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6/22/2010 5:37:10 PM
I’m back with Spotty Bowles , a tester on the VB compiler team, shows us the ins and outs of how multi-targeting works in Visual Basic projects in Visual Studio 2010 in this Channel 9 interview: Channel 9 Interview: Multi-Targeting Deep Dive with Visual Basic 2010 What's tricky in Visual Studio 2010 is that there are now two supported versions of the CLR. Spotty shows us how to work with client and full framework profiles in Visual Studio, as well as what happens at runtime when r ... [ read more ]
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6/22/2010 12:16:00 AM
Background
We’ve been hearing a lot of good feedback on the recently released update to the Entity Framework in .NET 4. This release marks a significant advancement from the first release that shipped with .NET 3.5 SP1. I’m not going to spend time here talking about what’s new, but you can check here to see for yourself.
With all that said, there are still a number of things we can do to simplify the process of writing data acc ... [ read more ]
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6/11/2010 5:17:00 PM
Visual Studio 2010 has a new feature, Embed Interop Types , that can simplify application deployment and solve those pesky issues that can arise when using COM Interop and Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). If you’ve ever had to ship multiple versions of an application that automates Microsoft Office where the only difference between your published versions is the version of the PIA (to match different Office versions), then this feature is for you.
You enable type embedding when yo ... [ read more ]
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6/9/2010 11:27:13 PM
A common problem that one often runs into with XML literals and the LINQ to XML API is duplicate XML namespaces. Consider the following example. The code imports a default XML namespace - “hello”.
Code: Imports < xmlns = " hello " > Module Module1 Sub Main() Dim x = < A > &nbs ... [ read more ]
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6/7/2010 8:04:00 PM
VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus)
It’s been a while since I wrote one of these XML cookbook entries. Here’s some info on a common problem: Really big XML files.
I’m going to show you two things in this recipe. The first is a tip on reading very large XML files while still being able to use XML Axis Properties. The second is how to do make it available to LINQ queries by exposing it as IEnumerable .
Reading a Large XML File
... [ read more ]
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5/25/2010 12:04:40 AM
One of the common use-cases of XML literals is creating HTML. However, HTML entities cannot be used in XML literals since LINQ to XML directly supports only the Data type definitions (DTD) defined in the XML 1.0 spec. You can read more about it here . The workaround is to use the Unicode representation of the entity, although it’s not as readable as the HTML entities, the output is the same. Here are two examples of HTML entities from the XHTML spec : ... [ read more ]
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5/19/2010 1:19:32 AM
One of the common use-cases of XML literals is creating HTML. However, HTML entities cannot be used in XML literals since LINQ to XML directly supports only the Data type definitions (DTD) defined in the XML 1.0 spec. You can read more about it here . The workaround is to use the Unicode representation of the entity, although it’s not as readable as the HTML entities, the output is the same. Here are two examples of HTML entities from the XHTML spec : ... [ read more ]
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5/3/2010 3:54:45 PM
I’ve written about collection initializers on my blog before , but I thought I’d catch up with the VB Team to tell me more about how they really work. In this interview Spotty Bowles, a tester on the VB Compiler team, shows us a couple of new language features: Array and Collection Initializers. He gives us insight into how they are implemented in the compiler and best practices on how to use them in our code. Additionally, he discusses how to extend Collection Initializers with your own ... [ read more ]
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4/16/2010 5:59:56 AM
It was a very exciting time this week, with the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. On April 12th, 5 launch events took place around the world in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, London and Las Vegas. The video from Bob Muglia’s VS 2010 Launch keynote is now available on-demand . The agenda for day was VS 2010 sessions, including Windows Development , SharePoint and Office , Dev & Test Collaboration , and Project Management . Follow the “Visual Studio 2010 Launch” t ... [ read more ]
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4/13/2010 4:53:00 PM
Along with all the new goodies that we released yesterday as part of Visual Studio 2010, one additional thing we did yesterday as well is release an update to the popular interopforms toolkit. This update brings VS 2010 (and VS 2008!) support to the toolkit and fixes a smattering of reported bugs. As many of you are aware, VB6 applications are alive and well in the community and this toolkit has proven to be quite successful in helping developers evolve these ... [ read more ]
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4/9/2010 4:09:00 AM
Crystal Reports has been a part of Visual Basic since 1993, and a part of Visual Studio since its first release in 2002. Crystal Reports has been a very successful component of these products. With the release of Visual Studio 2010, SAP and Microsoft have mutually decided to change how we deliver this important component to the .NET developer community going forward.
