Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

TechEd North America, here we come! (Lisa Feigenbaum)

TechEd North America 2009 is right around the corner. For those of you attending, we look forward to spending time with you at the VB.NET sessions and Technical Learning Center (a.k.a. booth). I've pasted the VB.NET session list below. See you in LA!(image...

Spain User Group Tour: All Good Things Must Come to An End (Lisa Feigenbaum)

After three and a half days visiting user groups through Spain, Jon and I have flown back to the US. We got to meet some great people and had lots of fun talking about VB. The slide decks that we used on the trip are attached at the end of this post. PPT: Deep Dive on VB 9.0 (link to be added shortly)PPT: Visual Basic IDE Tips and Tricks ...

Visual Basic en España (Lisa Feigenbaum)

This week Jonathan Aneja and I are traveling from city to city, and presenting to VB.Net user groups in Spain. We began the tour in Barcelona where we were speaking at TechEd EMEA, and will finish in Madrid. VB MVP Pep Lluis Blano organized the entire itinerary! Here are the topics for the presentations: The schedule is below. Each ...

Community Interview with Jonathan Aneja (Beth Massi)

Continuing the community interviews from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time we interview Jonathan Aneja, VB Compiler Program Manager.Remember that you can take a look at the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as ...

Where is the VB Team going to be over the next few months? (Lisa Feigenbaum)

We have quite a few trips coming up over the next couple months, and we want to connect with you while we’re on the road. Here is our plan. Let us know where we can find you. ;-)  October 6-7, 2008 Software Development Conference 2008: http://www.sdc.nl/ Beth Massi October 8-10, 2008TechEd Hong Kong: http://www.microsoft.com/hk...

VB 2008 Language Deep Dive – Presentation Materials (Jonathan Aneja)

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 ...

How LINQ to Dataset works in VB (Jonathan Aneja)

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 ...

Using LINQ to Dataset in an .aspx page (Jonathan Aneja)

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 ...

Launching External Tools from inside Visual Studio (Jonathan Aneja)

Visual Studio has a small but extremely useful feature that allows you to hook external tools directly into the IDE’s Tools menu.  All you have to do is click Tools->External Tools… and then you can add your own custom menu items that will launch a specified program.   On a typical day I’ll probably fire up Reflector and/or ...

Option Strict [On|Off|SortOf]

Yesterday I got a question from a developer asking whether or not we could add something called "Option Strict Warn" to the language.  This would give a developer a warning when using something like late binding or an implicit conversion, rather than disabling it altogether (through an error).As it turns out the ability to set custom ...