (Tuesday, November 11th): - C# 4.0 Implementation and Design Questions, Anders Hejlsberg - VB 10, Lucian Wischik - C++ 10: 10 is the new 6, Amit Mohindra The IDE (Wednesday, November 12th): - Being Code-Focused with Visual Studio 2010, Karen Liu - T...
Did you know there's a VB user group meeting each month at Microsoft Redmond? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
That's right... Just downstairs from our offices there is a VB user group that meets the fourth Monday each month. It's let by Robert Green, a former Microsoft employee, who used to work on the VB team! There are a lot of Microsoft speakers at this user group, so if you live in the area it's a great way to meet some folks on the team, and tell us what you think about Visual Basic!The user group website is here: http://www.dotnetda.com/Usual agenda is below...website for other Monday night events, which cover different .NET topics.
Code Focused Development in Visual Studio 2010 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Do you spend a lot of your day in code? (Writing code, navigating code, modifying code, understanding code, testing code, debugging code, etc.) If so, then the Visual Studio 2010 IDE has got a lot in store for you! In this release we're focusing on optimizing for code-focused development, which covers each of these tasks. There are a number of new features being added, designed to make your day easier. Here's the list: The VS 2010 Editor has also been rewritten using WPF and MEF (Microsoft Extensibility Framework) which allow us to create features with better visuali...
VS 2010 Announcements at TechEd EMEA (Lisa Feigenbaum)
TechEd EMEA kicked off on November 10th with an announcement-packed keynote by Visual Studio General Manager, Jason Zander! The 82min video has been made available for public viewing here. Below are some minute markers as well, in case you don't have time to watch the whole thing. Here's some other coverage you may want to check out, as well: Minute markers for the video: ...
Channel 9 Interview: WPF Drag-Drop Data Binding in Visual Studio 2010 (Beth Massi)
I just posted a new Channel 9 video with Milind Lele, Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team. In this interview Milind shows one of the new RAD improvements I was talking about that is coming to WPF in Visual Studio 2010 -- Drag-Drop Data Binding. Also check out his blog post on this topic for more information. His team is looking for feedback on this feature so visit the Visual Studio 2010 CTP page to download the CTP and visit the feedback forums. See it in action for yourself on Channel 9.Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
Panel: Developers moving to VB.Net for projects using XML (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Visual Basic 9.0 introduces a feature called XML Literals, which makes programming against XML a lot more natural, and dramatically decreases the number of lines of code you need to write. In fact, it makes working with XML in Visual Basic *so* much easier that many C# developers are moving to VB.Net for their XML work! To learn more about this phenomenon, watch the following panel from TechEd US, entitled: "VB XML Literals for C# developers or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Dim"
Spain User Group Tour: All Good Things Must Come to An End (Lisa Feigenbaum)
After three and a half days visiting user groups through Spain, Jon and I have flown back to the US. We got to meet some great people and had lots of fun talking about VB. The slide decks that we used on the trip are attached at the end of this post. PPT: Deep Dive on VB 9.0 (link to be added shortly)PPT: Visual Basic IDE Tips and Tricks User group meeting in Valencia: User group meeting in Alicante: Final pic with our host Pep Lluis after the user group meeting in Madrid: Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks.zip
Tutorial: Functional Programming with Visual Basic 9.0 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Using Visual Basic, and thinking about Functional Programming? Here's an excerpt from Eric White's blog, explaining why you should: Functional Programming (FP) has the potential to reduce program line count by 20% to 50%, reduce bugs and increase robustness, and move us in the direction of taking advantage of multiple core CPUs.He believes that the reasons many developers don't take advantage of functional programming are the learning curve and the unfamiliarity. If that's what's been holding you back, check out Eric's step-by-step tutorial on functional programming using VB 9.0. VB ...
Drag-drop data binding for WPF in Visual Studio 2010 (Milind Lele)
One of the improvements in VS2010 (CTP available for download here) is drag and drop data binding for WPF. Drag-drop data binding has been available for WinForms since Visual Studio 2005. So those of you that are familiar with that will find the WPF experience quite similar and readily usable. In VS2010 we've brought that to WPF.VS2008 SP1 brought the ability to add an Entity Data Model (EDM) to your projects. In VS2010 we've added support for EDM in the data sources window. Thus when you add an EDM to your project, the entities show up in the data sources window. You can simply drag the entit...
Installing the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as a Prerequisite (Mary Lee)
By now, you have heard of all the great new features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Now that you've developed your new applications, you want to include the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as a prerequisite in your Setup project or your ClickOnce installer. The default deployment experience in VS2008 SP1 is to download and install the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 from the Microsoft Download Center. However, you can add the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to the Visual Studio bootstrapper directory on your development computer, and make the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installer available in the same director...
My *V*Birthday with VB friends in Spain! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Yesterday I turned a year older, and spent the day meeting new people at user groups in Spain. Here's how the day went: 07:45 Meet our host, VB MVP Pep Lluis Blano. Leave the hotel in Barcelona and head to Vic in our van, rented for the week. 09:30 - 12:30 User group presentations in Vic. 12:30 - 14:30 Lunch with user group members in Vic. Chocolate birthday cake for all. :) Streets in Vic outside the restaurant: My birthday gift from Pep. (Very nice scarf!) Marta, a woman involved in the user group, picked it out. :) 14:30 - 17:00 Drive from Vic to Tarragona, waiting in traffic for an accident. 17:30 - 20:00 ...
Visual Basic en España (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This week Jonathan Aneja and I are traveling from city to city, and presenting to VB.Net user groups in Spain. We began the tour in Barcelona where we were speaking at TechEd EMEA, and will finish in Madrid. VB MVP Pep Lluis Blano organized the entire itinerary! Here are the topics for the presentations: The schedule is below. Each meeting is 3hrs. Come join us if you can! Read on for the invitation and more details en español... VS/VB Spanish Tour 2008 Un encuentro sin duda esperado. Esta tercera semana de noviembre y una vez finalizado el TechEd Europeo, nos complace anunciar la visita de los eq...
Romeo and Juliette and Windows Azure (Lucian Wischik)
1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead but I'm not really"2. Romeo receives the message3. Romeo finds Juliette looking dead, but knows she's not really dead4. They live happily ever aftervs.1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead but I'm not really" [the message is lost in a plague-related network outage]2. Romeo never receives the message3. Romeo finds Juliette looking dead, thinks she's dead, and kills himself4. Juliette wakes to find Romeo dead and k...
Where are the Windows "SDK tools"? Where is ildasm? (Lucian Wischik)
C:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv6.0binildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv6.0Abinildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0Abinildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0Abinx64ildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0AbinNETFX 4.0 Toolsildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0AbinNETFX 4.0 Toolsx64ildasm.exeC:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SDKsWindowsv7.0Abinildasm.exeC:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SDKsWindowsv7.0Abinx64ildasm.exeC:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SDKsWindowsv7.0AbinNETFX 4.0 Toolsildasm.exeC:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SDKsWindowsv7.0AbinNETFX 4.0 Too...
Community Interview with Doug Rothaus (Beth Massi)
This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole. This time we have Doug Rothaus, a writer on the documentation side. Doug has blogged up an XML cookbook here on the team blog with a bunch of "recipes" on how to use different features of XML Literals and LINQ to XML in Visual Basic. Check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. Here's the interview with Doug: 1. Nice to meet you Doug! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: wh...
TechEd Barcelona: Session Materials (Lisa Feigenbaum)
I'm here at TechEd Barcelona, and the week has gotten off to a great start. Jason Zander did the keynote this afternoon, and announced lots of great tooling support that will be included in Visual Studio 2010! Exciting stuff.I have 4 sessions here, starting tomorrow. I've attached the materials at the end of this post, in case you want to follow along during the talks! TLA325 Conquering XML with Visual Basic 9.0 *CLICK HERE FOR SESSION MATERIALS* Tuesday, November 11 09:00 - 10:15, Room 121 Primary Speaker(s): Lisa Feigenbaum Track(s): Developer Tools and Languages Level: 300...
"Future Directions of Visual Basic" Interview with Paul Vick (Lisa Feigenbaum)
In this short 10min video, I interview language architect Paul Vick about what industry trends he would think about while designing the Visual Basic language. Some of these trends have motivated features in the next version of the Visual Basic language (VB 10.0), such as interop with dynamic languages. Others are things the team is currently thinking about, and plans to address in future versions. These include concurrency, and "opening up the black box" to expose the Visual Basic compiler as a service. These features were announced publicly at last week's Professional Developers Conference. The li...
Typeless expressions (Lucian Wischik)
"My dog has no type.""How does he smell?""Awful!"Two of the new features of VB10 -- array literals and multi-line lambdas -- are interesting from the language perspective because their expressions have no type! This article is for language lawyers. I remember at my very first undergraduate computer science lecture, the lecturer Frank King handed out the class list and asked for corrections. One student raised his hand, apologized for being pedantic, and said that his name had an "å" with a ring above it, not a plain "a". Dr King praised him for the correction, saying "computer science needs pedants".On my p...
New WPF How Do I Videos Released! (Beth Massi)
I posted two more WPF "Forms over Data" videos onto the Developer Center that you should check out. How Do I: Edit Tabular Data in WPF? - learn how to create a simple data grid in WPF for editing tabular data using Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.How Do I: Create a Master-Detail Data Entry Form in WPF? - learn how to create a master-detail (or one-to-many) data entry form in WPF using Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.Subscribe to the How Do I video feed.Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
"Visual Basic 10: New Features" Interview with Paul Vick (Lisa Feigenbaum)
In this video, I interviewed language architect Paul Vick about what new language features are coming in the next release of Visual Basic. We talked about auto-implemented properties, collection initializers, statement lambdas, removal of the line continuation feature, and more. These features were recently announced at last week's Professional Developers Conference. Visual Basic 10: New Features (video)
Community Interview with Lucian Wischik (Beth Massi)
Here's a community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with Lucian Wischik, a Developer on the team. I'm just getting to know Lucian but he is a very interesting and bright person who is just a pleasure to talk with (I hope he starts blogging a lot more). When I told him that out Italian community had sent some interview questions over he responded to them in Italian! I feel totally lame that he speaks fluently and I don't, although he had the benefit of actually living there... oops I don't want to ruin the interview.Anyway, please check out the Visual Basic Team page for p...
Download the CTP and Submit Your Feedback! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP) is now publicly available! It's time to try out the features that you've been hearing about from the PDC. :)http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=922B4655-93D0-4476-BDA4-94CF5F8D4814&displaylang=enOnce you download the CTP, start Visual Studio and you will see a link to the CTP Walkthroughs from the Start Page. These walkthroughs are meant to guide you through the new features introduced in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Microsoft team members are very interested to hear your fee...
What to watch, as a VB Developer at PDC (Lisa Feigenbaum)
After you discover the PDC videos online, and you watch the Future Directions for Microsoft Visual Basic, you may wonder what other sessions this year's PDC has to offer for the VB developer... Lots!Here's a list of PDC sessions related to the VB language and IDE: Beyond the languages sessions, there are many more topics to watch: ASP.Net, Windows7, Oslo and more. So get comfortable and start watching!
VB 2010 Language Features: The Channel9 Version (Lucian Wischik, Lisa Feigenbaum)
I recently blogged about the new VB 2010 language features announced at PDC, as well as the video available from Paul and Lucian's "VB Futures" session. Another way to learn about the new features coming out in 2010 is by watching the following Channel9 video with VB specification lead, Lucian Wischik.Title: Lucian Wischik and Lisa Feigenbaum: What's new in Visual Basic 10Abstract: In this demo-heavy video, Lucian shows off a number of new features in Visual Basic 10 including Collection Initializers, better Office integration, inline functions, parallel LINQ, simpler type handling, auto properties, and lots more...
PDC Dinner in honor of VB and C# MVPs (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Last week at the Professional Developers Conference, the VB and C# teams held a special dinner in honor of the VB and C# MVPs in attendance. ("MVP" = Most Valued Professional) It was a great opportunity to connect with folks, talk about the exciting things being announced at the conference, and even hear from Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander! VB and C# language architects Paul Vick and Anders Hejlsberg were also in attendance, as were a number of other members from the team. Here are some photos from this special event.
I'm a VB! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This year at the Professional Developers Conference, there was a new trend called PDC badges. To fully understand the buzz, check out the following blog post and Channel9 video by Adam Kinney (badge extraordinaire): http://adamkinney.com/blog/366/default.aspxhttps://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Countdown-to-PDC2008-Badges-We-dont-need-no-stinkin-badges/ You might have heard references to the VB badges in the "VB Futures" presentation. Here's what they looked like: What else can I say? I'm a VB! :)
Experience PDC 2008 whenever and wherever – for FREE! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
That's right... All sessions from last week's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles have been videotaped and made available for FREE on Channel9.https://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/Check it out and enjoy the conference. :) For photos, see the "PDC2008" tag on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=pdc2008&m=tags&s=int
TL12: Future Directions for Microsoft Visual Basic (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Didn't make it to the PDC? No problem. You can still check out the *hottest* presentation at the Professional Developers Conference this year, available publicly on demand! Paul Vick (Principal Architect) and Lucian Wischik (VB Specification Lead & Software Engineer) gave an awesome presentation on the Future of VB. The presentation included VB 2010 and beyond. Title: Future Directions for Microsoft Visual BasicAbstract: Hear language architect Paul Vick and specification lead Lucian Wischik discuss the future direction of the Visual Basic language. Learn about the new capabilities of the next...
VB 2010 Unveiled at PDC 2008! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Last week at the Professional Developers Conference, we made a number of very exciting announcements regarding the future of Visual Basic. Here is the list of VB 2010 features we've announced: So many exciting features to look forward to! Stay tuned for more blog posts and videos which illustrate these features in more detail.
Shell Games (Matt Gertz)
I was once temporarily taken off the VB team to get an unrelated project back on track, just a mere handful of weeks before it was due to ship. I won’t go into the gory details; suffice it to say that we had reason to believe that the product would have to ship without delay, and that any major failure in the deliverable could create some seriously undesirable problems for both us and our customers. In the interest of expediting the development of the product, a external team knowledgeable in the underlying issue had been hired to do the actual work. When our testers were analyzing the res...
Community Interview with Adrian 'Spotty' Bowles (Beth Massi)
This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole. This time we have Adrian Bowles (who's nickname is Spotty), a Tester on the VB Compiler. Someday Spotty will have to tell us how he got his nickname.Please check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well.Here's the interview with Spotty:1. Nice to meet you Spotty! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: Where are you from?England via Philadelphia (9 years prior to moving to...
Community Interview with Sophia Salim (Beth Massi)
This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole. This time we have Sophia Salim, a Tester on the VB Compiler. I'm very happy to see Sophia reach out to the community and am looking forward to more interesting posts from her here. I'm always interested in what really goes on inside that compiler.Check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well.Here's the interview with Sophia:1. Nice to meet you Sophia Salim! Let’s begin by asking ...
Community Interview with John Stallo (Beth Massi)
Here's a community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole with John Stallo, a Program Manager working on RAD tools. I first met John on my interview loop at Microsoft. What immediately stuck me when I met him was his Italian name but he has a very cool Australian accent. Being that we both have an Italian heritage, in the first part of my interview we talked about where we were from. That broke the ice quickly and I think I did well in the rest of the interview. :-)And if you haven't seen them already, check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of t...
Community Interview with Eric Knox (Beth Massi)
Here's another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with Eric Knox, Development Manager on the VB IDE Team. I got to know Eric at TechEd this year where we had a lot of fun floating in the pool on bright pink inner-tubes. ;-) You can also see Eric in the interview I did with the IDE Team a while back on Channel 9.Also check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well.Here's the interview with Eric:1. Nice to meet you Eric Knox! Let’s begin by asking...
Community Article: Enabling Speech Recognition in Microsoft Word 2007 with Visual Studio 2008 (Beth Massi)
If you missed it, this week a new community submitted article was released onto the Visual Basic Developer Center and the Office Development with Visual Studio Portal by Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole. In this article learn how to control the Vista operating system's speech recognition engine in .NET from a custom task pane in Microsoft Word 2007. This article compliments Alessandro's previous article on a text-to-speech add-in for Word 2007. Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
Community Interview with Bill Horst (Beth Massi)
Continuing the community interviews from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time we have Bill Horst, a tester on the VB Team. You might know Bill from his awesome series of blog posts on Converting SQL to LINQ.Also check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well.Here's the interview with Bill:1. Nice to meet you Bill Horst! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: where are you from?I’m originally from Ellicott City, Maryland (USA). Now I live in Seattle, Washington.2....
