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