Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Channel 9 Interview: Type Inference in Visual Basic with Bill Horst (Beth Massi)

I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Bill Horst, a member of the Visual Basic QA team. Bill shows us the ins and outs type inference in the newest version of Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008. He shows us how the new Option Infer works and how various types are inferred by the compiler without having to explicitly declare ...

New Visual Basic LINQ to XML Videos Released! (Beth Massi)

We just released a new set of How-Do-I videos in our LINQ series on LINQ to XML in Visual Basic. These 4 new videos will help get you up to speed on using this new language feature in Visual Basic 2008. They walk you through the basics of LINQ to XML, creating, querying and transforming documents as well as how to import XML namespaces ...

LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 9: Dynamic Sort Order (Doug Rothaus)

Ingredients:·         Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ-To-XML Introduction:You can use the Order By clause to easily sort the results of a LINQ query in Visual Basic. A common requirement for sorted data, however, is that the user be able to choose the fields that ...

VB expression trees – string comparisons

Hey there! Last time, I talked a little bit about expression trees and what they are useful for. Expression trees are really interesting to those who want to write LINQ providers and have the ability to reason about the lambda expressions coming into their LINQ provider. However, in general, anyone that want's to reason about a lambda ...

XML to Schema Tool for Visual Basic 2008 (Beth Massi)

This week we posted a new tool called the XML to Schema Tool that allows you to easily import XML and infer schemas. The tool runs when when you add a new item to your VB 9 project and select the XML to Schema new item template (look under My Templates after you install). This allows you to work with XML much easier in Visual Basic 9 by ...

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 ...

Programming With XML Using Visual Basic 9 (Beth Massi)

We just published an article by Bill Burrows on Programming With XML Using Visual Basic 9. Bill has also created a series of video tutorials that walk you through the details of how to use the new XML features in Visual Basic 9. Bill takes an easy to follow, step-by-step approach to explaining the details in this ...

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 ...