Channel 9 Interview: ADO.NET Data Services in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Beth Massi)
In this interview Saaid Kahn, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team (and former member of the VB Team), shows us how to create an n-tier application against a database using ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) and an Entity Data Model, both now available in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.ADO.NET Data Services use WCF REST-ful services and provides all the plumbing so you can focus on the program logic by programming against a service proxy. ADO.NET Data Services allow you to easily create data services exposed on the web using URIs to point to pieces of data and simple, well-known formats to repres...
Community Interview with Me! (Beth Massi)
Here's another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with yours truly. ;-) I decided to release this one today since it's my birthday. Don't forget to check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. My picture up there is from a couple years ago when the Oakland A's went to the playoffs... ahh.. memories....Anyway, here's my interview with Alessandro:1. Nice to meet you Beth Massi! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: where are you from?I was ...
A VS plugin to background-run your code and see the output (Lucian Wischik)
Say you're demonstrating some code at a conference. What's the best way to do it? If you show only the code window, then you're counting on the audience's imagination about how the code will work (and their trust that it does!). But if you hit F5 to run it then this breaks the flow. And I find it hard to keep both the code and the output in my mind at the same time. I think this is one of those problems that can be solved by technology! So here's a small plugin for Visual Studio[http://blogs.msdn.com/lucian/archive/2008/10/16/liverun-a-vs-plugin-to-see-the-output-of-our-program-immediatel...
Community Interview with Matt Gertz (Beth Massi)
Here's another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with Matt Gertz. Matt still posts frequently on the VB Team blog even though he's changed roles (look at how big his name still is in our tag cloud on the right ;-)). Matt is a great technical leader here at Microsoft and he really loves the Visual Basic community so we welcome him here on the Visual Basic "virtual" team!You can also check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well.Here's the interview ...
Community Interview with Jared Parsons (Beth Massi)
Here's another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with Jared Parsons, a Developer on the VB Team. Jared is a great developer and loves the community. You can check out his personal blog here.You can also check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well.Here's the interview with Jared: 1. Nice to meet you Jared Parsons! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: where are you from?Born in Kentucky, raised in Tennessee, lived in Alabama for awhile, t...
Community Interview with Patrick Dengler (Beth Massi)
Continuing the community interviews from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time we interview Patrick Dengler. You can take a look at the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. Here's the interview with Patrick: 1. Nice to meet you Patrick Dengler! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: where are you from?I was born in New York, grew up in California, then moved to Redmond, WA2. We all know that you’re a Visual Basic Team member, but could we know something more about yo...
Reflection on COM objects (Lucian Wischik)
Reflection on .Net objects is done through System.Type and is very easy. For instance, "Dim type = GetType(System.String)" and now you can look at all the members and inheritance hierarchy of the System.String class.Reflection on COM types is also easy if they have an interop assembly. For instance, add a project reference to the COM Microsoft Speech Library and again do "GetType(SpeechLib.SpVoice)". This lets you reflect on the .Net "Runtime Callable Wrapper" that's in the interop assembly, that was generated from the COM type's type library, and that contains all information that the type library...
VB Video Tutorials on ASP.Net Dynamic Data (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Bill Burrows, VB MVP, has released some great videos on the ASP.Net Dynamic Data features that were added in VS2008 SP1. What is Dynamic Data?"ASP.Net Dynamic Data provides a framework that enables you to quickly build a functional data-driven application, based on a LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework data model. It also adds great flexibility and functionality to the DetailsView, FormView, GridView, and ListView controls in the form of smart validaton and the ability to easily change the display of these controls using templates."Bill's videos demonstrate the variety of tasks and customizations that you can do usin...
Community Interview with Jonathan Aneja (Beth Massi)
Continuing the community interviews from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time we interview Jonathan Aneja, VB Compiler Program Manager.Remember that you can take a look at the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. Here's the interview with Jonathan: 1. Nice to meet you Jonathan Aneja! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: where are you from?Toronto, Ontario – one of the few places in Canada that’s actually *south* of Seattle :-)2. We all know that you’re...
TechEd Online: .Net, A Multi-Language Platform (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Bart and Lisa Simpson - well actually, Bart de Smet and I recorded an interview about the .Net Managed Languages. :) You can find that interview on the TechEd Online South Africa library page. Otherwise, you can also launch the video directly from here. Below is the abstract from our discussion:.NET, A Multi-Language Platform In this talk, Lisa Feigenbaum and Bart de Smet introduce the Microsoft language portfolio and discuss WPF, new features in Visual Basic and Visual C#, and provide answers to questions they receive on Microsoft's developer tools and languages.Bart de Smet is a developer on the ...
VB Catch … When: Why so special?
The VB Catch syntax has a unique feature: When. It allows users to filter expressions based on something other than their type. Any arbitrary code can enter a When block to decide whether or not to handle an Exception. Newsgroups often ask, "Why's this so special? I could effectively get the same behavior out of C# by doing the following:" This is true to an extent. In both cases the code is handling an exception and making a decision, via calling Filter, as to whether or not to handle the exception. The subtle difference is when the Filter method is called. In VB the When statement...
Community Interview with Lisa Feigenbaum (Beth Massi)
Continuing the community interviews from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time we interview Lisa Feigenbaum, now a Visual Basic Community Program Manager! Cool!Remember that you can take a look at the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. Here's the interview with Lisa: 1. Nice to meet you Lisa! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: Where are you from?Los Angeles, California2. We all know that you’re a Visual Basic team member, but can you tell us something more abou...
Are you using Silverlight with Visual Basic? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
There are a bunch of great How-Do-I videos on the http://silverlight.net site to get you started! There are four different categories of videos, and they all include Visual Basic code available for download.Silverlight 2 BasicsControlsWeb Services and DataData
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 6: Writing an XSLT Transform in VB (Doug Rothaus)
Most XSLT programmers are familiar with this XSLT transform to copy an XML file. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/> <xsl:template match="@* | node()"> <xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/> </xsl:copy> </xsl:template></x...
Community Interview with Paul Vick (Beth Massi)
One of our Italian Visual Basic MVPs, Alessandro Del Sole, sent over some interview questions for the Visual Basic Team members to get our thoughts on the language and favorite features but mostly to share some of our personal interests to help you get to know us better. I also learned some fun facts about the team as well! Alessandro is also translating these interviews and posting them on the Italian Visual Basic Tips&Tricks site. You can take a look at the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios of those team members who aren't shy. ;-). The home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center will also dis...
Microsoft Announces Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Microsoft has announced the names Visual Studio 10 and .Net Framework 4.0 for the next versions of these two products! Here are a number of references where you can look to find more information about this announcement:http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/sep08/09-29VS10PR.mspxhttp://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Microsoft-Announces-Visual-Studio-2010-and-NET-Framework-40/http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2008/products/cc948977.aspxhttp://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb936699.aspxhttp://www.cio.com/article/451622/Microsoft_Announces_Visual_Studio_._Developers_Respond.?https://channel...
Looking for Setup and Deployment Project Templates? (Mary Lee)
Let's say that you've developed an application using the free Visual Studio Express Edition. Now, you want to deploy your application to the masses, and you read documentation about How to: Create or Add Deployment Projects. Here's how the topic starts: To create a new deployment project In this example, I'm using Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition. However, when I open the New Project dialog box, there isn't an Other Project Types node. The Other Projects Types node is only available in Standard Edition or higher (such as Professional Edition and Team System Edition). Also, you cannot download ...
Where is the VB Team going to be over the next few months? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
We have quite a few trips coming up over the next couple months, and we want to connect with you while we’re on the road. Here is our plan. Let us know where we can find you. ;-) October 6-7, 2008 Software Development Conference 2008: http://www.sdc.nl/ Beth Massi October 8-10, 2008TechEd Hong Kong: http://www.microsoft.com/hk/technet/teched2008/ Karen Liu October 21-23, 2008OOPSLA: http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2008/Dustin Campbell October 27-30, 2008Professional Developers Conference: http://www.microsoftpdc.com/Paul VickDustin CampbellLisa FeigenbaumAlex Turner November 8-9, 2008S...
To compare two filenames (Lucian Wischik)
I once visited an ancient tower in China. A sign said "tread carefully for you bear the weight of history on your shoulders". Our guide explained that the tower was over 800 years old! Oh yes, he said, it was built 800 years ago, had burnt to the ground three times in its history, had been moved to completely different locations twice, but it still counted as 800 years old.Back in VB land I was making two different calls into some framework, and each call gave me back a filename, and I needed to judge whether the two results were talking about the same file. But how? The framework docs didn't give ...
Did you know? 300+ Visual Studio Tips & Tricks (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Did you know that Sara Ford just recently passed the 300 mark for her Visual Studio Tips & Tricks? Sara used to be a tester on the Visual Studio Core IDE team, and knows the IDE inside and out! I remember the first time I met Sara was 4 years ago when she was writing some automation and called to find out the expected behavior for arrowing over tab stops in VB. :-) Now she works on CodePlex, but she still keeps up her Tips & Tricks blog going! These tips are most-often language-independent tips to help your productivity when working with Visual Studio. Here's w...
Building a Zune Playlist (Matt Gertz)
Well, that was… intense. You may have noticed the lack of articles coming from my direction. I have been so buried in work, and so far behind, that when I look forwards all I see is backwards. I work, I drive home, I work some more, and it all seems to keep piling up. I would like to say that this is going to change soon, but alas, that’d be a lie. Even though my immediate fire drills in engineering process have died down, I’m going to be flying a lot in October visiting our teams around the world, and then right back into the fires when I get home. One of the things that have been getting...
"Future Directions of Visual Basic": Don't miss this talk at the Professional Developers Conference! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is coming up next month, October 27-30 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The conference will focus on the future of the Microsoft platform. Here is the website for more information: http://www.microsoftpdc.com/At this future-looking conference, we will be giving a talk on the future of Visual Basic. Here are the details:Title: Future Directions of Visual BasicSpeaker: Paul VickAbstract: In this talk, language architect Paul Vick discusses the future direction of the Visual Basic language. Learn about the new capabilities on the next version of the la...
Malay Mail coverage of TechEd SouthEast Asia (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Here's a brief addition to my Visual Basic Around the World post... This one's for the folks in SouthEast Asia. The TechEd MVP and Speaker dinner made it into the local Malaysian paper. You can see a copy of the article below. The theme was "Bling-tastic!". I'm at the bottom left with other international speakers: David Tesar, Steve Riley, and Ronald Beekelaar.
Have a background in C#, and starting to write some Visual Basic? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Maybe you just started a job at a company whose development is in VB. Maybe you're working with XML, or Office, and heard that VB would be the best language for this project. Or maybe you're just switching over, to understand what millions of developers around the world love about VB! :) Whatever your reason may be, this post is for you.You'll find that there are a lot of similarities between Visual C# and Visual Basic. Afterall we're both built on top of the same Common Language Runtime! However once you get into the details, you'll find that there are quite a few differences too. Fortunately, VB MVP Kathleen Do...
Are you using Expression Encoder 2 with Visual Basic? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Now you can! Expression Encoder just released an update last month allowing VB developers to use the Expression Encoder 2 SDK. Here's the announcement:http://blogs.msdn.com/expressionencoder/archive/2008/07/26/8773569.aspxExpression Encoder is a tool for video encoding, and is a member of the Expression product suite. It allows you to import and encode video files, produce live webcasts, enhance media with watermarks and advertising, and publish with Microsoft Silverlight. You can learn more about Expression Encoder 2 on the product page here. You can also download the trial version for free!
Are you using Windows Presentation Foundation with Visual Basic? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
After watching this video, you just might be convinced to try it out! VB MVP Billy Hollis demonstrates that Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is about a lot more than just pretty UI. He shows how the technology can be used in an extremely useful way, to create killer line-of-business applications. Watch a few minutes, and you'll understand what I mean! The webcast is hosted on http://www.dnrtv.com/. You can find a direct link to the video HERE. Brad Abrams has also created a post about this video on his weblog.
Channel9 Interview: Meet the VS "Development Experience" Team (Beth Massi)
Today I posted another Channel9 interview. This time I met with the team that brings us the "experience" of coding in Visual Studio, also sometimes referred to as the VS IDE Team. I ask them how their design process works, what the top requested features are for the code editors, how they work with the language teams as well as what their favorite and hardest features are to build and test. Meet the Visual Studio Managed Languages Development Experience TeamEnjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
Are you using the ASP.Net MVC Framework with Visual Basic? (Lisa Feigenbaum)
If so here's a great tutorial video for you to check out, by VB MVP Bill Burrows:http://www.myvbprof.com/2007_version/MVC_P4_Tutorial.aspxHere's a description of the tutorial: "This tutorial covers an overview to the MVC pattern using MVC Preview 4 and Visual Basic. It highlights the changes in the MVC model since the release of Preview 1 and covers both 'drill-down' applications as well as showing how to update an existing database record and add a new record."
Visual Basic and CSharp IDEs Uncensored (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Interested in hearing about what the Visual Basic and CSharp program managers *really* think about the two IDEs? Come join Karen Liu and me as we chat about the goals, similarities and differences of the VB & C# IDEs. We also discuss our favorite features and where we think IDEs are going in the future. This talk was recorded at TechEd North America 2008 Developers conference. The video is posted at the TechEd Online Library. You can also find a direct link here.
Visual Basic Developer Center Revamped! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Have you refreshed your VB Dev Center page today? If you did, you'll notice a new look on both the Home page and the Learn tab. Also check out the new Forums and Community pages. For more info on the specific changes, please see these blog posts by Beth Massi and John Martin, who were involved in the redesign. Have you set the Visual Basic Developer Center to be your new home page? I know I have. :) http://msdn.com/vbasic The Visual Basic Developer Center is your best one-stop shop for everything Visual Basic. If there are any changes you'd like to see there, let us know! To hear what ot...
Visual Basic at TechEd SouthEast Asia (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This is a follow-up to my presentations at TechEd SouthEast Asia. Please find all the descriptions and materials for the presentations on the following resource page: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/techedsea Here are some direct links to the materials: TLA 314 - Visual Basic 2008 Tips and Tricks TLA 323 - Best Practices for the VB9.0 and CSharp 3.0 Features that Make LINQ Work TLA 335 - Conquering XML with Visual Basic 9.0 And now, some pictures below. :)
Visual Basic at TechEd South Africa 2008 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Thanks to those of you who attended my sessions at TechEd South Africa 2008. As promised here are the presentation materials I used, so you try out the examples yourself! I've created a Code Gallery resource page to host the material, with all the session abstracts, powerpoints, and solutions. That resource page is available here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/tesalf/More details on the individual sessions are below. Please click the talk names to view their downloadable materials.DEV311 - Visual Basic 2008 Tips and Tricks Abstract: In this session, learn how to turn yourself into a Visual Basic 2...
Around the World with Visual Basic (Lisa Feigenbaum)
I just finished a month-long 'round the world trip, where I was speaking about Visual Basic and meeting with local Microsoft representatives. I started off in Durban in early August, where I spoke at TechEd South Africa 2008. (More info on my talks and presentation materials to follow in my next post.) Then I continued on to TechEd SouthEast Asia in Kuala Lumpur. Here's a picture from the TechEd SouthEast Asia MVP and speaker dinner: Left to right: Prasanna Amirthalingam (VB MVP, Sri Lanka), Lisa Feigenbaum (VB Program Manager, Microsoft Redmond), Chan Wei Min (VB MVP, Malaysia), TK TEH, Tiong Keen (VB MVP, Mala...
Nice to meet you! A Nine Question Interview (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Chris Williams (VB MVP) started an interview series on his blog. In the series, he interviews various members in the technical community by asking them 9 questions. If you've read my blog posts and are interested to get to know me a little better, check out my 9 answers to Chris' questions!http://www.ninequestions.net/If you want to let us get to know you a little better, answer the questions about yourself in the comments to this post. :)
How Do I: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks? (Kathleen McGrath)
With the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you can now add smart tags to Excel by using an add-in. In this video, I show you how to add them to both a document-level customization and an add-in project. How Do I: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks? This video is based on the topic: How to: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks, where you can get the code and follow along step-by-step. Enjoy, Kathleen
Channel 9 Interview: New Editor Features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Beth Massi)
Today I posted another Channel 9 interview on SP1. This time, Yang Xiao, a tester on the VB IDE team is back demonstrating new improvements to the "Go To Definition", "Find All References" and Rename capabilities in the editor when flipping between code and XAML in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. New Editor Features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
VB 2008 Language Deep Dive – Presentation Materials (Jonathan Aneja)
Last week I got the chance to visit the Toronto .NET User Group and give a talk on all the great new language features in VB2008. It was great to see so much excitement around LINQ and especially XML Literals! The slides and demo code are posted at the link below; here’s the session abstract (with links inserted so you can find more info on each topic): Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is a new platform feature in Visual Studio 2008 that allows you to access objects, databases, and XML through a common query syntax (in both VB and C#). In this talk, we’ll take a deep dive into the langua...
