Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

VB2005 - Visual Basic Blog

Looking for Setup and Deployment Project Templates? (Mary Lee)

October 2, 2008 Oct 2, 2008 10/2/08
VBTeam
Let's say that you've developed an application using the free Visual Studio Express Edition. Now, you want to deploy your application to the masses, and you read documentation about How to: Create or Add Deployment Projects. Here's how the topic starts: To create a new deployment project In this example, I'm using Visual Basic 2008 ...

Building a Zune Playlist (Matt Gertz)

September 20, 2008 Sep 20, 2008 09/20/08
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Well, that was… intense. You may have noticed the lack of articles coming from my direction.  I have been so buried in work, and so far behind, that when I look forwards all I see is backwards.  I work, I drive home, I work some more, and it all seems to keep piling up.  I would like to say that this is going to change soon, ...

How LINQ to Dataset works in VB (Jonathan Aneja)

May 14, 2008 May 14, 2008 05/14/08
VBTeam
LINQ at its core requires any data source to be queryable, which basically means it must implement IEnumerable.  (It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, for a full explanation see section 11.21.2 of the Visual Basic 9.0 Language Specification).  Now when working with LINQ to Dataset we have a problem: DataTable does ...

New "How Do I" Videos Available on the Visual Basic Developer Center (Beth Massi)

March 24, 2008 Mar 24, 2008 03/24/08
Beth Massi
If you missed it, last week 48 new How Do I videos (Forms over data, Windows development, Office development and Security) were added to the Visual Basic Developer Center in addition to adding new download formats for 12 others. Many thanks to Rob Windsor, Pat Tormey and Steve Hansen for doing these videos.In addition to these I also...

Did you know? What you can do with Debugger Datatips… (Lisa Feigenbaum)

January 10, 2008 Jan 10, 2008 01/10/08
Lisa Feigenbaum
There's a lot of cool functionality built into VS debugger datatips that often goes unnoticed... For example, did you know that not only can you *see* values in the expanded datatips, but you can also edit them? Watch the following walk-through... While debugging, hover over a variable to view its debugger datatip: (image) Next press the '+' ...

Did you know? Ctrl+Tab to navigate windows in VS (Lisa Feigenbaum)

January 9, 2008 Jan 9, 2008 01/9/08
Lisa Feigenbaum
Just like Alt+Tab for Windows you can use Ctrl+Tab for Visual Studio. Ctrl+Tab will show you the active tool windows *and* the active files, so it is a good navigation tool for both. VS2008 has even added a cool miniature-sized visualization to this view, so that you can better determine which item you're after. Windows: (image) Visual Studio...

Higher Algebra with Operator Overloads (Brian Beckman)

December 19, 2007 Dec 19, 2007 12/19/07
Beth Massi
Recently I did a Channel 9 interview with Beth Massi where I walked through a Visual Basic program that used Generics and Operator overloads to perform some higher mathematics. I thought I'd follow up with a post explaining the details of exactly what I did. Operator overloads with Generics enable some beautiful designs for data types in ...

Euchre Revisited: Fixing bugs and service releases (Matt Gertz)

December 11, 2007 Dec 11, 2007 12/11/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
It’s really embarrassing when a bug gets out the door in a product.  In particular, it’s hard for me to just sit and take it (however well deserved the criticism is) when a Microsoft product gets nailed in the press for a bad error.  It’s much worse when a friend or relative is the one dealing out the grief.  However, ...

Launching External Tools from inside Visual Studio (Jonathan Aneja)

November 27, 2007 Nov 27, 2007 11/27/07
VBTeam
Visual Studio has a small but extremely useful feature that allows you to hook external tools directly into the IDE’s Tools menu.  All you have to do is click Tools->External Tools… and then you can add your own custom menu items that will launch a specified program.   On a typical day I’ll probably fire up Reflector and/or ...