Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Matt Gertz - Visual Basic Blog

Taking a tour of Roslyn

April 3, 2014 Apr 3, 2014 04/3/14
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
It’s a big day for us on the Managed Languages team! As announced at the //BUILD conference earlier today, and as posted by Soma on his blog, we are not just delivering a new preview of Roslyn to all of you, but are in fact moving all of the compiler code to open source! The code will be released and maintained by MS Open Tech, who are our ...

Roslyn performance (Matt Gertz)

January 15, 2014 Jan 15, 2014 01/15/14
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
(For the next few posts, I’m going to introduce readers to the different feature teams in the Managed Languages org.  Today, I’m starting this with a focus on the performance team.)Back in 2000, I found myself assigned to be the performance lead of the Visual Basic team, and my first assigned goal was to drive the performance ...

The Temple of VB (Matt Gertz)

April 29, 2011 Apr 29, 2011 04/29/11
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Hi, all!It's been a while since I've posted to this blog, and a lot has happened in my world since then.  Though I've been pretty busy on our engineering systems team, I took a little time off last summer to do some traveling and, more importantly, some long overdue writing.  Although I'd always enjoyed writing the "here's how ...

On The Blink (Matt Gertz)

February 26, 2010 Feb 26, 2010 02/26/10
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
One of the really fun things about being associated with the Visual Basic team is getting to see all of the varied usages to which our customers put it.  From enterprise software to games, our customer base covers a wide range.  The most fun to see, however, are the hobby applications, because the writers of that code come up with ...

There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Euchre! (Matt Gertz)

December 18, 2009 Dec 18, 2009 12/18/09
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
“Oh, no!”  I hear you cry, “not another blog about Euchre!”Well, I do like the game, to be sure.  But, more importantly, the Euchre scenario enables me to try out any new technologies on a reasonably complex problem (using Visual Basic, of course).  It’s my way of checking out our product to make ...

Linking Zune media items with LinQ, Part 2 (Matt Gertz)

November 7, 2009 Nov 7, 2009 11/7/09
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
In this post, I’ll continue on with coding the new playlist shuffler.  If you haven’t read part 1 yet, I highly recommend it so that this post will make more sense. JCode for the controls (continued)The Title TextBoxWhen the title changes, we’ll want to indicate that the playlist has changed, and we’ll want to ...

Linking Zune media items with LinQ, Part 1 (Matt Gertz)

November 6, 2009 Nov 6, 2009 11/6/09
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Way back in October 2007, I wrote up a few posts (here and here) on my experiments with the Windows Media Player object model.  The problem I was trying to solve was that, when I had a playlist set to “shuffle,” WMP would break up songs that should always play together (for example, Jackson Browne’s “The Load-Out&...

Getting Loopy (Matt Gertz)

October 7, 2009 Oct 7, 2009 10/7/09
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
In my last post, I talked about the hidden costs that can occur whenever you call out to methods, particularly in loops.  In looking at my examples, reader KG2V commented that another thing that folks need to be aware of is avoiding the assumption that the world (or, in this case, a list) is a static thing.  It’s a good point ...