Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Phoning Home, revisited (Matt Gertz)

In my post “M. G. Phone Home,” I discussed how to write a simple phone application for Windows Mobile, using Visual Basic, which accesses the Bluetooth service.  What I didn’t discuss was how to deploy it to the phone via CAB.  Since I purchased a new phone yesterday (a Samsung Saga, running Windows Mobile 6.1), and...

CodeRush Xpress 9.1 Beta: 59 Refactorings, 17 Consume-first providers, and Much more! (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Very exciting news! Developer Express is coming out with a new version of the FREE add-in we all know today as Refactor!. The new product, CodeRush XPress, builds on Refactor! by increasing the refactoring count to 59! It also includes a host of other editing functionality, making it a much richer tool for all-around IDE productivity. Consume-...

Keep the Customer Satisfied (Matt Gertz)

As I’ve written elsewhere, the toughest critics for any work you do can always be found in your own family.  Pleased at the immense work that I’d done in scanning in and tagging all of my photos and media (as noted in this post), and with my ego sufficiently boosted by writing a screensaver in VB that would display not only ...

Did you know? You can unwind the call stack from exceptions (Bill Horst)

The ability to unwind the call stack from exceptions is one of the debugger features that was newly introduced in Visual Basic.NET 2005. When the debugger hits a first-chance exception, you can unwind the call stack in order to make code edits to fix the exception and continue debugging with the changes. The exception assistant UI will have an...

Shell Games (Matt Gertz)

I was once temporarily taken off the VB team to get an unrelated project back on track, just a mere handful of weeks before it was due to ship.  I won’t go into the gory details; suffice it to say that we had reason to believe that the product would have to ship without delay, and that any major failure in the deliverable could ...

VB Catch … When: Why so special?

The VB Catch syntax has a unique feature: When.  It allows users to filter expressions based on something other than their type.  Any arbitrary code can enter a When block to decide whether or not to handle an Exception. Newsgroups often ask, "Why's this so special? I could effectively get the same behavior out of C# by doing the ...