Channel 9 Interview: XML Schema Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Beth Massi)
Today I posted an interview on Channel 9 with Yang Xiao, a tester on the VB IDE. In this interview Yang shows us the new XML Schema Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. This new window is invoked when you right-click on an XML literal element or namespace and select "Show in XML Schema Explorer" in Visual Basic programs. It's a nice way to visually display the structure of your schema sets which makes you even more productive when working with XML in Visual Basic. XML Schema Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Enjoy, -Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
VS2008 SP1 and NetFX3.5 SP1 Released (Adam Braden)
Today we shipped Service Pack 1 (SP1) for both Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5. This is the first time we’ve release both a VS SP and a .NetFramework SP at the same time! Additionally, we released ENU, JPN and 8 additional languages that ship with SQL 2008 at the same time! See the announcement on Soma’s blog:http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2008/08/11/service-pack-1-for-vs-2008-and-net-fx-3-5-released.aspxHere are the links for information and where to get it: For more details on what’s included, Scott Guthrie does a great job listing all the major ...
Channel 9 Interview: SQL 2008 & Occasionally Connected Client Support in Visual Studio SP1 (Beth Massi)
I just posted a new Channel 9 interview with Milind Lele, a PM on the VS Pro Tools team. In this interview Milind shows us the improvements made to the tooling in Visual Studio SP1 for occasionally connected clients as well as the new data type support for SQL Server 2008. Using SQL 2008 built-in change tracking, you don't need to make modifications to your table schemas like you have to do with SQL 2005. Additionally he shows off a "smarter" DataSet designer where you can have tables coming from server and client data stores all contained within one model making maintenance easier.SQL 2008 & Occasionally Con...
Co- and contra-variance (Lucian Wischik)
How do I convert an IEnumerable(Of CheckingAccount) into an IEnumerable(Of Account) ? (where CheckingAccount inherits from Account).Currently this conversion isn't allowed, but we're considering a VB language feature to support it. The topic is called "co- and contravariance", and has been in the CLR since 2005 or so, but no one's yet released a .Net language that uses it. Eric Lippert has written a series of blog posts to explore how variance might appear in a hypothetical future version of C# and gather feedback, and I'm going to do the same for VB. Dim args As New List(Of ConstantExpression)args...
Channel 9 Interview: Jared Parsons on the P-Invoke Interop Assistant (Beth Massi)
Today I posted an interview screencast on Channel 9. In this interview, Jared Parsons, a Developer on the Visual Basic IDE, shows us the P/Invoke Interop Assistant available on CodePlex. The tool helps with converting unmanaged C code to managed P/Invoke signatures and vice versa. Say goodbye to digging through random header files or MSDN documentation to find the right constants, structures and signatures. The P/Invoke Interop Assistant does a smarter translation for you using SAL (Source Code Annotation Language). Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Channel 9 Interview: Look Who's Working on Visual Basic (Beth Massi)
Last month when I was in Redmond I was pulled into a photo with some of the people working on Visual Basic. Do you notice something quirky about these pictures (besides me)? Yes, they are all wearing grey shirts! There's apparently a running joke going on with how Jonathan Aneja (top row, 4th from the left in the first picture) only wears grey. So the team all wore grey to see if he would even notice! The joke is explained in this Channel 9 interview with the VB Language Design Team. I sat down with the VB Language design team and asked them about their design process, favorite features, their thoughts on othe...
WANTED: Your feedback on a potential Call Hierarchy feature (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Last post, I introduced the VS Languages Future Focus page on Code Gallery. This time, we'd like to get your feedback on another potential IDE feature: Call Hierarchy.Please find a description of the feature here:http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vslangfutures/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Call%20Hierarchy&referringTitle=HomePlease leave your feedback here:http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Thread/View.aspx?ProjectName=vslangfutures&ThreadId=123Thanks!LisaDISCLAIMER: It is important that readers of Future Focus topics have the right expectations. The information presented is not a binding commitment nor is it n...
WANTED: Your feedback on a potential Quick Search & Navigate feature (Lisa Feigenbaum)
We've started a new page on Code Gallery called "Future Focus", to collect your feedback on ideas that we're considering for future versions of Visual Studio.The latest post is regarding an IDE feature to help you quickly search for and navigate to symbols in your code. Please see a description of the feature here:http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vslangfutures/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Symbol%20Search&referringTitle=HomePlease leave your feedback on this feature here:http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Thread/View.aspx?ProjectName=vslangfutures&ThreadId=520Thanks!LisaDISCLAIMER: It is important th...
Community Article: Using Windows Communication Foundation with Windows Workflow Foundation – Part 1 (Beth Massi)
This week on the VB Dev Center we're featuring another community submitted article by Maurice de Beijer (VB MVP) on Using Windows Communication Foundation with Windows Workflow Foundation. Maurice has a great wiki as well that you should check out if you're doing Windows Workflow development. In this article he shows you how to use SendActivity which enables you to call WCF as well as standard web services in your workflows. Stay tuned for the next article which will show you how to use ReceiveActivity, which enables a you to publish a workflow as a WCF service.Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
How-Do-I Videos: WPF Forms over Data (Beth Massi)
If you haven't noticed, we released a couple new how-to videos on the VB Dev Center starting a new series which is focused on data-based application development in Windows Presentation Foundation using Visual Studio 2008. The videos are also being featured on www.WindowsClient.net today. Look for many more in the coming weeks!Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Article: Sharpening Your Axis with Visual Basic 9 (Beth Massi)
In the July/August issue of CoDe Magazine there's an article I wrote with Avner Aharoni (the Program Manager on XML literals) called Sharpening Your Axis with Visual Basic 9. (They just opened up online access to even non-subscribers today!) I highly recommend this article which shows you from the beginning how XML literals, embedded expressions and axis properties work in Visual Basic. I start with the basic syntax and definitions and then walk through the XML to Schema tool (which has been added to VS2008 SP1) to enable XML IntelliSense, as well as show some practical examples of using these features ...
PInvoke Interop Assistant on CodePlex (Jared Parsons)
I'm happy to announce that the PInvoke Interop Assistant tool is now available on CodePlex. This includes the binaries, source code and the dev authored unit tests. It is hosted on the more general CLR Interop Tools page. http://www.codeplex.com/clrinterop I will be actively maintaining this tool in the future and (hopefully) adding more features. There were several features we cut just before release due to QA costing that I would like to add back (including VS integration, wrapper functions). Please post any suggestions you have for the tool on the site and we will definitely...
Protein is Good for You, part 2 (Matt Gertz)
In yesterday’s blog post, I walked through an engine for translating DNA to its amino acid results via messenger RNA. In today’s blog, we’ll work on the visualization using WPF StackPanels. (This example requires VS2008, although it could certainly be written in WinForms as well with just a little bit of extra work.)Caution: The point of this blog is to demonstrate StackPanels, and specifically how you can control their orientation and nesting. Consequently, for the sake of that argument, I’m creating a lot of text objects (one for each base and each amino) and nest...
Protein is Good for You (Matt Gertz)
As I was preparing to graduate from the University of Michigan way back in the late eighties, I had a big decision to make regarding grad school – robotics at Carnegie Mellon, or biology at Washington State? On the one hand, biology was something I’d always really loved, having even intended to go to med school at one point. On the other hand, robotics was more likely to help me pay off my debts a very exciting field with a lot of challenges still ahead of it. Ultimately, I chose robotics (gaining a degree that, to this day, I have never used), but I often wonder what it might have b...
Community Article: Creating a Text-to-speech add-in for Word (Beth Massi)
Just released onto the Visual Basic Developer Center, a new article Creating a Text-to-speech add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 with Visual Studio 2008 from a member of our Italian .NET community, Alessandro Del Sole. The article shows how to use Visual Studio 2008 to create an add-in for Word 2007 that will read your documents out loud to you using the text-to-speech APIs in .NET Fx 3.0. Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
TechEd US 2008: Presentation Materials for TLA325 (Lisa Feigenbaum)
This week I presented "Microsoft Visual Basic IDE Tips and Tricks" at TechEd US 2008. Thanks to those of you who attended. The presentation materials are listed below. Thanks!Lisa
Come hear about VB 2008 Tips & Tricks at TechEd US! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
The VB team has two great sessions coming up on Wednesday June 4th, covering tips & tricks for the language and IDE. Abstracts are below. Hope to see you there!TLA319 Microsoft Visual Basic 2008: Microsoft LINQ Language Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices Wednesday, June 4 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM, S220 E Speaker(s): Amanda Silver Track(s): Developer Tools and Languages Level: 300 - Advanced Session Type: Breakout Session LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a key platform innovation introduced with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, which brings SQL-style query expressions into Visual Basic and Visual C#, enablin...
Do you have an opinion about Visual Studio and .NET Framework developer Help content?
Our Help content architect, Kathleen McGrath, has created a short, anonymous survey (15 questions/10 mins.) to gather input on how and when the Visual Studio and .NET Framework developer Help content is used, how satisfied you are with it, and about areas that need improvement:Link to the Visual Studio and .NET Framework Developer Documentation Survey(Kathleen will also be taking this survey with her to TechEd in June.)The focus of this survey is content improvement. We want to learn more about the types of applications you're creating, the tools/technologies you're using, and how we can improve our content and c...
LINQ Deep Dive and Best Practices Presentation Materials (Lisa Feigenbaum)
I presented the following talk this week at VSLive! Orlando 2008:Visual Studio 2008: LINQ Deep Dive and Best PracticesLINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a key platform innovation introduced with Visual Studio 2008 which brings SQL-style query expressions into VB and C# enabling you to describe what data to reason about instead of how to access the data. In this session, by taking a much closer look at the language features that enable LINQ-enabled frameworks, we’ll uncover tips, tricks, and best practices for writing queries that will help you write robust, high-performing, maintainable business applicatio...
VB 2008 IDE Tips & Tricks Presentation Materials (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Last week I went on a user group tour around Southern California. I've uploaded the materials from my talk: You can find these all posted together on the following Code Gallery page.The demo requires installation of Refactor!, which is a 3rd party tool available for free on MSDN. I also pointed out a number of resources at the end of the talk that you might be interested in: Thanks & Enjoy!Lisa
How LINQ to Dataset works in VB (Jonathan Aneja)
LINQ at its core requires any data source to be queryable, which basically means it must implement IEnumerable. (It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, for a full explanation see section 11.21.2 of the Visual Basic 9.0 Language Specification). Now when working with LINQ to Dataset we have a problem: DataTable does not implement IEnumerable, so how can we query over it? As we saw yesterday, Visual Studio 2008 includes an assembly called System.Data.DataSetExtensions.dll, which defines an extension method called AsEnumerable(). Here’s what this method looks like: &nb...
Using LINQ to Dataset in an .aspx page (Jonathan Aneja)
Recently I got a customer question about how to use LINQ to Dataset in an .aspx file. The compiler was complaining that it couldn't find the AsEnumerable method that allows LINQ to work over a DataTable ("AsEnumerable is not a member of 'DataTable'"). The code he sent looks correct, so why is the compiler not picking up the extension method (defined in System.Data.DataSetExtensions.dll)? <%@ Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.vb" Inherits="WebApplication6._Default" %> <%@ Import Namespace="System.Linq" %><%@ Import Namespace="System.Data.DataSe...
Visual Basic "Learn" Section of MSDN – Give it a Spin (Beth Massi)
The Learn tab of the Visual Basic Developer Center is being updated with a bunch of new content and VS 2008 topics. If you look at the center of the page you'll see the list of topics and when you click one, you should now see some fresh stuff. Currently there's over 200 items presented on the topic pages and we're adding more every week. Right now each of the topics are displayed in a fixed order by content type (i.e. Webcast, Video, Article, Blog, etc.) but we plan on adding a tag cloud for easier navigation and more community features going forward so check back often. You can also subscrib...
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 5: The “Halloween” Problem (Doug Rothaus)
In the last two XML cookbook entries, we talked about the technique of using the ReplaceWith method to perform an identity transform. While this technique may meet your needs, it can introduce a problem in your code commonly referred to as the “Halloween” problem. Let’s take a look at what the problem is, and how to solve it. (For details on the “Halloween” problem and recommended solutions, see this topic in the documentation.) The “Halloween” problem describes a scenario where you have a set of data that is updated in some fashion while enumerating through that data set. As a result, you can encounter a null r...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 10: Like (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read my previous Converting SQL to LINQ posts. I haven’t had much in the way of specific requests for more LINQ posts, so I’d still welcome any suggestions that people want to offer. I did get one request about how to mimic the LIKE keyword functionality in VB LINQ. In SQL, the LIKE keyword compares a string field against a pattern and returns a Boolean value representing whether the string matches the pattern. For example, if I wanted to select every customer in the 206 area code, I could use this SQL query: The LIKE expression can inclu...
Come join me on a Southern California user group tour (Lisa Feigenbaum)
I will be presenting on the VB IDE in Southern California this week at a series of user group meetings. The events will be held in the San Diego and the Los Angeles area. Charlie Calvert from the C# team will be flying down from Redmond to speak as well. The schedule is as follows: I will be speaking on Visual Basic 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks: In this talk, we’ll show how to turn yourself into a Visual Studio 2008 guru with the new language and IDE features. Tips and tricks will include how to maximize your VB IntelliSense experience, leverage Refactoring features, and improve the perform...
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 4: Get Inner XML from the Nodes Property (Doug Rothaus)
Recipe 3 showed one way to work with mixed XML content using the XML Descendant axis property and the ReplaceWith method. This is one way to do an identity transform and we’ll look at another method in a later post. There is a key capability not mentioned in Recipe 3 that you will need for fully-functioning identity transforms. That is the concept of copying the inner XML of an element. You get the inner XML of an element from the Nodes property.Recipe 3 transformed e-mail objects from our AdventureWorks sample document into hyper-links in an HTML document and preserved the original formatting by performing...
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 3: Identity Transforms (Doug Rothaus)
An identity transform in XSLT does just what the name implies: replace the identity of an element or attribute with a new identity. Identity transforms are especially critical when dealing with XML markup that is less rigid in its structure. Consider a documentation structure for news articles. Whenever a title is referred to within an article, it is highlighted with italics. However, the XML schema for the article does not specify italics, it specifies that the term is some type of title so that different transforms can handle the term in their own fashion. When you transform XML such as this into a readable for...
New Community Article – The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 2) (Beth Massi)
On Wednesday we released onto the VB Developer Center the second part of Maurice de Beijer's article on Windows Workflow. In this second article about developing custom Workflow Activities, Maurice takes a look at some of the more advanced aspects of Workflow Activity development.Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
"Git Over Here": Making Your Windows Mind Their Manners (Matt Gertz)
Supporting the “pajama programmer”Telecommuting is a great thing, and as the environmentally-conscious person that I strive to be, is something I wholeheartedly endorse when it can be done practically. My current job involves a lot of face-to-face meetings with people, so I don’t actually do a lot of it. However, I do work from home in the evenings (for example, when crafting blog posts), so it’s important to me that my setup for working from home is usable.The challenge that I face is that my work machine is dual-monitor, whereas my home machine is single-monitor. Conseq...
VSLive San Francisco Content (Amanda Silver)
All - I'm about to go on for my LINQ Deep Dive and Tips &Tricks session at VSLive in San Francisco. I posted all demos & slides here:https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=LaunchVB&ReleaseId=805
Milestone Quality & Dogfooding (Matt Gertz)
After some hard but fruitful work, we’ve just finished our “milestone quality” (MQ) efforts, the goal of which was to get ourselves ready for developing the next versions of Visual Studio, Team System, and .NET. Although not specific to Visual Basic, I’ve opted to use this “bully pulpit” to let you know about these efforts, which certainly do impact Visual Basic along with other Visual Studio and .NET products. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the MQ work doesn’t involve new features or any such thing – what it does is get our tools and processes ...
