Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

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: (image) In discussions about how to get a handle on such scenarios there...

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 ...

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...

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 ...