Showing results for VB2005 - Visual Basic Blog

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 Express Edi...

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, but alas...

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 not imp...

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 uplo...

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: Next press the '+' to expand the...

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: Visual Studio:  

I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Brian Beckman, Principal Developer (currently working with Erik Meijer), where he attempts to teach me higher algebra using Visual Basic, generics, and operator overloading. Brian is a wonderful person and brilliant physicist and we have a lot of fun with vectors and matrices and VB. I actually think I u...

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 Higher Al...

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, worst of all is...

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 ildasm a fe...