LINQ to SQL (and LINQ to Entities) performance improvements (Tim Ng)
Over the last few months, the VB and Data Programmability teams were working on fixing a performance problem with LINQ to SQL (which also manifested in LINQ to Entities). The issue was that LINQ to SQL was generating sub optimal T-SQL queries when the VB LINQ queries included filters over nullable columns. For example, consider the following query: In this scenario, the Orders.EmployeeID field is a nullable field (Integer?). In VB, the logical operators (<. <=, =, etc) are considered "three-value" operators, and thus, the result of the equality comparison is a “Boolean?” however, the LINQ operators expect t...
Recap of European Launch Events for Visual Studio 2008 (Amanda Silver)
Last week I had the privilege of speaking in Lisbon, Portugal & Birmingham, England at launch events for Visual Studio 2008. There seemed to be a lot of buzz and excitement in the air at both events -- no doubt due to the recent release of Visual Studio. TechDays, Portugal The TechDays event is similar to TechEd in that it's a four-day long affair with an ITPro track and a Developer track and tons of exciting sessions, breakouts, Hands-on-Labs, and experts at booths. I only arrived for the last day of the conference and presented my session at 3am my time given jetlag from which I never recovered. (I retur...
STAThread vs. MTAThread (WHorst)
I recently ran into an interesting threading problem that I wanted to share, so that perhaps I can save some people from the same confusion I had. I started with a C# application someone else had written. I’ll call it “DeltaEngine” for the purpose of this post. DeltaEngine calls into a native assembly and handles certain events from it. I created a solution where I referenced DeltaEngine as a library project, and called into it from a VB project. I’ll call this project “VBApp”. So, the reference structure looks like this: VBApp (VB) -> ...
New "How Do I" Videos Available on the Visual Basic Developer Center (Beth Massi)
If you missed it, last week 48 new How Do I videos (Forms over data, Windows development, Office development and Security) were added to the Visual Basic Developer Center in addition to adding new download formats for 12 others. Many thanks to Rob Windsor, Pat Tormey and Steve Hansen for doing these videos.In addition to these I also uploaded a couple more that I did on Windows Forms development. One is on the new DataRepeater control available in the latest version of the Visual Basic Power Packs and the other I did in response to customer requests on how to handle unhandled exceptions and email t...
Silverlight Ux Musings: New Control Skin Set [Corrina Barber]
One more set of control skins is up and ready for use. I had hoped to have two ready, but one set needed some additional tweaking work that I can't get to until I return to Seattle on 4/14.This new set is very rough and organic in appearance and maybe even a bit esoteric, but it can still work on various sites or it can be used in early mockups of a site to give the mockups a rough and sketched appearance. I take this sort of approach to many of my early mockups; especially, if I don’t want reviewers to focus on design details. Here’s a screen shot of the new set of controls. You can also view a ...
Hotfix available for VB performance issue in VS2008 (DJ Park)
I wanted to let you know about a hotfix we recently released that may help solve some performance issues you may have run into using Visual Studio 2008. DetailsThe hotfix is a 3.98MB download and can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946344 It addresses performance issues in the following scenarios:• The IDE takes a long time to build/rebuild the solution. • You experience a slow response time when you press F5 to start debugging. • &nbs...
New Community Article – The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 1) (Beth Massi)
MVP Maurice de Beijer is at it again with another great article on Workflow Foundation (WF), this time showing us how to create custom workflow activities in "The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 1)". This is the first of a two part series on how to create custom activities but if you need to get started with an intro first you can check out his Workflow Foundation 101 article as well. Thanks Maurice!And don't forget to check the VB Dev Center often for more great content including 48 new How Do I videos!Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 2: Descendants and Ancestors (Doug Rothaus)
This entry in the cookbook shows how you can access descendant and ancestor elements in an XML document using Visual Basic, XML Axis properties, and LINQ to XML objects.DescendantsVisual Basic provides XML Axis properties that enable you to easily refer to child nodes and attributes. As is often the case with XML, you may need to reference sub-elements that show up in different levels of the XML hierarchy. In that case, you can use the XML Descendant axis property.The XML Descendant axis property is identified using three periods followed by the XML element that you want to refer to. For example, in the Adventure...
Did you know? You can now manage your snippet highlighting (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Do you use code snippets (introduced in VB 2005)? If you do, then you've probably noticed the green highlighting that stays around for the lifetime of the file. We've heard *a lot* of feedback that once you are done customizing the snippet, it is distracting to see this highlighting stay around. To address this, VB 2008 has improved the heuristics that determine when you are done using the snippet. It has also added some new commands that allow you to control whether or not the highlighting appears. Let's take a look at how the works in VB 2008... Snippets can be inserted either from the snippet picker (Rt-click ...
Improvements to Visual Basic 6 Runtime Support on Vista, Windows Server 2008 (by Paul Yuknewicz)
You probably didn’t notice it, but we made some important and beneficial changes to the Support Statement for Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 just a few weeks ago, and I want to share the good news. First, just like Vista, the Visual Basic 6 runtime is officially supported on Windows Server 2008.Second, we have expanded the list of ActiveX controls that are officially supported as part of Vista and Windows Server 2008. For background, when we first announced over a year ago that the Visual Basic 6.0 applications would “just work” on Windows Vista, many of you pointed ou...
Making PInvoke Easy
Jared here again. I very excited to announce we recently released a tool I've been working on to MSDN that will greatly help with using PInvoke in managed code. The tool is called the "PInvoke Interop Assistant" and is included as part of a MSDN article on marshalling data for PInvoke and Reverse PInvoke scenarios. Here is a link to the article and tool The motivation behind this tool is writing PInvoke is a hard and often tedious task. There are many rules you must obey and many exceptions that must be taken into account. Anything beyond simple data structures gets very involved and s...
Launch events in Portugal & England!
All -- I'm very excited to be speaking at launch events in Lisbon, Portugal and Birmingham, England within the next week. After a 17 hour journey, with much jet-lagged-sleepiness in my eyes, I'll be speaking tomorrow morning at 9:30am in room A3 of the Centro de Congressos de Lisboa. DEV10 - Expert VB.NET 2008: Past, Present, and FutureDo you remember your first Basic program? Visual Basic has come a long way from a simple event handling language to a fully capable Object-Oriented language with the power of the .NET Framework behind it. Visual Basic 9 brings unparalleled productivity for line of business applicat...
Orcas introduces the IF operator – a new and improved IIF (Sophia Salim)
One of my all time favorite features in C# and CPP has been the conditional operator (?:). The brevity and elegance introduced by this operator in the code is unparalleled. We had IIF in all the previous versions of VB.net, which was not an operator in the true sense (It was a call to a function). But now with Visual Studio 2008, we have taken an "i" from this function and promoted it to operator status. "IF" can now be used instead of "IIF". It provides full functionality of the IIF function with some very interesting additions of its own, including short-circuiting. It even comes...
Silverlight Ux Musings: Silverlight 2 Control Skins [Corrina Barber]
Silverlight 2 beta one is now available with lots of great new functionality!! You can go to Silverlight.net to find important downloads, specific details about new functionality, and very cool sample applications. So, what I want to talk about today is the controls that Silverlight 2 now provides. There are a bunch of new controls available and these include...§ Button§ Toggle Button§ Radio Button§ Checkbox§ Texbox§ Tooltip§ Hyperlink§ Slider§ ScrollViewer§ Calendar§ Datepicker&...
Language Futures Page on Code Gallery (Beth Massi)
Go take an early peak at what the VB and C# teams are cooking up for the next version by visiting the Language Futures page on Code Gallery. Code Gallery is not just about samples. It also allows us to host threaded discussions and the teams want your feedback on some features they are considering for the next version of Visual Studio. Charlie has moved his Future Focus blog discussions into this Code Gallery page as well so that all the teams can engage with the community on these early ideas together. Enjoy,-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
InteropForms ToolKit – Visual Studio 2008 edition (Todd Apley)
I apologize right away that it's been a while since I've blogged about the interop forms toolkit although I've been doing my best to keep up with issues and questions on the interop forums. It seems from the mail I've received that a lot of people are having good success at extending their legacy vb6 apps in interesting ways using the toolkit. This post is a follow-up to the channel9 video that Beth posted here.What's New - VS 2008I wanted to use this posting to describe in more detail some of the content that I covered in that video. The main focus of t...
Channel 9 Interview – Tips and Tricks with the Interop Forms Toolkit (Beth Massi)
Today I posted a Channel 9 interview with Todd Apley, Senior Test Lead on the VB Team, where he shows us a variety of tips and tricks with using the Interop Forms Toolkit on Visual Studio 2008. He also shows us how to deploy a hybrid application built with VB 6 and VB.NET using XCopy deployment and RegFree-COM. Todd will also be posting follow-up information here on this blog. Also, check out interop posts here, articles on my blog on interop as well as the rest of the VB Team Interviews on Channel 9.Enjoy,-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
Keeping Track of Books Using VB (Matt Gertz)
I have a confession to make. I’m not a database guy. I’ve done a lot of varied coding over my career, but somehow I’ve never been directly involved in the guts of database coding. Whenever my code needed some sort of data-caching mechanism, I’ve tended to “roll my own,” as the saying goes. Therefore, when we first started working on Linq for VS2008, I was quite excited as it was my chance to really learn something about the ins and outs of data programming. As it happened, within a few weeks of scheduling that, I was promoted from Compiler Lead to ...
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 1: XML Transformations using XML Literals (Doug Rothaus)
I was working on a blog entry about replacing XSLT transforms with Visual Basic XML Literals. As the entry progressed, I noticed that it was really, really long. So, Avner Aharoni and I talked things over and we decided to break it up into multiple entries and start a series, much like the LINQ Cookbook that was started a few months back. Introducing the VB XML Cookbook. We’ll use these entries to show quick and easy solutions using XML Literals in Visual Basic. In many cases we’ll reference XSLT and XPath where there’s a direct (or very close) replacement of functionality. You’ll find that consuming and transfor...
New Community Article – Windows Workflow 101 (Beth Massi)
Yesterday on the Visual Basic Developer Center we released a new article by VB MVP, Maurice DeBeijer on getting started with Windows Workflow called Windows Workflow 101. This is the first in a series of Workflow articles by Maurice. If you're struggling with how to use this technology in your applications this is a great place to start. The next couple articles will explore more advanced senarios and building custom activities. Thanks Maurice!Enjoy,-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
New Data Repeater Control in Latest Power Packs Release! (Beth Massi)
Check it out, the team just released a new version of the Visual Basic Power Packs which now includes a Data Repeater control. Power Packs are free Add-Ins, Controls, Components, and Tools for you to use that make developing .NET applications even easier. From the Power Packs Team: Today we are announcing the release of the third version of the Microsoft Visual Basic Power Packs! This version includes a new Data Repeater control that enables you to use standard Windows Forms controls to display rows of your data in a scrollable container, giving you more flexibility and customizatio...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 9: Full Outer Join (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series. It makes the same assumptions as Part 8, and I will pick up where I left off, covering Full Outer Join. Once again, I recognize this isn’t an ideal situation, so if you’d like to see better support of Full Outer Join in a future VB release, you can file a suggestion from our product feedback site. A Full Outer Join is basically like the union of the results of a Left Outer Join and Right Outer Join. Records are joined together based on common fields, and all records with no match are also displayed, whether i...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 8: Left/Right Outer Join (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series. After my post on joins, I’ve had some questions about outer joins. As you can see in part 6, VB9 doesn’t have smooth support for Left or Right join. I showed how to get similar functionality with Group Join, but I’ve looked into the subject some more, and want to give everyone a more extensive explanation of how to get left, right, and full outer join results accurately with VB LINQ. Admittedly, these queries are very complex for a relatively simple conce...
Preparing for the Next Product Cycle (Matt Gertz)
I once had to learn how to juggle in a very brief time in order to get an “A” in my high school computer science class. I am not making this up. The idea was that juggling, being a systemic process, was somehow analogous to writing programs and… well, it sort of made sense at the time. I’d done well that semester (my final semester) and was looking forward to getting a good grade in the class. The instructor (probably the best teacher I’d ever had) gave me a preview of my grade, and it wasn’t what I’d expected. Hmm. Without getting int...
Petzold WPF Book Sample Conversion – Final Chapters (Young Joo)
I've just posted a final set of chapters (Chapters 25 - 31). This completes our conversion efforts and you now have access to entire sample code from Petzold's book in VB. I would like to thank Evan and Ged who have been working with me on this. You guys rock!!!A few things to note: Hope you enjoy this!Thanks!Young Joo
Announcing the Forums Bug Submission Pilot (Sarika Calla)
In addition to Connect, you can now report Visual Basic bugs directly in the Visual Basic Forums. The forum posts get entered as a bug or product suggestion into VB’s internal bug tracking system. With this we hope to take Forums (our vibrant online channel for feedback) a step further by making it easier to submit bugs and product suggestions. Currently this pilot is integrated with 3 Visual Basic Forums, Visual Basic Language, Visual Basic Interop and Upgrade and Visual Basic Power Packs. Depending on the feedback we receive, we will consider enabling this functionality in more forums! Here’s...
Source code of Visual Basic runtime has been released to public. (Vladimir)
One of the things we have been working on recently was publishing sources of VisualBasic runtime library. I am very excited to announce that the sources of VB runtime (Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll) are publicly available now! This is a part of a more general work on making .Net Framework sources available to public ( http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx ). The most important result of this is that developers can see and debug through VB runtime code. There is a very detailed description on how to set up VS debu...
Channel 9 Interview: XML Properties and Enabling IntelliSense (Beth Massi)
Today I posted a Channel 9 interview with Avner Aharoni, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team. In this interview Avner shows us how to enable XML IntelliSense in Visual Basic using the XML to Schema Wizard. He also shows the differences between how IntelliSense works with axis properties on XDocument and XElement objects and speaks to how the wizard can infer multiple schemas from multiple sources -- as well as the affect XML namespaces have on IntelliSense. Get started with LINQ to XML in Visual Basic with these How-to Videos. Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Did you know? VB IntelliSense now filters as you type! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Our goal in designing VB2008 IntelliSense was to make users of the feature the most productive that they could be. One problem we found in watching people use the feature, is that sometimes intelliSense displays so many items that it is hard to know whether or not you're close to the item you're looking for. You basically have to read them all of them to know. (Not very time-efficient...) Thus, we added a new feature in VB2008 IntelliSense to make the list filter-as-you-type. Here's an illustration: Let's consider that I am looking for a control named "lblTotalNum". I start typing letter by letter... When I type ...
Did you know? What you can do with Debugger Datatips… (Lisa Feigenbaum)
There's a lot of cool functionality built into VS debugger datatips that often goes unnoticed... For example, did you know that not only can you *see* values in the expanded datatips, but you can also edit them? Watch the following walk-through... While debugging, hover over a variable to view its debugger datatip: Next press the '+' to expand the tip and view the variable's members: Click on a value in the righthand column to edit it. Start typing: To verify, look in the Watch window to see that the value has changed based on your edit: Voila! The value is changed. The next great (hidden) debugger datatip fe...
Did you know? Ctrl+Tab to navigate windows in VS (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Just like Alt+Tab for Windows you can use Ctrl+Tab for Visual Studio. Ctrl+Tab will show you the active tool windows *and* the active files, so it is a good navigation tool for both. VS2008 has even added a cool miniature-sized visualization to this view, so that you can better determine which item you're after. Windows: Visual Studio:
Did you know? IntelliSense is now transparent in VS2008! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
With the help of one little hotkey, you can now make the VS2008 IntelliSense list transparent! Just press CTRL. This is especially convenient when you need to see the code underneath the list. Watch it in action :)
Did you know? IntelliSense Everywhere (Lisa Feigenbaum)
I've decided to start a "Did you know?" series with tips & tricks. First off is my favorite IDE feature in VB2008: IntelliSense Everywhere! Did you know about all the new places where you can now find intelliSense in VB2008? If you're like me, once you try 2008 IntelliSense you won't be able to go back to 2005. VB's mission statement is to be the most productive tool for building .NET-connected applications. The VB IDE tools certainly support this point, with intelliSense in particular. Here's a list of ways that intelliSense can make you more productive: But rather than listening to me tell you why it's...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 7: UNION, TOP, Subqueries (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 4: Functions Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 5: GROUP BY and HAVING Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 6: Joins This post will discuss UNION, TOP and Subqueries. Next week, I plan to cover LEFT, RIGHT and FULL OUTER JOIN more fully. If there are additional topics you’d like to see discussed related to ...