Starting on Friday, April 16 th , the beta version of Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 will be ... [ read more ]
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3/26/2010 7:51:58 AM
The implicit line continuation feature in Visual Basic 2010 provided an opportunity to improve the code editing experience in XML literals embedded expressions. In Visual Studio 2008, pressing Enter inside an embedded expression would result in the cursor being positioned to the left of the end embedded expression tag. In Visual Studio 2010, pressing Enter inserts a newline for the cursor, and the end embedded expression tag moves to the line below. This minimizes the number of key strokes need ... [ read more ]
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2/27/2010 1:22:00 AM
One of the really fun things about being associated with the Visual Basic team is getting to see all of the varied usages to which our customers put it. From enterprise software to games, our customer base covers a wide range. The most fun to see, however, are the hobby applications, because the writers of that code come up with some pretty off-the-wall (but very cool) uses for it.
Case in point: I was contacted two weeks ago by a gentleman named David Swoboda ... [ read more ]
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2/2/2010 12:44:49 AM
Today we revamped some of the Visual Basic Developer Center Learn pages with more content that allows you to pivot on more fine-grained topics and tasks related to Visual Basic programming. We’ve started with the Introductory Topics and Language Syntax pages. To get there, head to http://msdn.com/vbasic and then click the Learn tab . There you will see a set of general topic areas to explore. If you select Introductory Topics or Language Syntax you will be taken ... [ read more ]
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1/28/2010 5:59:00 PM
Visual Studio 2010 is almost out the door. Now is a good time to look back at what we didn't get into the language in this release, but would have wanted to, and so will consider for future releases.
Over the coming weeks, each day, I'll blog on blogs.msdn.com/lucian about the ideas on our wish-list, along with our evaluation of them. We have our own thoughts about what are the priorities for the VB language. You'll have your own thoughts - please tell us!
The ser ... [ read more ]
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1/26/2010 10:25:21 PM
One of the overlooked or simply misunderstood features of the VB language is calling a function which has a ByRef parameter. Most languages support only a single method of passing parameters by reference [1], that is the scenarios directly supported by the CLR. The CLR has a lot of restrictions on the type of values it supports for ByRef parameters and these restrictions get in the way of VB’s goal to be a flexible language that strives to get out of the way of the user. Hence ... [ read more ]
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1/20/2010 11:07:00 PM
A while back, I remember being asked if there was a simple way to expose a source XML document as an object with properties. That is, if the root XML element had a child element <Name>Doug</Name> , then the object would have a Name property that was a string and returned “Doug”. The catch was that the XML document did not conform to a specific schema. Hence, you could not simply create an object with a Name property, because you did not know if the source document h ... [ read more ]
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12/18/2009 2:26:00 PM
“Oh, no!” I hear you cry, “not another blog about Euchre!”
Well, I do like the game, to be sure. But, more importantly, the Euchre scenario enables me to try out any new technologies on a reasonably complex problem (using Visual Basic, of course). It’s my way of checking out our product to make sure that it works before we ship it out to you guys.
For my app building this time around, I chose to focus my energies in two areas – WPF, and Windows Mobile. &nbs ... [ read more ]
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12/15/2009 1:21:00 AM
By now you've likely heard about the major new features coming in VB 2010, but there's also a number of smaller additions in the language and IDE that might not be as readily noticeable. "Hidden Gems" will be a multi-part series where we'll explore some of these smaller enhancements. First up - serialization!
Let’s say you have a simple entity class that you need to serialize and send over the wire. This class implements INotifyPropertyChanged which conta ... [ read more ]
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11/17/2009 7:54:00 AM
This one’s going to be long, but for those of you who’ve felt the first 3 in this series were too easy I promise this one’s tougher J .
Let’s say you want to list all the customers from a table in a ComboBox, and update the UI based on which one is selected. To do this we’ll need to bring back two fields from the database – the customer’s name and the customer’s ID. When a customer is selected we want the ComboBox’s SelectedValue property to equ ... [ read more ]
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11/13/2009 3:39:00 AM
What’s wrong with the following WPF code?
Class Window1
Sub OK_Click(sender As Object , e As RoutedEventArgs) Handles OK.Click
MsgBox( "Button Clicked" )
End Sub
End Class
< Window x : Class ="Window1"
xmlns ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xm ... [ read more ]
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11/7/2009 4:00:00 PM
In this post, I’ll continue on with coding the new playlist shuffler. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, I highly recommend it so that this post will make more sense. J
Code for the controls (continued)
The Title TextBox
When the title changes, we’ll want to indicate that the playlist has changed, and we’ll want to cache the change and update the menus. This is pretty simple:
Private Sub edtTitle_TextChanged( ByVal sender As ... [ read more ]
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11/6/2009 10:17:00 PM
Way back in October 2007, I wrote up a few posts ( here and here ) on my experiments with the Windows Media Player object model. The problem I was trying to solve was that, when I had a playlist set to “shuffle,” WMP would break up songs that should always play together (for example, Jackson Browne’s “The Load-Out” and “Stay”, or Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” and “Total Eclipse”). In those posts, I worked around this by building my own shuffler which would emit a new ra ... [ read more ]
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11/6/2009 7:46:00 AM
In yesterday’s post we saw that the use of the wrong comparison operator with Nothing in an If block can lead to surprising results. Let’s look at a slightly different case today:
Dim x As Integer = Nothing
If x = Nothing Then
MsgBox( "A true statement - we land here" ) ... [ read more ]
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11/4/2009 2:32:00 AM
Microsoft has this neat mailing list called “Spot the Bug” where developers can send interesting snippets of code that look correct but actually have subtle bugs in them. The puzzles are a lot of fun and I’ve always thought it’d be a fun thing to try here on the team blog. Over the past year or so I’ve been keeping a list of interesting bug reports and emails where people have been tripped up by some of VB’s hidden subtleties (though admittedly many of these could apply to C# as ... [ read more ]
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10/22/2009 1:23:11 AM
We’ve started two new “How Do I” videos series on the Visual Basic Developer Center . More to come, but here’s the latest!
