Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Kinect SDK v1.5 – Now with VB Samples !!!

As developers start to realize the full potential of Microsoft Kinect and new hardware is made available for the PC it’s really great to see the Kinect team provide some sample support for VB developers.    For a while the Compilers team (who handle both VB and C# compilers) have been hearing VB developers  asking ...

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 ...

LINQ for the Web Using VB (By Paul Yuknewicz)

Happy holidays!  It's been a long time since I've written a post, so I figure I can bring in the new year answering some great questions submitted by you.  Just this week someone gave me this feedback: "I am having a difficult time finding information to help me adapt to LINQ in my webforms. I am hoping that someone from ...

Higher Algebra with Operator Overloads (Brian Beckman)

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 ...

Hidden Gems in Visual Basic 2008 (Amanda Silver)

Yesterday I promised to post about the hidden gems in Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2008 that you haven’t read about in blog posts or seen at conferences. I forgot that I mentioned a few of my favorite features in the Beta1 announcement where I showed off the improvements in the Intellisense experience – statement completion for ...

Visual Basic 2008 Ships!!! (Amanda Silver)

Hooray! Today we’ve finally shipped Visual Studio 2008, previously known as “Orcas”, previously known as some symbol which doesn’t have an ascii representation. We’ve come a long way, but it’s been a great ride. In his blog, Soma mentions many of the flagship features at a high-level that will undoubtedly ...

Creating Visual Basic Add-ins for Windows Home Server (Beth Massi)

We recently announced the availability of Windows Home Server. Here's an interview on Channel 9 with Dev Lead, Chris Gray, where he talks about the extensibility model and then walks through how to create an add-in for the Home Server console using Visual Basic Express. A couple people on the thread have also posted VB ...

Sons and Daughters Day: a pure blast!

On Friday, Chris Smith and I (Chris is a test engineer on the VB Team) attended an event called 'Sons and Daughters' day. The day consisted of 2 sessions (20-25 kids in each) where kids aged 6-13 were run through a class of writing an app in VB (20-25 kids in each). The class was very introductory, but eas very appropriate for the ...