Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

VB2005 - Visual Basic Blog

Owner Draw in VB (Matt Gertz)

July 3, 2007 Jul 3, 2007 07/3/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
I hate going so long without blogging, but it’s getting really busy around here as we get closer to the endgame for Visual Studio 2008.  That, combined with “review time,” creates a bit of a problem for writing apps for the blog, and I wasn’t able to give it much attention until last night.  Realizing I really...

What is the difference between VB 9, VBx and Silverlight? (Scott Wisniewski)

June 7, 2007 Jun 7, 2007 06/7/07
VBTeam
I recently received an email from a customer asking for clarification as to what the difference was between VB 9, VBx and Sliverlight. In particular, it seems as if we have been releasing so much information about cool new stuff that at least a few people have become confused, making them a bit nervous about the future of VB. The customer had ...

Slide deck for Interop Toolkit Webcast

June 6, 2007 Jun 6, 2007 06/6/07
VBTeam
Thanks to everyone who was able to make it out for this morning's webcast.  We covered how to use the Interop Toolkit 2.0 to upgrade VB6 applications to VB.NET, how to deploy hybrid applications, and finally we touched on some other great interop resources available on MSDN.  As promised the slide deck's available below, and ...

Dissecting Snippets (Matt Gertz)

June 4, 2007 Jun 4, 2007 06/4/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
The snippet feature is one of the features that I’m fondest of in Visual Basic.  It was another one of a handful of features that got discussed in a series of “What if…” meetings that Sam & I had during the “Whidbey” planning stages.  As I recall, the things that motivated it for Sam was ...

So what does ComClass actually do?

June 1, 2007 Jun 1, 2007 06/1/07
VBTeam
I came across a really cool article yesterday by James Ashley, which shows some of the cool things you can do with the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0.   The three VB6 examples cover consuming a WebService (complete with a Dilbert icon showing up in the VB6 toolbox!), implementing multithreading using the BackgroundWorker component, and ...

Error correction (Matt Gertz)

May 21, 2007 May 21, 2007 05/21/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
It’s funny how we come up with a VB feature sometimes. I remember one case pretty well.  I was the new dev lead of the VB editor at the time, and I was talking about possible features for “Whidbey” (i.e. Visual Studio 2005) with my program manager, Sam.  We’d been talking about snippets, a feature that Sam &...

Visual Basic & Smart Devices (Matt Gertz)

May 14, 2007 May 14, 2007 05/14/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Last week I talked a bit about operator overloading, and used the concept to support a library of matrix functions.  This week, we’ll use those functions in a Smart Device application to create a matrix calculator. Smart Device applications It’s extremely easy to create an application for your Smart Device.  Let’s start from ...

Visual Basic Forms over Data "How-to" video series (Beth Massi)

May 8, 2007 May 8, 2007 05/8/07
Beth Massi
Friday we posted the first 8 videos of the Visual Basic Forms over Data "How-to" video series on MSDN. If you don't have the Visual Basic Dev Center as your homepage you might have missed the headline. ;-) This how-to video series is dedicated to getting Visual Basic developers productive on areas of data-based Windows ...

Operator Overloading: A demonstration using matrices (Matt Gertz)

May 7, 2007 May 7, 2007 05/7/07
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
Over a decade ago, before I joined Microsoft, I was a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon studying robotics.  One of the things that you had to do to get into the doctoral program was pass a qualifier test (“the qual”), which was a three-hour oral examination at the conclusion of the Master’s program.  My qual was, without a ...