Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Visual Basic "Orcas" Beta1 is in the wild! (Amanda Silver)

Woohoo! Its official, we finally got Orcas Beta1 out the door! We’re very excited to get this release out to you so we can finally talk about some of the stuff we’ve been working on in addition to the LINQ and XML feature-set. We believe that Orcas Beta1 displays all of the essential value in the Orcas product but it’s important to keep ...

Interop Roadmap – UserControls, MDI, and Data

Recently the VB team released the Interop Forms Toolkit, which allows VB6 developers to extend their existing applications using .NET.  The toolkit allows developers to write a regular Windows Form in VB.NET, click “Generate Wrapper Classes”, and then call those forms from VB6.  It also provides mechanisms for firing and handling...

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 ...

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 ...

DTEE is BACK!!! by Kathleen Tamanaha

Running Code at Design Time from the Immediate Window Back in Visual Basic 6.0, developers were able to evaluate expressions from the Immediate Window at design time (we’ll call this feature ‘DTEE’ – Design Time Express Evaluation from now on).  This feature gave the developer an opportunity to test their code...

Code Generation for Overrides in Visual Basic .Net 2005

 by Mike CarterSome subtle changes were made in Visual Basic .Net 2005 to make code generation of overidden methods a little easier.  In Visual Basic .Net 2003 and earlier, you used the code dropdowns as in Figure 1 below.(image) Figure 1When overriding a Sub, a declaration stub similar to the following was generated in the ...

Edit & Continue – Rude Edits

 by Bill Horst Edit and Continue is a new VB debugging feature which allows the user to make edits to code while the debugger is in "Break Mode" and then to continue debugging with the new edits applied, without having to start execution over again.A Rude Edit is an edit made during "Break Mode" from which the debugger cannot ...