Petzold WPF Book Sample Conversion – New Chapters (Young Joo)
Happy new year! Hope you enjoyed your holiday break! And hopefully you found some time to read Petzold's book and try out VB samples we've posted so far. :)Evan and Ged had been working very hard to convert rest of chapters throughout December and I just posted Chapters 13 - 24 to Applications = Code + Markup (Charles Petzold) Visual Basic Code Sample page. We also have several more chapters converted but since we have a couple of chapters missing between sets, I will hold off posting them until we have those missing chapters ready.I've also added a link to the single downlo...
VB2008 Outperforms VB2005! (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Looking for another reason to upgrade to 2008? How about performance! In addition to making tasks easier for you from release to release, another way we can save you time and make you more productive is by making the product faster! This is a goal we are very commited to on the VB team, and for which we have dedicated an entire virtual team for the Orcas release. Take a look at the stats below to see some interesting improvements.[**DISCLAIMER: The data posted here is what I have observed from comparing 2 runs in our internal labs. These are my observations using two large customer solutions on a specif...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 6: Joins (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 4: Functions Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 5: GROUP BY and HAVING This post will discuss Cross Join, Inner Join, Natural Join and Outer (Left/Right) Joins. JOIN It’s very common to query over more than one set of data (such as a table) in the same SQL SELECT statement. Bringing together the information i...
LINQ for the Web Using VB (By Paul Yuknewicz)
Happy holidays! It's been a long time since I've written a post, so I figure I can bring in the new year answering some great questions submitted by you. Just this week someone gave me this feedback: "I am having a difficult time finding information to help me adapt to LINQ in my webforms. I am hoping that someone from the team can offer a direction. " You bet! We have a lot of attention to LINQ and Forms-over-data in VB in our learning content, but we're lacking content with attention to LINQ and Web-based Forms-over-data. There are a number of great innovations in the Web spa...
VB Love Song for the Holidays and New Year (By MS Friends of VB)
Here's a holiday present just for you -- in keeping with what has become a holiday tradition on Channel 9 we have Chris Anderson, Don Box and now our very own Amanda Silver singing you a special holiday song. You can view the full video and sample code here on Channel9 (Thanks Jeff and C9 team!):https://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=367997%20%20With love,Microsoft Friends of VB
Channel 9 Interview: Brian Beckman Does Higher Algebra with Visual Basic (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Brian Beckman, Principal Developer (currently working with Erik Meijer), where he attempts to teach me higher algebra using Visual Basic, generics, and operator overloading. Brian is a wonderful person and brilliant physicist and we have a lot of fun with vectors and matrices and VB. I actually think I understood some of what Brian showed me ;). Visual Basic is a great language for mathematics as well as all kinds of other applications. Brian makes the point that he has fun coding in VB because of its intuitive style and how easy it is to be immediately produ...
Higher Algebra with Operator Overloads (Brian Beckman)
Recently I did a Channel 9 interview with Beth Massi where I walked through a Visual Basic program that used Generics and Operator overloads to perform some higher mathematics. I thought I'd follow up with a post explaining the details of exactly what I did. Operator overloads with Generics enable some beautiful designs for data types in Higher Algebra, a branch of mathematics, sometimes called Abstract Algebra. Consider fields and vector spaces. I'll show you operator overloads at THREE levels in a single design. First, background: In this context, a "field" is a collection of unspecified objects, closed under ...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 5: GROUP BY and HAVING (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 4: Functions This post will discuss the GROUP BY and HAVING clauses. GROUP BY A SQL GROUP BY clause allows you to group records by particular fields, so the entire group can be dealt with at once. A LINQ statement can have a Group By clause as well, but with different syntax. An informal (and incomplete) syntax e...
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 12: Calculate the Standard Deviation (Doug Rothaus)
Ingredients:· Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to Objects Introduction:LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 11 showed how you can use LINQ queries to perform calculations on sets of data using a set of standard aggregate functions such as Average, and Sum. In this recipe, you will learn how to add an extension method so that you can include your own custom aggregate function in a LINQ query.This recipe adds two extension methods: StDev (standard deviation) and StDevP (standard deviation for the entire population). Because the extension methods...
Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with Paul Vick (Beth Massi)
Scott Hanselman posted a podcast with with Paul Vick, Principal VB Architect, and Paul Yuknewicz, Senior Program Manager on the VB Team about the past, present and future of Visual Basic. Check it out!Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Channel 9 Interview: XML Literals Performance and Namespaces Explained (Beth Massi)
I just posted a Channel 9 interview with Avner Aharoni, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, as he dives into LINQ to XML and XML Literals in Visual Basic 9 and explains namespace bubbling and the performance gains you may see using XML Literals. This is a good interview to pay attention to if you are struggling with how XML namespaces work in Visual Basic. Get started with LINQ to XML in Visual Basic with these How-to Videos. Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 11: Desktop Search Statistics (Doug Rothaus)
Ingredients:· Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to DataSet Introduction:You can use aggregate functions in LINQ queries to perform calculations on sets of data. Visual Basic includes a set of standard aggregate functions for LINQ queries: All, Any, Average, Count, LongCount, Max, Min, Sum. These functions are documented in the reference topics for the Aggregate Clause. You can use aggregate functions as part of the Aggregate clause for an entire set of data, or as part of the Into portion of a Group By or Group Join clause, where the a...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 4: Functions (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators This post will discuss scalar and aggregate functions. Functions SQL SELECT clauses often involve functions, which can be scalar or aggregate. An aggregate function is applied to a field over all the selected records, while a scalar function is called with individual values, one record at a time. It is possible to re-create both kinds of functions wi...
Channel 9 Interview: Refactoring in Visual Basic with Refactor!
I released a Channel 9 screencast with Lisa Feigenbaum, PM on the VB Team where she shows us how to use Refactor!, the free add-in for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 that provides over 30 refactorings for Visual Basic. Lisa walks us through all the new refactorings that were added for the latest version of Visual Basic 2008. You can download Refactor! here. You can get the demo code she used here.Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community RefactorDemo.zip
Euchre Revisited: Fixing bugs and service releases (Matt Gertz)
It’s really embarrassing when a bug gets out the door in a product. In particular, it’s hard for me to just sit and take it (however well deserved the criticism is) when a Microsoft product gets nailed in the press for a bad error. It’s much worse when a friend or relative is the one dealing out the grief. However, worst of all is when your specific product – your specific feature – is getting railed on by your family. I vividly remember an incident about eleven years ago, when I was a developer on Visual InterDev and my wife was working on her Master’s in Education. She needed to create a...
New VB Community Article: Creating Visual Studio Add-ins (Beth Massi)
Rod Paddock's latest Community Article is up on the Visual Basic Developer Center on Creating Visual Studio Add-Ins which first appeared in CoDe Magazine. Rod goes a little bit deeper than I did when building an add-in and shows how to work with the project system and automatically open files and insert code. Thanks for submitting, Rod! Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
Silverlight Ux Musings: Providing Panning Functionality for a Canvas of Objects – Part 2 [Corrina Barber]
I’m back with part 2 of the blog on panning functionality (part 1 is here), and, to quickly recap, we’re creating a region in a web site that can be panned rather than scrolled (users can click and drag to pan and navigate the region). We’re also designing the region so images always align properly (no images clip when the user finishes panning). I have a sample solution that looks like my design goal pictured at right that can be downloaded here or you can simply check it out online here. Please note that the UI in this solution has many buttons and features that are disabled because my primar...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT Continuing with specific query clauses, I will cover topics related to DISTINCT, WHERE and ORDER BY. DISTINCT SQL SELECT statements can include the DISTINCT specifier, which causes all duplicate records in the query result to be removed. In a LINQ expression, Distinct is its own individual clause, rather than a specifier on the Select clause. This means that Distinct can appear between any two other clauses. The Distinct clause takes whatever result is...
Silverlight Ux Musings: Providing Panning Functionality for a Canvas of Objects – Part 1 [Corrina Barber]
Recently, I was experimenting with Silverlight and decided to create a website that would allow me to browse some of my personal images, and the website was designed to look something like the image below.My intention for the site was that it would be able to display many images, certainly more than the 12 that you see grouped together and aligned left in the image above, but I didn’t want to provide a standard scrolling region. Instead, I decided to implement panning functionality for the region (the ability to click and drag to pan and navigate the available images). I also wanted to ensure that the image...
Job Alert: Programming Writer opening on Visual Basic Team (Robin Reynolds-Haertle)
The Visual Basic User Education team has an interesting opportunity that I wanted to share with you all. We're looking for a Visual Basic .Net application programmer who also has a flair for writing. If you’d like to submit your resume, please apply for this job via the Microsoft Careers site. - Robin Reynolds-Haertle, Documentation Manager Do you have a passion for .NET programming? Are you ready to be an early adopter of new technologies? Do you want to be a subject matter expert? If so, join the Visual Basic User Education team, and you’ll be at the cutting edge o...
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT (Bill Horst)
This post assumes you’ve read Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics. I’ve made the following name changes since the last post, which I hope will make the code examples clearer: · Customers -> CustomerTable · Orders -> OrderTable · cust -> Contact · CustomerName -> ContactName · ID -> ContactID Since I plan to do a handful more of these posts, I welcome any feedback or suggestions so I can make these as clear and useful as possible. Continuing on to specific clauses, we’ll start with the most fundamental, FROM and SELECT. FROM A SQL SELECT state...
Launching External Tools from inside Visual Studio (Jonathan Aneja)
Visual Studio has a small but extremely useful feature that allows you to hook external tools directly into the IDE’s Tools menu. All you have to do is click Tools->External Tools… and then you can add your own custom menu items that will launch a specified program. On a typical day I’ll probably fire up Reflector and/or ildasm a few times, and I’ve always found it annoying to have to leave the IDE to launch the program, then navigate to the folder where my .dll is. Adding them to the menu once simplifies things and saves a lot of time. Let’s take a look at how we ...
Drawing Maps with Visual Basic (Scott Wisniewski)
If you find yourself looking for something to do with your awesome new copy of Visual Studio 2008, you should check out the December 2007 edition of MSDN magazine. It features an article, written by me, that provides a walk through on how to visualize data on a map using VB 9, WPF and LINQ. To give you a sneak preview of what the app described in the article does, I've included a screen shot below: Over my next several posts I plan on expanding on the article by showing how you can extend the application by adding new functionality to it. For now, I will give you some time to read through t...
Petzold WPF Book Sample Conversion Update (Young Joo)
Been a while since I posted Chapter 3 of Petzold's WPF book converted to VB. In case you missed it, Patrick started working on this project which I took over early this month. Anyway, I am very excited to tell you about progress we've been able to make so far.First, we now have a separate article page, Applications = Code + Markup (Charles Petzold) Visual Basic Code Sample, where you can grab all the converted sample packages. We will be updating this article page as we continue with our conversion project. We did this to make it easier for you to find all sample codes witho...
Applications = Code + Markup (Charles Petzold) Visual Basic Code Sample
Charles Petzold's latest book, Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, is the best WPF book available right now. Unfortuantely, all code samples in the book are written in C#. In order to help VB developers trying to learn about WPF, we are working with a couple of VB experts to convert all samples appearing in the book to VB. As we finish converting each chapter, this page will be updated with a link to sample code package.Quick info about two experts helping us with this. Link to a single download: Petzold_WPF_VB_All.zipTo access ...
Awesome VB9 Blog Series by Bart De Smet (Amanda Silver)
I guess I've been working too hard on getting the product ready to ship to notice that Bart has put together an awesome blog series on VB9. It includes discussion of a feature called runtime agility or compiler agility that we haven't taken up on this blog. We introduced this feature to make it much easier for new .NET platforms (think Silverlight, XNA, & .NET Micro Frameworks) to allow Visual Basic programmers to target their platform. For those of you language/compiler wonks or VB zen masters -- this is a good feature to learn about as it gives you insight into the dependencies the Visual Basic compil...
Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 and Visual Studio 2008 Shell released (Beth Massi)
Today the VS Ecosystem team released the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 and the Visual Studio 2008 shell. The VS 2008 SDK contains full native Visual Basic support and contains many VB samples. What was in the VB Pack for the VS 2005 SDK is now included in the VS 2008 SDK, plus more. I've started playing with building Visual Studio AddIns in Visual Basic and it's really simple to get started. I've got the Tip of the Day Browser running at startup now. Stay tuned for a post on that. ;-)Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Hidden Gems in Visual Basic 2008 (Amanda Silver)
Yesterday I promised to post about the hidden gems in Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2008 that you haven’t read about in blog posts or seen at conferences. I forgot that I mentioned a few of my favorite features in the Beta1 announcement where I showed off the improvements in the Intellisense experience – statement completion for keywords, local variables, and expressions. In that post, I also cover a new language feature called Relaxed Delegates which allows you to provide alternate signatures for events. Both of those are pretty great features – but I promised to tell you about some new stuff....
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics (Bill Horst)
As you may already know, VB LINQ statements enable SQL-like syntax for queries in the VB language. LINQ syntax doesn't match SQL syntax exactly, so if you are already working with SQL or familiar with SQL queries, you may find yourself wanting to convert an existing SQL query to LINQ.This will be the first in a series of posts about converting SQL to LINQ. In this post, I want to establish a basic understanding of how SQL differs from LINQ, and then get into specific language constructs next time.AssumptionsThe SQL code examples I'll be using assume a table called Customers and a table called Orders.&...
Visual Basic 2008 Ships!!! (Amanda Silver)
Hooray! Today we’ve finally shipped Visual Studio 2008, previously known as “Orcas”, previously known as some symbol which doesn’t have an ascii representation. We’ve come a long way, but it’s been a great ride. In his blog, Soma mentions many of the flagship features at a high-level that will undoubtedly make the every developer and head of IT salivate, but this blog is about Visual Basic. :) This is a tremendous release for Visual Basic users everywhere as it’s the first to introduce query expressions and XML as a first class data-type. Not only does this make Visual B...
One is the Loneliest Number (Matt Gertz)
(This post assumes that you’ve read my previous post on Windows Media at http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2007/10/30/let-the-music-play-matt-gertz.aspx – I will be modifying that code in this post.) After posting my media player blog sample a couple of weeks ago, I got a few questions from a reader called Saleem on how to adapt it to take multiple files as arguments when launching the app. After a few exchanges, I figured that it made sense for me to write up a post on command line arguments, since it’s actually a really fascinating topic. The first “given” in this problem is that your application ...
Don Box on Visual Basic 9 (Beth Massi)
It looks like Don Box is really liking Visual Basic 9 and it's unique XML support, LINQ query syntax, and lambdas. He even mentions in a post about authentication with REST that his dream stack would be doing direct XML payload programming with Visual Basic 9. There's so many interesting things you can do with VB9 and XML. If you want to get started learning this great new feature check out the LINQ to XML How Do I videos on the Visual Basic Developer Center. You can also read some more articles I have on the subject on my blog. Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Creating Visual Basic Add-ins for Windows Home Server (Beth Massi)
We recently announced the availability of Windows Home Server. Here's an interview on Channel 9 with Dev Lead, Chris Gray, where he talks about the extensibility model and then walks through how to create an add-in for the Home Server console using Visual Basic Express. A couple people on the thread have also posted VB templates that you may find useful. Get Chris's code here.Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Channel 9 Interview: Type Inference in Visual Basic with Bill Horst (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Bill Horst, a member of the Visual Basic QA team. Bill shows us the ins and outs type inference in the newest version of Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008. He shows us how the new Option Infer works and how various types are inferred by the compiler without having to explicitly declare them. Type inference is one of the new features in Visual Basic to support LINQ.Also make sure to check out these LINQ How-Do-I videos on the VB Dev Center.Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 10: Pre-compiling Queries for Performance (Doug Rothaus)
Ingredients:· Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to SQL Introduction:As we add cookbook entries, we will include performance improvement tips where appropriate. Here’s a tip that you can use with LINQ to SQL to speed up queries that you will call numerous times: Pre-compiled queries. By pre-compiling a query, you perform the processing to compile the query once, and then skip the compile step every consecutive time that you run the query.Pre-compiled queries are created using the Compile method of the CompiledQuery class in ...
Petzold Chapter 3 (Young Joo)
I am Young Joo, PM @ VB team. I will be helping out Patrick on converting samples in Charles Petzold's WPF book (Applications = Code + Markup) to Visual Basic. This is an exciting project and I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. Another exciting news is that we have an extra help for this project. Evan Lim who currently teaches WPF & Blend courses at Foothill Community College in Los Altos, CA, has decided to help us with this. He already has a lot of chapters converted. So we will be able to release them much more quickly. Attached is VB sample for chapter 3. Enjoy! Ch_0...
