Visual Studio Blog

Visual Studio has been around since 1997 when it first released many of its programming tools in a bundle. Back then it came in 2 editions - Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Enterprise. Since then the family has expanded to include many more products, tools, and services.

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Box Selection and Multi-Line Editing

October 26th, 2009
(image) I’m Brittany, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Editor team.  Some of you may recognize me from Connect bugs, @VSEditor on Twitter, or the Visual Studio Editor blog, which has recently moved to its new home here at The Visual Studio Blog.  I’m responsible for a variety of Editor features, but most recently I designed the new...

Toolbox Search

October 26th, 2009
(image) Hi, my name’s Josh and I’m a developer on the VS Shell team.  Among other things, I’m responsible for the Toolbox.  In VS 2010 Beta2, we’ve added the ability to search for controls in the toolbox by name.  To use it, put focus in the toolbox (by clicking in it, for example) and start typing the name of the ...

Visual Studio Sessions at PDC ‘09

October 25th, 2009
The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this year is in Los Angeles from November 17th to 19th. The PDC is an opportunity to mingle with architects and developers from the software industry and to listen to the leaders, heroes and legends from Microsoft and its industry partners. As well as workshops and training sessions, there are hands...

Visual Studio Sessions at PDC ‘09

October 25th, 2009
The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this year is in Los Angeles from November 17th to 19th. The PDC is an opportunity to mingle with architects and developers from the software industry and to listen to the leaders, heroes and legends from Microsoft and its industry partners. As well as workshops and training sessions, there are hands...

Announcing the Visual Studio Blog!

October 22nd, 2009
Since this week is already filled with other notable launches, we figured it would be fitting to unveil one more important launch: The Visual Studio Blog!  Since the majority of our users are utilizing not just one, but multiple aspects of Visual Studio in their daily development, we wanted to take the same approach with our blog and ...

Dynamic in C# 4.0: Creating Wrappers with DynamicObject

October 19th, 2009
In the previous post I showed how you can use the new dynamic feature and the ExpandoObject class to add and remove properties at run time, and how this can make your code more readable and flexible than code written with LINQ to XML syntax. But there were some obvious flaws in that example: While ExpandoObject provided better syntax, LINQ to...

Dynamic in C# 4.0: Introducing the ExpandoObject

September 30th, 2009
You have probably already heard about the new dynamic feature in C# 4.0 and how it is used to support COM interop. If you haven't, I strongly recommend reading the following MSDN articles: Using Type dynamic and How to: Access Office Interop Objects by Using Visual C# 2010 Features. Well, where else can you use this new feature? What are the ...

Generating Dynamic Methods with Expression Trees in Visual Studio 2010

September 14th, 2009
Expression trees first appeared in Visual Studio 2008, where they were mainly used by LINQ providers. You can use expression trees to represent code in a tree-like format, where each node is an expression. You can also convert expression trees into compiled code and run it. This transformation enables dynamic modification of executable code as...

How to use LINQ methods to compare objects of custom types

March 25th, 2009
LINQ provides a convenient syntax and many useful methods for operating with collections of objects. However, to be correctly processed by LINQ comparison methods such as Distinct or Intersect, a type must satisfy certain requirements.Let’s take a look at the Distinct method, which returns all distinct objects from a collection.List<...