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...
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 in...
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 imp...
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 me...
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
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 keywor...
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 th...
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...
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...
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...