Refactoring in Action (Lisa Feigenbaum)
Have you downloaded the latest Refactoring tools from Developer Express? There is a free version available on the Visual Basic Developer Center. Once you download, you will discover a number of cool capabilities you can now do in the Visual Basic IDE. When used to the fullest, it can really change the way you code!VB super-user Kim has created a video which demonstrates just that point: http://www.renaissance.co.il/downloads.aspx. (It's the download called "Coding Model-View-Presenter with CodeRush and Refactor Pro!"). In the video, Kim goes through the process of creating a Model-View-Presenter (M...
New Community Article – Using Business Objects with WCF (Beth Massi)
There's a new article up on the VB Dev Center by Rob Windsor, a follow up from his first Getting Started with WCF article, called Using Custom Business Objects with Windows Communication Foundation. Rob explains how to serialize your own custom business objects using WCF DataContracts and what issues you may run into in Visual Studio 2005. Check it out!Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
New Visual Basic LINQ to XML Videos Released! (Beth Massi)
We just released a new set of How-Do-I videos in our LINQ series on LINQ to XML in Visual Basic. These 4 new videos will help get you up to speed on using this new language feature in Visual Basic 2008. They walk you through the basics of LINQ to XML, creating, querying and transforming documents as well as how to import XML namespaces and infer schemas to enable IntelliSense. In the end I demonstrate how to create an Excel spreadsheet like I did in this post. In addition to the videos, check out these blog posts to help you get started: And don't forget you can also subscribe to the How-Do-I Video RSS...
Silverlight Ux Musings: Controlling Alignment of UI Elements [Corrina Barber]
This is my first post on the VB blog! I’m a designer on the team with a background in visual and interaction design, and I also have some .NET coding experience. I plan to start blogging on the VB blog on a regular basis, and my goal is to share some of my thoughts on and explorations with Silverlight.I’m sych'd about the possibilities enabled by Silverlight for many reasons, but, being a designer, one of the main reasons is that I can actually get cool UI implemented exactly as I envisioned. I love that I can create unique and beautiful UI in Blend, bring it into Visual Studio, and then add the inter...
Let the Music Play! (Matt Gertz)
Oh, boy. Sorry I haven’t written any posts lately, but I’ve transitioned to a new job within Visual Studio and have been getting my sea legs there. One of the job tasks is getting Visual Studio 2008 out to you folks, and while I’ve always been involved with that aspect of the product in the past, it was always to a lesser degree. I could best describe each day now as “23 hours of nervous tension followed by one hour of utter panic” as we knock down the last few things that would otherwise keep us from shipping on time.(Incidentally, in the spirit of making sure that...
Channel 9 Interview: Matt Gertz Plays Cards with Visual Basic (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Matt Gertz, Development Manager on the Visual Basic team (well former Dev Manager, I'll let him explain <g>) where he shows off a Euchre game he's developed in Visual Basic that includes speech and sound. Matt is one of our best bloggers on the VB Team and he loves game programming as well as the VB Community. Matt talks about his experiences at Microsoft and the Visual Basic team, and what he'll be doing going forward. Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Visual Basic 9.0 Language Specification Released (Beth Massi)
The Beta 2 version of the Visual Basic Language specification has been released onto the download center. This language specification corresponds to the version of Visual Basic that will ship in Visual Studio 2008. The spec covers the following major new features:• Friend assemblies (InternalsVisibleTo)• Relaxed delegates• Local type inferencing• Anonymous types• Extension methods• Nullable types• Ternary operator• Query expressions• Object initializers• Expression trees• Lambda expressions• Gen...
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 9: Dynamic Sort Order (Doug Rothaus)
Ingredients:· Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ-To-XML Introduction:You can use the Order By clause to easily sort the results of a LINQ query in Visual Basic. A common requirement for sorted data, however, is that the user be able to choose the fields that the results are sorted by. The Order By clause requires that you specify a static list of sort fields and sort directions, so how do you specify a sort order when you don’t know which fields the user has chosen until run time? The solution is to use the OrderBy or OrderB...
A Note about Enums (Scott Wisniewski)
I recently received an email from a customer who had a few questions about "enum inheritance" in VB, specifically as to why it wasn't supported. In particular, he sent us the following snippet of VB code (I've changed the names of the classes and methods involved) : Option Strict On Public Class BaseClass Public Enum SomeEnum Value1 Value2 End Enum Public Overridable Sub DoSomething(ByVal e As SomeEnum) Select Case e &...
Continued search for Small Business Developers and Chapter 2 of Petzold's book (finally!)
I've attached the chapter 2 Visual Basic.NET code for the ongoing project of converting Peztold's Applications = Code + Markup book on WPF proramming. I am happy to say that Young from my team is going to help with this effort so you will see these chapters coming out more frequently. Also, we are about to close the doors on our intial sweep of bringing in our fellow small business developers to help us shape Visual Basic. As a note, I should mention that if you or someone you know is still using VB6 or has switched to another technology, we are very intersted in talking with you. A fe...
Visual Studio Content – Tell Us What You Think! (Beth Massi)
The documentation team has just released a survey aimed at gathering feedback on Visual Studio content. Are you dying to tell us what you think about the Visual Studio content in the MSDN library? Please share your perspective by taking part in the Visual Studio Content Survey. The survey is completely anonymous and doesn't require that you fill in any personal information. It should take about 10 minutes to complete. Visit Kathleen's blog for more information. Thanks for helping us improve our documentation! Enjoy,-Beth Massi, VS Community
Channel 9 Interview – Offline Data Synchronization Services in Visual Studio 2008 (Beth Massi)
I just posted a Channel 9 interview with Milind Lele showing us his favorite VS 2008 features - the new Data Synchronization designer and how the sync services for ADO.NET work to support occasionally connected scenarios. He shows us how to set up a local database cache using SQL Compact Edition and how to use it to store read-only data caches as well as how to add the code to support two-way synchronization. If anyone's ever tried to implement an occasionally connected smart client, they'll very much appreciate this new tooling and framework in Visual Studio 2008. For more information on sync services catch...
Why you should learn WPF (and how I can help)
A few weeks ago I mentioned I was working on a side project. Well, then the soccer, tennis, and school season hit and..well I won't tell you the rest. What I had started to do was take all of the samples in Charles Petzold's book Applications = Code + Markup and rewrite them in VB for publication to the VB community. I had invited anyone else to do the same as it was a great way to learn WPF, and for the customers I will be focussing on over the next few years (the small business developers and IT pros) there was method behind my madness; especially for those still using VB6. One of m...
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 8: Querying XML Using LINQ (Doug Rothaus)
Ingredients:· Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ-To-XML Instructions:· Create a new Console Application in Visual Basic.· Create an RSS document. Add the following code to Sub Main. Dim rss = <?xml version="1.0"?> <rss version="2.0"> &...
Customizing Displays in the Debugger for System Types
We've heard feedback from several customers regarding the way certain types are displayed in the Debugger. Many of the displays exist to maintain the user experience between versions of Visual Studio. We constantly evaluate if this is the correct choice for a given version of the product. Starting with VS2008, you don't have to wait for us any longer. In VS2008, VB added full support for many of the debugging features it lacked compared to C# in 2005. In particular we've added full support for the DebuggerDisplayAttribute. By attributing a class or member with this attribute yo...
Option Strict [On|Off|SortOf]
Yesterday I got a question from a developer asking whether or not we could add something called "Option Strict Warn" to the language. This would give a developer a warning when using something like late binding or an implicit conversion, rather than disabling it altogether (through an error).As it turns out the ability to set custom custom values for Option Strict is actually already in Visual Studio. To test this out double click on "My Project" and click on the Compile tab of the Application Designer.The top 3 lines of the grid (under "Warning configurations") contain the following options:- Implici...
Small Business Developers Unite!
I can't believe it's already Sunday. I've been spending all weekend (and the last few weeks) as a returning member of the VB team emersing myself in the product, specifically getting my head around how I would use VB today to build the types of solutoins when I was writing departmental applications, or applications for small businesses. I remember these days well. 1 or 2 week deadlines were usually the norm, and VB was the only reasonable solution. I remember wanting to "wow" my customers (or my boss) with how fast I could create a great user experience.With this in mind, I took time to really learn a...
VB expression trees – string comparisons
Hey there! Last time, I talked a little bit about expression trees and what they are useful for. Expression trees are really interesting to those who want to write LINQ providers and have the ability to reason about the lambda expressions coming into their LINQ provider. However, in general, anyone that want's to reason about a lambda expression should be interested in expression trees. Today, I'm going to write particularly to those who are implementing code that reads expression trees. Even if you don't plan to do that, I hope you follow along because this stuff is interesting to know and understand regardless ...
Visual Basic Developer Center Gets a Facelift (Beth Massi)
I'm happy to announce the redesign of the Visual Basic Developer Center! This is the first step in a series of community-focused and dynamic content changes you'll be seeing on the Developer Center. Many thanks to the people over at MSDN, (especially Kerby) that made this a reality. Besides the new UI and fresh headlines and downloads, check out the new MVP aggregated blog feed and the new article on Silverlight by Rod Paddock. And keep checking back daily for updated content and new features!Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
Visual Basic Pack for Visual Studio 2005 SDK Released! (Beth Massi)
The Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Team released the Visual Basic Pack for Visual Studio 2005 SDK on Friday! This download provides the SDK samples in Visual Basic and a new wizard that is used for generating Visual Basic-based integration packages for Visual Studio. Head on over to the VSX team blog for more info.It's important to note that while current VB support for the VS 2005 SDK is in the form of this independent add-on install, VB support for the upcoming VS 2008 SDK will be included (integrated in along with C++ and C# support). So if you're itching to extend Visual Studio but don'...
XML to Schema Tool for Visual Basic 2008 (Beth Massi)
This week we posted a new tool called the XML to Schema Tool that allows you to easily import XML and infer schemas. The tool runs when when you add a new item to your VB 9 project and select the XML to Schema new item template (look under My Templates after you install). This allows you to work with XML much easier in Visual Basic 9 by inferring schemas from XML files and resources and adding the .XSD files to your project in order to enable IntelliSense on the XML properties. Take a look at the walk-through on this page and download it now!Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
Lambda Expressions and Expression Trees
Hi there! My name is Tim, and I'm the dev lead for the VB compiler team. Recently Amanda convinced me to blog on the VB team blog rather then my own blog for a variety of reasons, and so here I am. My current plan is that I'll post VB related postings here, and more compiler implementation/technology/fun facts on my own blog (ie, things that don't relate to the VB language/features). Recently my article on lambda expressions got published on MSDN magazine. For this blog post, I'm going to expand on some of the ideas in that article, so feel free to check out the article if some of the ideas here don't make s...
Channel 9 Interview – John Stallo on Building N-Tier Applications in VS 2008 (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with John Stallo talking about some cool tools in Visual Studio 2008 that will help you build simple N-Tier applications. Thanks to Kathleen again for helping with the shoot! This time we got fancy and used two camera angles ;-):Building N-Tier Applications in Visual Studio 2008In this in interview John Stallo, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, talks about WCF and simple N-Tier applications. He talks about a specific architecture scenario and some of the pain points we have building n-tier applications today. He then walks us through the improvements made in the D...
Back home again!
I can't tell you how excited I am to return to the Visual Basic team after almost eight years of absence! I spent much time working in groups around Microsoft including games, office and business solutions. But in each of these areas I focussed primarily on enabling developer scenarios. And now I am back! And what am I here for? Well, to continue to evolve Visual Basic into the best product for our customers. My personal goal is to make Visual Basic even more approachable and usable by anyone! I know this is possible as I myself cut my teeth on BASIC when I was in the single digit ...
Fun with VB !!!
Who says you can't obfuscate VB code? For fun, I tried writing some VB code which was shaped in the letters 'vb' (that's right, the code itself forms the shape of the letters), where the 'v' and the 'b' are formed from the Visual Studio inifinity logo. In case you're having trouble visualizing that, here's a picture. Because I'm forming the letters from the symbol, the v and b have to be visually interpreted of course: OK, so we have the above shape, but how to create the code this way? Well, we do that by using the ':' line separator all over the shop in order to allow us to create statements on the s...
Programming With XML Using Visual Basic 9 (Beth Massi)
We just published an article by Bill Burrows on Programming With XML Using Visual Basic 9. Bill has also created a series of video tutorials that walk you through the details of how to use the new XML features in Visual Basic 9. Bill takes an easy to follow, step-by-step approach to explaining the details in this exciting new technology. He walks us through creating an Excel spreadsheet from an RSS feed of homes for sale using the Windows Live Expo service. Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
A Walkthrough of WCF Support in Visual Studio 2008
One feature in Visual Studio 2008 I would like to highlight is our support of Windows Communication Foundation. WCF was introduced with .NET Fx3.0 as a next generation communications API. Previously if you wanted apps to talk you needed to make a lot of up-front decisions: o How important is transmission speed?o How will apps talk? Over the internet, intranet, or on the same machine?o Is reliable messaging important?o Is message encryption important? Once you made those decisions and started writing your app you were forced to learn a new protocol {.Net Remoting, ASMX web services, MSMQ, Named Pipes, etc.} and...
Implementing Dynamic Searching Using LINQ
A common requirement in forms-over-data applications is that users be able to search by any combination of fields to construct a dynamic query at run time. For example, the search feature in this application allows the user to find all records that meet criteria defined on multiple columns: LINQ makes it easy to write powerful queries like this over various data sources; for instance, we can use the following query to find all Orders shipped to a given country within a user-specified timeframe: Dim query = From order In db.Orders _  ...
Channel 9 Interview – LINQ to SQL and the O/R Designer in VS 2008 (Beth Massi)
I just posted another great interview on Channel 9 with Young Joo talking about LINQ to SQL and the new O/R Designer in Visual Studio 2008. He demos a typical business client-server scenario and shows how LINQ to SQL classes make it much easier to work with relational data in SQL Server 2005. Young also talks about architectures where he sees using LINQ to SQL having the most benefits.Learn more about the OR Designer and LINQ to SQL by viewing our "How Do I" video LINQ series on the Visual Basic Developer Center.Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
Endgame (Matt Gertz)
Well, I’m back from vacation, pleasantly tired and yet relaxed at the same time. I’m busy trying to dig out of e-mail, things are going well, Beta2 has been in your hands for several weeks, and I’ve got lots of great ideas to try out on this site.(That’s the theory, anyway. In reality, I’m writing this post while waiting to start my vacation, having some extra time now that I’ve got everything squared away at the office, and plan on posting it when I get back. Hopefully, everything that I said in the first paragraph above is true… J)I haven’t blog...
Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs 2.0 now available
In case you didn't see the links go live on the Visual Basic Developer Center the VB Off-Cycle team has shipped the latest edition of the Power Pack controls. You can download them from here.In this update we've added the much anticipated Line and Shape controls. The line and shape controls give you drag and drop ease at design time and great performance at runtime. By simply setting a few properties you can accomplish complex gradient fills. An improvement over the VB6 version of Line and Shape is we've added support for Events. These are fully supported by Microsoft as part of...
Channel 9 Interview – Amanda Silver on LINQ (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview with Amanda on Channel 9 where she walks us through the new LINQ syntax available in VS 2008 Beta 2. I also posted some How Do I videos on LINQ to help get you started -- look for more of these beginning of next week!In this interview, Amanda Silver, a Lead Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, demonstrates new LINQ syntax around Joins and Aggregates that is now available in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. Amanda is a guru of LINQ in Visual Basic and gives insightful explanations of how to use this new syntax. The interview starts out a little funny because the first 20 seconds o...
Channel 9 Interview – Visual Basic Intellisense Improvements in VS 2008 (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview with Lisa on Channel9 that you'll probably want to check out -- showing the new and much much imporoved Intellisense for Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008:In this interview Lisa Feigenbaum, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Editor, shows us all the improvements made to the Intellisense support in Visual Basic including keyword and local variable Intellisense, new language feature support, and top customer requests. Although every feature is important, the biggest chunk of the work this cycle was supporting the new language features including LINQ. As Lisa puts it, "The...
