Did you know? Archives | Visual Basic Blog

The many cases of ByRef

VBTeamJanuary 26, 2010Jan 26, 201001/26/10

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...

Did you know? There are many ways to insert a snippet into your code (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Lisa FeigenbaumDecember 7, 2008Dec 7, 200812/7/08

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 ...

VB Catch … When: Why so special?

VBTeamOctober 9, 2008Oct 9, 200810/9/08

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 ...

Did you know? 300+ Visual Studio Tips & Tricks (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Lisa FeigenbaumSeptember 22, 2008Sep 22, 200809/22/08

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 ...

PInvoke Interop Assistant on CodePlex (Jared Parsons)

VBTeamJune 20, 2008Jun 20, 200806/20/08

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...

Did you know? You can now manage your snippet highlighting (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Lisa FeigenbaumMarch 15, 2008Mar 15, 200803/15/08

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 ...

Making PInvoke Easy

VBTeamMarch 14, 2008Mar 14, 200803/14/08

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 ...

Did you know? VB IntelliSense now filters as you type! (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Lisa FeigenbaumJanuary 11, 2008Jan 11, 200801/11/08

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...

Did you know? What you can do with Debugger Datatips… (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Lisa FeigenbaumJanuary 10, 2008Jan 10, 200801/10/08

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 ...

Did you know? Ctrl+Tab to navigate windows in VS (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Lisa FeigenbaumJanuary 9, 2008Jan 9, 200801/9/08

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: ...

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