Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Lambdas, and Take While, and Group By, Oh My!

Hooray! Visual Basic 2008 Beta2 has been released to the wild today to return to its natural habitat – the desktops of our beloved customers. (Please note our smiling GPM's face on that landing page -- he's so happy the Beta is done.) What’s inside? So much that there might be more new features than we released in Beta1, but who’s ...

Closures in VB Part 5: Looping

For previous articles in the series please see Once again sorry for the long delay between posts.  Looping structures can cause unintended consequences when used with Lambda expressions.  The problem occurs because lambda expressions do not execute when they are constructed but rather when they are invoked.  For example take ...

Shameless Plug (Scott Wisniewski)

If you get a chance, you should check out the August 2007 edition of MSDN Magazine. In addition to its usual array of awesome goodies, this month's edition features a super cool Basic Instincts column, written by me. In it I discuss the design of Query Comprehensions in VB, giving an overview of the basic framework used by the compiler to ...

Closures in VB Part 4: Variable Lifetime

For previous articles in this series please see Sorry for the long delay between posts here.  We're getting Orcas out the door and getting this series completed takes a back seat to shipping.  Originally I wanted to talk about looping structures next.  However when I started writing that post I realized that I had to talk ...

What is the difference between VB 9, VBx and Silverlight? (Scott Wisniewski)

I recently received an email from a customer asking for clarification as to what the difference was between VB 9, VBx and Sliverlight. In particular, it seems as if we have been releasing so much information about cool new stuff that at least a few people have become confused, making them a bit nervous about the future of VB. The customer had ...

Visual Basic LINQ Hands On Labs for Orcas Beta 1 (Beth Massi)

The VB team just posted some Hands On Labs on LINQ and LINQ to SQL for Orcas Beta 1. The first lab provides an introduction to The LINQ Project. You'll look at basic LINQ features including the Standard Query Operators, and you'll see how these features can be used against in-memory collections, connected databases, and XML documents. The ...

Closures in VB Part 3: Scope

Jared here again.  For previous articles in this series please see Thus far in the series we've only lifted variables that are declared in the same block/scope. What happens if we lift variables in different scope?  The answer is that one closure class will be created for every unique scope where a lifted variable is declared ...

Closures in VB Part 2: Method Calls

For previous articles in this series, please see Jared here again.  This part of the series will focus on how method calls are handled in closures.  As stated in the previous article, the purpose of closures is to allow all operations inside a lambda or query expression that would normally be available inside the function or ...