Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Orcas - Visual Basic Blog

Closures in VB: Part 1

May 2, 2007 May 2, 2007 05/2/07
VBTeam
  My name is Jared Parsons and I am a developer on the VB Compiler and Debugger.  One of the features I implemented for VB 9.0 is lexical closure support.  This a great addition to the VB language and I wanted to do a series of blog posts to describe this feature and how it will impact your code. Lexical Closures (more often ...

VB On Silverlight

May 1, 2007 May 1, 2007 05/1/07
VBTeam
  One of the great things about being on the VB team is that we’re generally in the loop early and often with teams developing new technologies and products. It’s always exciting to see ideas take shape, evolve into a product, and eventually hit the market—often after four or five code names, a couple of tech previews, and a few ...

The Best of Intentions (Matt Gertz)

April 30, 2007 Apr 30, 2007 04/30/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
The title pretty much describes this post.  I had fully intended to work on a Smart Device application for VB last week, and post the walkthrough here.  VB is a great language for coding against devices, and there are a lot of cool things you can use a device for, so I was looking forward to a fun post on that this morning.  ...

Visual Basic LINQ Samples Updated for Orcas Beta 1! (Beth Massi)

April 20, 2007 Apr 20, 2007 04/20/07
Beth Massi
The Visual Basic LINQ Samples have been updated for Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1! This is a set of 101 samples that demonstrate all the features of Visual Basic's Language Integrated Query in Orcas Beta 1. Also check out the The LINQ Project page. This has been updated with links to some news articles and quote highlights ...

Visual Basic "Orcas" Beta1 is in the wild! (Amanda Silver)

April 19, 2007 Apr 19, 2007 04/19/07
VBTeam
Woohoo! Its official, we finally got Orcas Beta1 out the door! We’re very excited to get this release out to you so we can finally talk about some of the stuff we’ve been working on in addition to the LINQ and XML feature-set. We believe that Orcas Beta1 displays all of the essential value in the Orcas product but it’s important to keep ...

"Live From Redmond: Orcas Overview" Webcast Rescheduled (Beth Massi)

April 18, 2007 Apr 18, 2007 04/18/07
Beth Massi
Live Meeting had some technical issues for this morning's webcast with John Stallo. Sincerest apologies from the Visual Basic team. We’ve rescheduled the webcast for this Tuesday, April 24th. Please register here. Also don't forget to register for the other incredible webcasts from other members of the team. You can always find...

Live From Redmond Webcast Series (Beth Massi)

April 9, 2007 Apr 9, 2007 04/9/07
Beth Massi
The Visual Basic team has put together a "Live from Redmond" webcast series aimed at the next version of Visual Basic and Visual Studio code named "Orcas". The live series starts April 18th and will continue to the end of May. Come join us for this exciting series direct from the Visual Basic team!! Here's the schedule (check the VB Developer ...

Partial Methods

March 28, 2007 Mar 28, 2007 03/28/07
VBTeam
About two weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the product group dinner associated with the Global MVP Summit that was behind held here at Microsoft. Besides a free meal, this also gave me the excellent opportunity to meet with some of our MVPs and discuss their impressions with Visual Studio and all the cool new features we are ...

New Data Tools Features in Visual Studio Orcas

March 13, 2007 Mar 13, 2007 03/13/07
VBTeam
Here's a list of new data tools features in Visual Studio. I will be discussing each one in more detail in upcoming posts. Object Relational Designer The object relational mapping technology lets you map relational databases to objects. Once the mapping is done, you can manipulate mapped objects as normal objects and easily submit changes ...

Extension Methods Best Practices (Extension Methods Part 6)

March 10, 2007 Mar 10, 2007 03/10/07
VBTeam
This is the sixth installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here. Today I am going to talk about some best practices for using extension methods. Most of this content is geared toward authors of class libraries designed for wide spread consumption. Developers of such libraries often...