Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

The Temple of VB (Matt Gertz)

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)

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 ...

Spot the Bug! – The Key to using Anonymous Types (Jonathan Aneja)

This one’s going to be long, but for those of you who’ve felt the first 3 in this series were too easy I promise this one’s tougher J. Let’s say you want to list all the customers from a table in a ComboBox, and update the UI based on which one is selected.  To do this we’ll need to bring back two fields...

Spot the Bug! – Is it in VB or XAML? (Jonathan Aneja)

What’s wrong with the following WPF code?   Class Window1     Sub OK_Click(sender As Object, e As RoutedEventArgs) Handles OK.Click       MsgBox("Button Clicked")   End Sub   End Class   <Window x:Class="Window1"     xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/...

Spot the Bug! – Much Ado about Nothing… (Jonathan Aneja)

Microsoft has this neat mailing list called “Spot the Bug” where developers can send interesting snippets of code that look correct but actually have subtle bugs in them.  The puzzles are a lot of fun and I’ve always thought it’d be a fun thing to try here on the team blog.  Over the past year or so I’ve been keeping a list...

Getting Loopy (Matt Gertz)

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 ...

Hidden Costs (Matt Gertz)

(Note: there was a grievous error in this post based on a bad assumption on my art regarding VB.  Not feeling the need to hide my ignorance :-), I have instead made a number of edits in this post to bring it back to some semblance of reality.)One thing that gets me annoyed with myself is realizing that the product or service I’ve ...