Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Productivity Improvements for the Entity Framework

BackgroundWe’ve been hearing a lot of good feedback on the recently released update to the Entity Framework in .NET 4. This release marks a significant advancement from the first release that shipped with .NET 3.5 SP1.  I’m not going to spend time here talking about what’s new, but you can check here to see for ...

Spot the Bug! – The Key to using Anonymous Types (Jonathan Aneja)

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...

Dynamic Searching using LINQ – Dataset + Joins

About two years ago I posted some code that shows how to dynamically construct LINQ queries at runtime.  On average there's a couple questions per month about trying it in some edge case, and usually the support already exists within the API.  Recently though someone posted a question that has to do with Datasets and Joins that ...

VSLive San Francisco Content (Amanda Silver)

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...

Hidden Gems in Visual Basic 2008 (Amanda Silver)

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 ...

Visual Basic 2008 Ships!!! (Amanda Silver)

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 ...

Lambda Expressions and Expression Trees

Hi there! My name is Tim, and I'm the dev lead for the VB compiler team. Recently Amanda convinced me to blog on the VB team blog rather then my own blog for a variety of reasons, and so here I am. My current plan is that I'll post VB related postings here, and more compiler implementation/technology/fun facts on my own blog (ie, things that ...

Implementing Dynamic Searching Using LINQ

A common requirement in forms-over-data applications is that users be able to search by any combination of fields to construct a dynamic query at run time.  For example, the search feature in this application allows the user to find all records that meet criteria defined on multiple columns:    (image)   LINQ makes it ...

How to implement IQueryable (by Kevin Halverson)

Here’s a link to a post I just finished on ‘How to implement IQueryable’ (create a custom Linq provider).http://blogs.msdn.com/kevin_halverson/archive/2007/07/10/how-to-implement-iqueryable.aspxMy example project allows you to query the Windows Vista (Desktop) Search engine for files on your local machine.  For example:&...