LINQ to XML Videos (Beth Massi)
Bill Burrows has created a series of videos to help get the community started with LINQ to XML in Visual Basic! These videos were created in conjunction with his upcoming MSDN article that will be published soon. Bill takes an easy to follow, step-by-step approach to explaining the details in this exciting new technology in Visual Basic 9.0. He walks us through creating an Excel spreadsheet from an RSS feed of homes for sale using the Windows Live Expo service. Enjoy!-Beth Massi, VS Community
Channel9 Interview: Scott Wisniewski on Extension Methods in Visual Basic 9.0 (Beth Massi)
I just posted an interview with Scott on Channel9 where he talks about extension methods, a new language feature in Visual Basic 9.0:In this in interview Scott Wisniewski, a Developer on the Visual Basic Team, talks about Extension Methods and shows us a couple interesting LINQ providers. In his own unique way, Scott dives into the meaning of Extension Methods and how they can extend types with discoverable methods which are part of the underpinnings of LINQ. He walks through some code written as an extension to LINQ query results to generate pie charts and then dives into a LINQ provider he built th...
If I gave you $200 to spend on VB, how would you spend it?
I spent the last few weeks using VB, and I kept thinking things such as “Wow, this is really awesome, I wish all other languages had that!” or “I’m sure there is an easier way to do this”. I simply can’t help it - just as with any other language, when I start using it I notice a few things that are really cool, and a few things that can be improved.So, I had my very own list of what was really cool and what could be better, but then I wondered – how did other VB developers feel? And, what is a better way to answer a question like this than actually asking the co...
Amanda Silver will be Presenting VB and Silverlight on Second Life! (Beth Massi)
If you haven't seen or experienced Second Life it's pretty amazing. It's an online, 3D, digital world. Visual Studio has created an island where you can come listen to live Microsoft presenters in this virtual world's live presentation theater! Amanda Silver will be presenting Visual Basic on Silverlight tomorrow, July 31st at 4pm Pacific time. There's a lot of other fun events you should check out as well. See you there! -Beth Massi, VS Community
Kit George and Chris Smith on Channel9 (Beth Massi)
I posted a couple more videos on Channel9 that you'll definitely want to check out! Thanks again to Kathleen for helping with the production.The first one Kit George walks us through some of his favorite VB9 language features that enable LINQ:In this in interview Kit George, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team and a former member of the CLR Team, shows us his favorite language features that enable LINQ without actually talking about the queries themselves. His excitement about Extension Methods, Anonymous Types, Object Initializers, Type Inference and the new Refactor! shows through in typical Kit ...
Lambdas, and Take While, and Group By, Oh My!
Hooray! Visual Basic 2008 Beta2 has been released to the wild today to return to its natural habitat – the desktops of our beloved customers. (Please note our smiling GPM's face on that landing page -- he's so happy the Beta is done.) What’s inside? So much that there might be more new features than we released in Beta1, but who’s counting? Here’s a laundry list that’s specific to the VB language that’s new for Beta2: · Query operators o Group By, Group Join, Join, Take [While], Skip [While], Aggregate, Count, Sum, Min, Max, Average, From à Let · &n...
Closures in VB Part 5: Looping
For previous articles in the series please see Once again sorry for the long delay between posts. Looping structures can cause unintended consequences when used with Lambda expressions. The problem occurs because lambda expressions do not execute when they are constructed but rather when they are invoked. For example take the following code. Many users are surprised to find out the above will print "4 4 4 4 ". The reason goes back to my previous 2 posts on variable lifetime and scope. All "For" and "For Each" blocks in Vb have 2 scopes. The first scope is entered on...
Today's Performance Webcast Slide Deck and Channel9 Interview (Beth Massi)
The VB team thanks everyone who attended Cameron's webcast on Performance Improvements in Visual Studio 2008 this morning. If you missed it, you can click this link for the on-demand replay. I've attached his slides that he used in the webcast for your reference. Also check out Cameron's Channel9 interview for more information (and if you're curious to see what he actually looks like!). Enjoy! -Beth Massi, VS Community performancewebcast.pptx
Visual Basic on Channel9 (Beth Massi)
I just posted a couple screen casts/interviews on Channel9 you should definitely check out. I rounded up VB team members and influentials and asked them what their favorite Visual Studio 2008 features were and to give us all a demo of them! The first one is with Erik Meijer and he shows us his favorite feature, XML Literals:In this in interview Erik Meijer, an Architect on the Data Programmability team, shows us how LINQ to XML works in the next version of Visual Basic, 9.0. He talks about some of the history behind the features as well as how XML literals, unique to Visual Basic, are implemented. He takes us on ...
Sons and Daughters Day: a pure blast!
On Friday, Chris Smith and I (Chris is a test engineer on the VB Team) attended an event called 'Sons and Daughters' day. The day consisted of 2 sessions (20-25 kids in each) where kids aged 6-13 were run through a class of writing an app in VB (20-25 kids in each). The class was very introductory, but eas very appropriate for the audience. Parents typically hung out with their kids to help things along. The role Chris and I played was to be additional helpers, to be able to provide extra assistance as necessary (parents were typically good at helping their kids along, but the odd issue or question wuld...
How do we write software at Microsoft: a PM intern’s perspective #1
Now that you know our team, it is time to get down to the real meat - we are building software here, so let’s talk about software. As I promised to keep you up to date with what is going on here at Microsoft, I decided to start a series of blog posts under the title “How do we write software at Microsoft: a PM intern’s perspective”. Expect to get a flavor of the Dev and QA prospective as well really soon!Even though our team is small and the project lifecycle will be relatively short (just 3 months), I am sure that throughout the series you will be able to get an idea of how much energy it...
Shameless Plug (Scott Wisniewski)
If you get a chance, you should check out the August 2007 edition of MSDN Magazine. In addition to its usual array of awesome goodies, this month's edition features a super cool Basic Instincts column, written by me. In it I discuss the design of Query Comprehensions in VB, giving an overview of the basic framework used by the compiler to translate queries into code. I hope that it should be interesting to anyone who wants to write their own custom query provider, or for anyone who just wants an understanding of how things work under the covers. If you don't have access to the print version, you can see the onlin...
Using the PrintForm component in Visual Basic (Matt Gertz)
(This is the fourth and final part of the Paint-by-Numbers series) Late last year, some clever guys on our Visual Basic team released the PrintForm component on the web. The idea behind the PrintForm component was to make printing and previewing your form very easy in .NET. I’m going to leverage this component to enable printing of the Paint-by-Number puzzles created in the application I’ve been building in this series. First of all, I need to download the component, which is available here on the Microsoft site – it’s about 500KB. Once downloaded, I’ll install it (you can even do this while Vis...
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 7: Selecting Pages of Data from Northwind (Jonathan Aneja)
Ingredients: - Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) - Connection to Northwind database Categories: LINQ-To-Objects, LINQ-To-SQL Instructions:· Create a new Windows Forms project with a Northwind DataContext (for step-by-step instructions on how to do this please see Recipe #6)· Drop a DataGridView control from the Toolbox onto the Form· &nbs...
Linq Cookbook, Recipe 6: Your first Linq Application using Northwind (Kit George)
This example is intended as a ‘primer’ for following recipes (so we don’t repeat the same instructions multiple times). This recipe takes you through everything you need, and assumes only that you've installed Visual Studio (and in so doing, you've installed SQLExpress). Subsequent Northwind based Linq-To-Sql recipes will point to this entry.Ingredients:- Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) We assume that SQL Express (or better) has been installed Categories: LI...
How to implement IQueryable (by Kevin Halverson)
Here’s a link to a post I just finished on ‘How to implement IQueryable’ (create a custom Linq provider).http://blogs.msdn.com/kevin_halverson/archive/2007/07/10/how-to-implement-iqueryable.aspxMy example project allows you to query the Windows Vista (Desktop) Search engine for files on your local machine. For example: Dim index As New WDSQueryObject Dim cutoffDate = #6/28/2007# Dim r = From file In index _ ...
Loading and Saving Files in Visual Basic (Matt Gertz)
(This is part 3 of the Paint-by-Numbers series)There are four issues I want to deal with in this post: New, Open, Save (As), and Exit. I’ll be doing these in order, but all of them depend on knowing whether or not the application is dirty, so I’ll deal with that problem first. Opening and saving files isn’t a particularly hard problem once you know how to deal with streams, but knowing when to notify users about potential data loss when opening files (or creating new ones, or closing an application) involves some logic, and that's where understanding "dirtiness" comes into play...
This Week's Live From Redmond Webcast Rescheduled [Beth Massi]
We just had to reschedule Cameron's Wednesday Live From Redmond: VB9 - Performance Improvements in Visual Studio 2008 talk for Tuesday July 24th. If you're already registered then you're good to go 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? :-)We apologize for any inconvenience!-Beth Massi, VS Community
Lumos: Fireworks in Seattle
Hello, dear readers!It has been another exciting week, so here is the second intern post :)New Team MembersLet me first introduce to you the other two members of our team. They are also interns, and the three of us are going to be working together on our really awesome top-secret intern project. Cameron is our SDET guy, and here he is in his own words:"Hi, I’m Cameron Hatfield, a native Washingtonian, hailing from the Renton area. I am a 4th (and going on 5th) year Computer Science Senior at Western Washington University (WWU), who is celebrating his 20th birthday on September 30th. My interests,...
Implementing infinite undo/redo (Matt Gertz)
(This is the second part in my series on creating a Paint-by-Numbers designer application.)This is the first application that I’ve built specifically for this blog, where I’m actually writing the code while I’m writing the blog. (For example, the Euchre game that I blogged about was something I’d written a couple of years ago, so there were no surprises for me when writing the posts about it.) As such, for this series I’m spending a lot more time documenting what my thoughts are while coding than I normally do, and it’s very interesting have that all down in print.&...
Slide Deck for Conquering XML with LINQ to XML Webcast [Beth Massi]
Amanda Silver gave a great webcast Tuesday morning on LINQ to XML (if you missed it, just click the link and view it on-demand). Here is the deck she used. Happy LINQing! -Beth Massi, Program Manager VS Community VB9 - Conquering XML with LINQ to XML.pptx
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 5: Concatenating the selected strings from a CheckedListBox (Kit George)
Ingredients: - Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ-To-Objects, LINQ and WinForms Instructions: CheckedListBox1.Items.AddRange( _ New String() {"Apple", "Orange", "Banana", _ "Avocado", "Tomato", "Tamarillo", _ "Kiwifruit", "Cherry"}) MsgBox( _ Aggregate Box In CheckedListBox1.CheckedItems _ Into Concat()) Public Module AggregateModule <Extension()> Public Function Concat(Of Type)( _ ByVal ie As ...
Owner Draw in VB (Matt Gertz)
I hate going so long without blogging, but it’s getting really busy around here as we get closer to the endgame for Visual Studio 2008. That, combined with “review time,” creates a bit of a problem for writing apps for the blog, and I wasn’t able to give it much attention until last night. Realizing I really needed to get an article out, I was wracking my brains for something to write about. I happened to notice that my wife was working on some puzzles in her “Games” magazine – she was on one of her favorites, which is called Paint-by-Numbers.  ...
Sleepless from Bulgaria: an intern's first weeks in the VB team
I started as an intern at Microsoft two weeks ago, and I thought it might be nice to share my experience with you. Not just because I love blogging, but also because I think that there are so many great things that happen here that are worth mentioning. I will try to post weekly, keeping you up to date with my thoughts on Microsoft, the VB team, my project, Seattle and the area, fun stuff that happened here, etc. But first things first, so: Who am I?My name is Slavi, I live and study in Bulgaria and in October I am starting my last year as a B.Sc. student in Sofia University, major Computer Sc...
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 3: Find all the prime numbers in a given range (Jonathan Aneja)
Ingredients:- Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ-To-Objects Instructions:- Open Visual Studio 2008, and Click ‘File/New Project’. Find and double-click the ‘Console Application’ Icon- Add the following code: Module Module1 Sub Main() Dim primes = GetPrimesInRange(30, 50) &nbs...
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 4: Find all complex types in a given assembly (Kit George)
Ingredients: - Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) - An assembly which you want to analyze (in this example, we use mscorlib.dll, the assembly which houses String)- A definition for 'Complex Type'. In this instance, a complex type is defined as having more than 10 public methods, of which at least one has more than 3 arguments Categories: LINQ-To-Objects, LINQ and types, LINQ and WinForms Instructions:- Open Visual Studio 2008, and Click &l...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
"Live From Redmond: Orcas Overview" Webcast Rescheduled (Beth Massi)
Live Meeting had some technical issues for this morning's webcast with John Stallo. Sincerest apologies from the Visual Basic team. We’ve rescheduled the webcast for this Tuesday, April 24th. Please register here. Also don't forget to register for the other incredible webcasts from other members of the team. You can always find the latest information on all the webcasts on the Visual Basic Developer Center. -Beth Massi, Program Manager VS Core Community
Using XML as a resource in your code –one more series on gamewriting (Matt Gertz)
Using XML as a resource in your code –one more series on gamewriting (Matt Gertz) This is actually going to be part one of a two-part blog. In this post, I’m going to cover some basic usage of XML, as well as a few other interesting coding points such as debug-only code. In the second part, I’ll cover the creation and handling of on-the-fly controls. As has probably become apparent over my posts so far, I have a certain fondness for creating small computer games, and while I promise not to make every post about writing them, nevertheless this post does cover the creation of a different type of game th...
Live From Redmond Webcast Series (Beth Massi)
The Visual Basic team has put together a "Live from Redmond" webcast series aimed at the next version of Visual Basic and Visual Studio code named "Orcas". The live series starts April 18th and will continue to the end of May. Come join us for this exciting series direct from the Visual Basic team!! Here's the schedule (check the VB Developer Center for updates): UPDATE: The VB Team has added more webcasts for June! Hope to see you at the webcasts! For more webcasts past, present and future, please visit the VB Webcasts page.-Beth Massi, Program Manager VS Core Community
Simple Animation in Visual Basic (Matt Gertz)
Simple Animation in Visual Basic (Matt Gertz) The basics: You're almost certainly used to placing controls on a form; however, you probably have an expectation that they will stay in place once you put them there. That need not be the case, however. Controls have X & Y positions, and you can modify them at any time during the runtime. We can use this to create a simple animation in a windows application -- let's say, for example, an animal walking. First, I'll need a two or more images of the animal in different stages of walking. (In the attached windows application, I'v...
It’s Elementary: Using VB To Get Process Information (Matt Gertz)
I’ve had a wide variety of jobs over my career, beyond working at Microsoft. I’ve been a burger-flipper and an administrative assistant. I’ve worked with the DOE and NASA on robotics projects, and back in my NROTC days I spent a month at the helm & planes of a nuclear submarine. I spent a summer doing really tedious data entry, another summer writing an accounts receivable program for local businesses in my home town, and a couple of summers writing CAD/CAM models for IC chips. But I think one of the most interesting things I ever did, for one brief moment,&...
Partial Methods
About two weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the product group dinner associated with the Global MVP Summit that was behind held here at Microsoft. Besides a free meal, this also gave me the excellent opportunity to meet with some of our MVPs and discuss their impressions with Visual Studio and all the cool new features we are introducing for Orcas. At the dinner, I had an opportunity to talk with a group of VB MVPS from Japan, who met with me and about 5 or 6 other members of the VB team. While we were talking, a couple of them asked me a few questions about partial methods. Unfortunately, I do not speak ...
Visual Basic "Soup-to-Nuts" Webcast Series
This webcast series is devoted to those who want to learn to really use Visual Basic and what it can do! Learn from Ron Cundiff, Developer Evangelist and featured Microsoft speaker. This is a 20+ part series that's underway. Check out the on demand recordings and sign up for the live webcasts here.-Beth Massi, Program Manager VS Core Community
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 9: Into the Wild Blue Yonder (Matt Gertz)
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 9: Into the Wild Blue Yonder So, here we are at the end of this series, which I hope you’ve found interesting. In this final post, I’m going to talk about deployment – getting your code shipped to another person. Oh, and the final code (including the deployment project) is included at the bottom of this post. It can be a lot of fun to code & play your own card game, but at some point, you’re going to want to share it with friends or sell it to customers. Visual Studio gives you two options for this: Click-Once deployment and Setup projects. I’ve o...
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 8: Remember Me, Show Me, Help Me (Matt Gertz)
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 8: Remember Me, Show Me, Help Me We’re getting close to wrapping up this series. In this post, I want to cover several “clean up” topics, and then in the following post, I’ll talk about deployment and will attach the entire codebase for your perusal. Settings You’ll note, from earlier posts, that there are a lot of options around variations in the Euchre rules, options for AI personalities, options for sound, and even options for the names of the players. Obviously, it would be really annoying if you had to specify those at the beginning of each session! The best...
