Visual Basic Blog
A group blog from members of the VB team
Latest posts
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...