Jared Parsons Archives | The Visual Basic Team

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.

Community Interview with Jared Parsons (Beth Massi)

Beth Massi - MicrosoftOctober 15, 2008Oct 15, 200810/15/08

Here’s another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with Jared Parsons, a Developer on the VB Team. Jared is a great developer and loves the community. You can check out his personal blog here.

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.

    <span>Sub </span>Sub1()
        <span>Try
            </span>DoSomeAction()
        <span>Catch </span>ex <span>As </span>Exception <span>When </span>Filter(ex)
            <span>Stop
        End Try
    End Sub
</span>

Sub Sub1()

Try

DoSomeAction()

Catch ex As Exception When Filter(ex)

Stop

End Try

End Sub

Newsgroups often ask,

Channel 9 Interview: Jared Parsons on the P-Invoke Interop Assistant (Beth Massi)

Beth Massi - MicrosoftJuly 28, 2008Jul 28, 200807/28/08

Today I posted an interview screencast on Channel 9. In this interview, Jared Parsons, a Developer on the Visual Basic IDE, shows us the P/Invoke Interop Assistant available on CodePlex. The tool helps with converting unmanaged C code to managed P/Invoke signatures and vice versa.

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) adding more features.

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.

Customizing Displays in the Debugger for System Types

VBTeamSeptember 28, 2007Sep 28, 200709/28/07

We’ve heard feedback from several customers regarding the way certain types are displayed in the Debugger. Many of the displays exist to maintain the user experience between versions of Visual Studio. We constantly evaluate if this is the correct choice for a given version of the product.