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 7: Total Logic (Matt Gertz)
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 7: Total LogicSince I’ve been concentrating on specific VB functionality, you may have noticed that the one topic I haven’t really drilled into yet is game logic, and yet it’s central to what a game is all about. Games have certainly gotten more sophisticated over the years, and yet that sophistication is largely a result of graphical and audio advances. The actual logic of games itself hasn’t changed nearly as much – I still have to exercise pretty much the same control over my NWN2 party as I did way back in Pools of Darkness, for ...
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 6: Pump up the volume (Matt Gertz)
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 6: Pump up the volume Ever since Commodore first introduced the SID chip to their line of PCs way back in the earlier 80’s, sound has been an important experience in any computer game. What’s particularly exciting to me is that audio has caught up to graphics as far as game relevance goes – I can’t imagine Planescape: Torment having the same sort of immersive experience without Mark Morgan’s haunting, searching themes, or Icewind Dale messaging the loneliness and weariness of travelling across the ice plains without Jeremy Soules’ amazing harmonies. Alas, I can’t pretend tha...
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 5: Modality is a crutch (Matt Gertz)
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 5: Modality is a crutch It’s really tempting to rely on modal dialogs in a program. It forces the user to pay attention to what you feel is the most important thing. However, modal dialogs can also be frustrating to users and you should be careful about when you use them. To illustrate this point, let’s consider the Euchre game again. At some point, the user is going to be asked to play a card. Ideally, you don’t want the user to do anything else because there isn’t anything else the user can do – right? Well, no exactly. Remember that the user ...
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 4: Tooltips and Menus (Matt Gertz)
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 4: Tooltips and Menus Menus and tooltips are so incredibly important to applications, and yet implementing them sometimes seems to be arcane magic. In this post, I’m going to do my best to demystify them. Menus To add a menu, you simply drag a MenuStrip control from the toolbox to your form. As with the Timer control from the last post, the control will end up in the grey area at the bottom of the form; however, there will also be a visible component at the top of the form. Use the former to change the name of the control, but mostly you’ll be working with the visual i...
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 3: Timers (Matt Gertz)
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 3: TimersIn my previous posts regarding the Euchre game creation, I discussed some issues with creating a complex form and maintaining images to be shown on it. In this posting, I’m going to start covering some of the more esoteric controls.Timers and Message PumpsTry this: go to your Programs menu in Windows and launch the “Hearts” game. Play a few hands of it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.(hum-dee-dum-dee-dum)You back yet? Notice anything a little odd about that game? The action is just a little fast, isn’t it? In fact it’...
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 2: Show me the cards! (Matt Gertz)
Coding a Euchre Game, Part 2: Show me the cards! In my previous post, I discussed using control-drag to speed up the design of a form which uses lots of similar controls. In this post, I’m going to discuss displaying images on those controls. Now, the face of each card is going to need an image, and you’ll also need one image for the back of the card (which you can use for any of the cards). This is where I’m afraid you’re going to have to leverage your own artistic talents, unless you can find some "free" cards. For VBEuchre, I used Paint.exe to design each card by hand, because I couldn’t find...
TableAdapter and Multiple Result Sets
Several people asked me whether TableAdapter can be used to retrieve multiple result sets from stored procedures. The quick answer is... No, you can't do that with TableAdapter.Fill() method that gets generated as a part of Typed Dataset. But there's a very simple work-around. DataAdapter.Fill() & Multiple Result Sets TableAdapter.Fill() method calls DataAdapter.Fill() to retrieve data from database. And DataSet.Fill() method allows you to retrieve multiple result sets from a stored procedure. In order to retrieve multiple result sets, an overload of DataAdapter.Fill() that takes Dataset as a parameter needs ...
New Data Tools Features in Visual Studio Orcas
Here's a list of new data tools features in Visual Studio. I will be discussing each one in more detail in upcoming posts. Object Relational Designer The object relational mapping technology lets you map relational databases to objects. Once the mapping is done, you can manipulate mapped objects as normal objects and easily submit changes back to relational database without writing complex data access logic. It is the latest enhancement in data access technology and there are many different implementations out there currently. However, no O/R implementation comes with a graphical designer that makes it easy to ...
Fun with card tricks (Matt Gertz)
Back when I first started writing code, I got interested in game writing, and was fairly sure I could write out text-based games as well as the other offerings one could find on mainframes and, later, on the Commodores/TRS/Apples of the day. The flow of those games were really very easy – you’d present a block of text to the user to read to set up the situation, and then simply prompt the user for a pseudo-English sentence which you’d parse for keywords (“GO NORTH,” “PICK UP SWORD,” “SHOOT BOB,” etc) – you’d then proceed to the next block of text, and so on. Easy to write, easy to amaze yo...
Extension Methods Best Practices (Extension Methods Part 6)
This is the sixth installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here. Today I am going to talk about some best practices for using extension methods. Most of this content is geared toward authors of class libraries designed for wide spread consumption. Developers of such libraries often need to worry about things like making their API's future proof, and finding ways to extend their libraries while still preserving backwards compatibility. In most real world applications these suggestions can (and quite frankly should!) be completely ignored. However, if y...
Making your VB code ready to go global (Matt Gertz)
Greetings, all! I’m Matt Gertz, the Dev Manager for Visual Basic team. I’ve been on the team for a bit over 12 years, via the Blackbird/Visual InterDev side of the product, and in that time have been a dev on various features (mostly IDE-related), dev lead of deployment, dev lead of compiler, and box lead before my current responsibilities as DM. I’ve been somewhat remiss in not having posted to this blog before, being content to hang out on the VB IDE Forum, but it’s my intent to correct that situation and to throw out a few thoughts here and there. Many of our clever folk here have been writin...
March 2007 Orcas CTP Available
The March 2007 Orcas CTP is now available for download.You can see Soma's anouncement about it here.This is the first Orcas CTP to include new VB 9.0 features and is the first update of VB LINQ since last year's May 2006 LINQ CTP.Amongst a lot of other really cool Orcas stuff, this CTP includes previews of the following VB 9.0 features: You can download it here.Also, downloading the CTP is a great way to checkout the things I've been talking about in my recent posts about extension methods.
Extension methods and Generics (Extension Methods Part 5)
This is the 5th installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here. Originally I had planned on discussing extension method versioning issues, but I've decided to postpone that topic to my next post and talk about extension methods and generics instead. In Orcas we've introduced a new set of rules for the way we deal with generic extension methods that differs significantly from the way we deal with regular generic methods. When binding against extension methods we now perform generic type parameter inference in two passes instead of one. During the first ...
Extension methods and late binding (Extension Methods Part 4)
This is the fourth installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here. Today I'm going to talk about extension methods and late binding. Essentially there isn't much to say about it, other than the fact that we don't support late bound execution of extension methods. For the most part this isn't a big deal as one of the primary benefits of extension methods is its interaction with intellisence which doesn't work in late bound scenarios anyways. Unfortunately, however, there is one big side effect of this decision that you need to be aware of when authoring...
Articles about Extension Methods
Here is a list of links to posts on this blog that talk about extension methods:
Extension Methods (part 3)
In my previous 2 posts I talked about some of the benefits of extension methods and then delved into the details of our new binding rules for consuming them in your programs. Today I'm going to talk about some perils to be aware of when defining extension methods. First, however, I'm going to dig a little into the mechanics used by the compiler for evaluating extension method calls. Essentially, whenever the compiler detects a call to an extension method, it simply translates it into a call to the underlying module method, passing in the call's receiver as the method's first argument.If we take the following simp...
Extension Methods (part 2)
In my previous post I gave a high level overview of some of the benefits of using Extension Methods in VB 9.0. Today I'm going to delve into some of the details about how to define extension methods and then use them in your programs. Defining Extension Methods You can define an extension method by creating a method in a VB module and decorating it with the System.Runtime.CompilerServices.Extension attribute. The type of the methods first parameter specifies the type the method extends, and the remaining arguments indicate the method's signature. In general, we allow an extension method to be defined on any type ...
Extension methods (part 1)
Hi. I'm Scott Wisniewski, a dev on the VB Compiler Team. I've been here for a while now (about a year and a half), but this is my first blog post. I've been spending the past seven months or so working on Orcas, and finally decided it would be a good time to come up for some air, talk about what I've been working on, and start to actually make a dent against my blogging commitments. I figured the best place to start is with my favorite feature: extension methods. If you didn't know this already, one of the new features we are adding to VB 9.0 is Extension Methods, which provide a very powerful and elegant way to ...
Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and Visual Basic 2005 Command-line Compiler (VBC.exe) Hotfix Released!
Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is now available for download. We’d like to thank everyone in the Visual Basic community for providing feedback on SP1 and helping us identify and address issues for this service pack. In some areas, more than 50% of the bugs addressed were reported by customers through the MSDN Product Feedback Center. Overall, SP1 offers customers improvements in responsiveness, stability and performance for Visual Basic 2005. This service pack rolls up all of the Visual Basic 2005 hotfixes we’ve made to date and provides you the best overall performance and st...
Holiday fun with LinQ, and LinQ technologies in mind
OK, so when you're playing around with LinQ and all it's various additional bits, you really do get to have a bit of fun. I've made this available simply because i enjoyed doing it. The basic idea is to time and then compare the duration of various 'IsPrime' implementations. The 'client' simply allows you to run various IsPrime implementations. The IPrime interface defines the basic structure of running the exercise, while BasePrime provides the majority of the required code. Then, three imlpementations are provided (I make no defense of their efficiency!). The LinQ aspect to this is in two parts: - The 'Run' imp...
Key VB Hotfixes Available for Download
We’ve heard from you that popular hotfixes should be a public download rather than requiring a call to support. Based your feedback, we’ve launched a pilot program that will allow you to download the most frequently requested Visual Basic 2005 hotfixes without having to contact Microsoft Developer Support. For more information about this pilot and a list of hotfixes that are available for download please visit the pilot home page. The following Visual Basic 2005 hotfixes are available for download: Registration is required for download. Let us know what y...
Interop Roadmap – UserControls, MDI, and Data
Recently the VB team released the Interop Forms Toolkit, which allows VB6 developers to extend their existing applications using .NET. The toolkit allows developers to write a regular Windows Form in VB.NET, click “Generate Wrapper Classes”, and then call those forms from VB6. It also provides mechanisms for firing and handling events, and sharing application state (i.e. Globals). We’ve heard a lot of great feedback since the release. For example, we heard that a better interop story and things like the toolkit help enable more gradual migrations. We also heard that several scenario...
Notes from a recent tour to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Phillipines (well, almost!)
All, I recently went on a trip to 3 Asian countries, and thought I would share the notes.Here’s my summary of the recent trip a colleague and I made to Asia. The trip was cut short due to a typhoon in Manila, which was a real shame: my colleague and I were very much looking forward to seeing the Philippines. However, the trip was still excellent. My notes below are written semi-formerly, to make it a more interesting read. ArrivalWell, Hong Kong is certainly a bustling place. I arrived just before midnight on Saturday, and there must have been a few of flights arriving at the same time, becau...
Check out "Live from Redmond series #3" from the .NET FX product teams
The .NET Framework teams are providing several Live Meeting presentations spanning application technologies like Smart Clients, Web 2.0 (AJAX) and Mobile. Check out SimonMu's blog for more information:http://blogs.msdn.com/simonmu/archive/2006/10/09/The-next-series-of-team-member-Live-From-Redmond-webcasts.aspxSimon also pointed me to a great video archive:http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/default.aspx?tabid=63#ajax If you're a VB developer and you're interested in these modern .NET app types, I think you'll want to check this out. Enjoy!Best,Paul YuknewiczVisual Basic Team
VB Developer's Introduction to ASP.NET
by Kathleen McGrath If you're a Visual Basic developer who wants to learn about ASP.NET, you should check out this new MSDN article: A Visual Basic Developer's Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0There's also a number of introductory webcasts and multimedia presentations at Learn ASP.NET
Video Screencast: Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0
by Kathleen McGrathI've created a screencast that shows you how to create a Windows form in Visual Basic 2005 that you can call from your Visual Basic 6 application using the Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0. The screencast is about 6 minutes long.Interop Forms Toolkit Screencast
Visual Basic 2005 Power Pack!
I’m excited to announce that the Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Power Pack has been released and is now available for download on MSDN! In this release we have two components: Both components are fully supported, and we’ve included the source code for the Interop Toolkit as well. For more information check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/downloads/powerpacks/default.aspx We plan to release additional components for the Power Pack in the coming months, and your feedback is an important part of the process. Is there a specific component you’d like to see? Let us kno...
Create Add-ins for Office 2007 with Visual Basic
By Kathleen McGrathThe beta release of Visual Studio Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (VSTO 2005 SE) was announced today. VSTO 2005 SE is a free add-on for Visual Studio (Professional or above) that enables you to create add-ins for the most popular Office 2007 and Office 2003 applications. You can get VSTO 2005 SE Beta here.
Visual Basic Express Edition Videos
by Kathleen McGrath Have you ever wished that you could have someone show you how to accomplish a programming task instead of having to read through the steps on how to perform the task? Or maybe you just need a little more clarification about where a particular option is located. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, so imagine what a video can do. I'm creating a series of video demonstrations that follow the Visual Basic Guided Tour in the Visual Basic Express documentation as a way to supplement the great content you'll find there. My first set of videos are based on Creating Your First Visual Bas...
Whats New In VB2005 – Some parts of the TechEd demos
So I cleaned up my teched demos and editted the notes so hopefully, someone other than me (without access to what's inside my head ;-)) can follow along and see some of the cool new things in VB2005. Simply unzip the solution, open it, and remember to START with the demo.vb file in the DemoProject solution! If there's a project you're interested in that is NOT walked through ( i haven't had time to explain them all) then let me know and I'll look at adding in descriptions for it! Kit kitg@microsoft.com WhatsNewInVB.zip
Generics Patterns and Practices: ideas and suggestions for when to use generics
So at TechEd-2006, I gave a chalktalk on generics patterns and practices. I've zipped the content up here so folks can check it out if they want. I start by giving a quick background on generics (the GenericsBasics solution attached), then looking for patterns in the framework of where generics might be applied (The Examples project in the solution attached), to help people see where they might look for ways to create generics APIs in their own code. I also give a couple of exmaples of 'anti' patterns, just so they can see clearly, why some stuff is discouraged. I finally finish with a list of "Kit's Do's and Don...
VB Curioddities #1: Enum, Enum, my kingdom for an Enum.Parse
Hey folks, my name's Kit George and I've joined the VB team from the CLR. VB is after all, the best language, so of course, it makes sense to work directly on it!Like all languages, VB has it's little 'oddities', so i thought i would start a series to present a few of these. These are little (and perhaps large) curious VB things that you may or may not have noticed. Either way, you can bring them up at the water cooler to impress everyone with your VB knowledge.I thought I would start with an interesting oddity surrounding Enum.Parse. Enum is of course, a keyword in Visual Basic, since it was already a keywo...
VB6 Collections: The Missing LINQ
By Jonathan Aneja Hi, my name’s Jonathan and I’m a Program Manager on the VB team, working mainly on LINQ features. One of the things I love about LINQ is it’s not just limited to querying over databases and XML – you can query over any collection of Objects. For example, let’s say I have a collection of PurchaseOrders, and I want to return the ones that meet the following criteria: At this point you’d have to write code to filter out the correct POs and then apply the double-sort criteria. With LINQ this simply becomes: Dim query = From p In PurchaseOrders _  ...
EMEA Tour Followup
PaulYuk and I just returned from the EMEA tour where we demoed tons of new VB 2005 features to groups in Brussells, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Belfast, and Dublin. Here (as promised) are links to more information on what I presented. If you didn't make it to the presentations, check out the below. Lots of interesting material!Was good to visit everyone on the trip. Paul and I had a great time visiting everyone.Start Clients Using Office:Main page -> http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/vsto/default.aspxGood overview -> http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/v...
Paper on XML features of VB9
Just wanted to point out a paper Brian Beckman and Erik Meijer wrote on the XML features of VB9.
New VB9 Bloggers
By Amanda Silver I just wanted to let you know that we’re working furiously on turning the VB9 features into an actual product, understanding how the debugger and editor should support them, and getting another CTP out to you all. Your feedback so far as been invaluable. Hopefully you’ll see that we’ve responded to your feedback in the next CTP (due out this spring.) One of the things you’ll see is changes to the syntax for XML LateBinding as Avner talks about. Brian Beckman has posted some cool entries on writing a VM using VB9 and hash joins with VB9. And Erik Meij...