Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

New Language Features in Visual Basic 14

(image) "Visual Basic 14" is the version of Visual Basic that will ship with Visual Studio 2015. In this blog post I'll talk specifically about the VB language improvements in this release. (Separately, there are a whole host of IDE and project-system improvements as well). There are two overall themes to the language improvements: (1) Make ...

New Language Features in Visual Basic 14 (animated)

(image) "Visual Basic 14" is the version of Visual Basic that will ship with Visual Studio 2015. In this blog post I'll talk specifically about the VB language improvements in this release. (Separately, there are a whole host of IDE and project-system improvements as well). There are two overall themes to the language improvements: (1) Make ...

VB Universal Windows App: downloads

Here are download links for the "VB Universal Windows App" series:   App1.vb This is the minimal VB universal app that we'll build in this blog series.   Breakout Universal This is a complete game, based upon all the principles that were covered in the blog series...

VB Universal Windows App Part 5: calling into platform-specific APIs from PCL

This is Part 5 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: So far we've been able to re-use all our code and XAML by placing them in the PCL. Actually, PCLs can only ever contain calls to APIs that are common to the platforms they target. This generally isn't a problem, because most APIs on Windows also exist on Windows Phone, ...

VB Universal Windows App Part 4: using SharpDX for sound effects

This is Part 4 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: So far we've built a solid app, sharing as much code and XAML as possible by placing it in our PCL. For today's post we'll continue the process, adding game-quality sound effects to our app. SharpDX is the best way to do this. Please bear with me. This is a long ...

VB Universal Windows App Part 1: Getting Started

This is Part 1 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series:   Recently in April 2014, Microsoft announced Universal Windows Apps. I thought I'd take an old Silverlight paddle game and turn it into a VB Universal Windows App. Here's how the finished game looks, on devices and in the stores:   What is a Universal ...

Visual Basic 11 Beta Available for Download!

As you may have read in Jason’s announcement, today we announced that Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download.  This is a huge release for Visual Basic as it provides full platform support for building Windows 8 Metro style apps, a first-class asynchronous programming experience, and also the long-awaited Iterators ...

Announcement: Namespace Global

There’s a new feature coming to VB, and already included in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. The feature is called Namespace Global and it’ll make your life easier… The MSDN reference on namespaces (including Namespace Global) is here: Namespaces in Visual Basic. As an aside, I’d like to thank Shimmy ...