Some great new video's on MSDN showing how to do async programming using the Async CTP. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh378091.aspx There are different versions of video's for both VB and C#. This is a great opportunity to see the power of the new Async languages featuresand follow through a series of examples showing ho...
We're very happy to announce today the Async CTP for Visual Basic and C#. Asynchronous programming is something that helps make your UI more responsive, especially in applications that interact with databases or network or disk. It's also used to make ASP servers scale better. And it's the natural way to program in Silverlight. Until now, asyn...
Visual Studio 2010 is almost out the door. Now is a good time to look back at what we didn't get into the language in this release, but would have wanted to, and so will consider for future releases.Over the coming weeks, each day, I'll blog on blogs.msdn.com/lucian about the ideas on our wish-list, along with our evaluation of them....
Our recent post on "negative sleeps in VB" was an April Fool's joke. VB doesn't have negative sleeps, and isn't going to. But the joke's on me! Several readers wrote back to say that other languages do have negative sleeps. Tony Hoare, inventor of "Quicksort" amongst other things, wrote: Did you know that negative delays have long been used i...
[NOTE: please also read the followup to this article] .NET 4.0 will introduce many new threading and concurrency classes -- SpinLock, Parallel Linq, and ConcurrentDictionary to name but a few.The new feature that excites me the most is the ability to pass a negative argument to Thread.Sleep. This article describes how you ...
Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on using the Touchless SDK. The Touchless SDK enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. "Touch without touching." It's actually pretty cool! In this interview I meet up with Touchless SDK creator, Mike Wasserman and Visual Basic Spec Lead, Lucian Wischik. They e...
Concurrency is an important topic on everyone's mind, when considering future trends for computing and programming languages. Concurrent Basic is a variant of the Visual Basic language, with new constructs baked in to help handle concurrency and parallelism, in a very natural way. Watch this high-energy video with language guru Erik Meijer, VB spec...
We've just had a fascinating article about using VB's XML literals to produce web pages.I've been interested in the other side of the process: using VB's XML support to scrape web-pages for data. Here's the essential bit of code, which looks for something like <div class="content"><h2>Title</h2> <table><tr>&l...
It's common that you want to launch an external process but supply input and capture the output. Here's one attempt: ' BAD CODE Using p As New System.Diagnostics.Process p.StartInfo.FileName = "cat" p.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = False p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = ...
"Visual Basic Tips & Tricks" is an Italian online community that was started 10 years ago today. To be exact, the first tips were actually published in 1996 on a personal web page of the founder and leader, Gianluca Cannalire. However, the group recognizes the first day of the "real community" as December 8th 1998, when a web portal was created...