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10/20/2009 5:35:00 PM
There were a lot of Microsoft announcements that happened yesterday! Many of these happened during Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the SharePoint Developers Conference ( Video , Twitter ). Here is the list:
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and compatible versions of IronRuby / IronPython
Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint ( Keynote , Dev Center )
New Visual Studio logo and brand (blue & purple infinity sign)
Visual Studio 2010 SKU Simplification to Professional, Premium, Ult ... [ read more ]
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10/17/2009 1:42:53 AM
Let me count the ways: xcopy, ClickOnce, Windows Installer (.msi), Windows Installer XML, Group Policy, Active Directory, Systems Management Service or System Center Configuration Manager, login scripts, CD, USB drive, and many more third-party software options. Despite the many options, one common requirement is that applications typically have prerequisites to install before the application can run. Prerequisites can include the .NET Framework, Visual Basic PowerPacks, SQL Server Express, ... [ read more ]
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10/7/2009 9:50:00 PM
In my last post, I talked about the hidden costs that can occur whenever you call out to methods, particularly in loops. In looking at my examples, reader KG2V commented that another thing that folks need to be aware of is avoiding the assumption that the world (or, in this case, a list) is a static thing. It’s a good point and it deserves some attention, particularly given that different languages will react in different ways to change.
To illustrate this point, let’s assu ... [ read more ]
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10/6/2009 7:54:00 PM
(Note: there was a grievous error in this post based on a bad assumption on my art regarding VB. Not feeling the need to hide my ignorance :-), I have instead made a number of edits in this post to bring it back to some semblance of reality.)
One thing that gets me annoyed with myself is realizing that the product or service I’ve just bought has some hidden costs that I didn’t anticipate. It might be as complicated as realizing that my plane ticket has all sorts of byzanti ... [ read more ]
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9/30/2009 10:27:00 PM
Thanks to the SQL Server Team we just released a free SQL Server 2008 Express How-To-Guide Series on msdev.com . During the next weeks we’ll also integrating parts of the series into the Visual Basic Developer Center , C# Developer Center , the Beginner Developer Learning Center , etc. One video of the series: How do I query data in a database? Given the fact that we don’t have unlimited resources (yeah, I know… that was the biggest surprise for me as well when I sta ... [ read more ]
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9/25/2009 5:10:00 PM
While helping some Windows API folks with some sample code this week, I stumbled upon...uh...I mean “carefully researched” an issue that you might find handy.
You may be aware that the RaiseEvent statement automatically checks to verify if an event handler exists before raising the event. If the event is Nothing , then there’s no event handler and RaiseEvent terminates. If the event is not Nothing , then RaiseEvent triggers the event.
However, what if you want to follow a diffe ... [ read more ]
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9/4/2009 9:01:47 PM
The other day I got an email from a developer asking an interesting question about VB10’s Auto-implemented Properties feature. “I am, however, somewhat confused regarding the properties feature you mentioned - i.e. turning 11 lines of get/set/backing variable into one line. Wouldn't this be exactly the same as the existing functionality of creating a public variable? I see no benefit for using a property in this case, except perhaps for the sake of what some would consid ... [ read more ]
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8/5/2009 7:30:00 PM
In my previous post, we fixed up a C# GPS library to provide more support, and wrote all of the UI for a VB GPS application, all based on (but modified from) a Mobile GPS sample in the Windows Mobile 6.0 SDK. In this post, we’ll finish up the app by enabling a bunch of cool functionality not exposed in the original sample.
The C# sample uses a helper function called UpdateData – I will too (as noted above), except that the code is going to deviate significantly. We’ll start ... [ read more ]
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8/4/2009 9:34:00 PM
The title of this blog post has sort of a triple meaning for me. First of all, I just got back from a long (and wonderful!) cruise in the Caribbean, followed by a stop at Disney World. And of course, if you go to Disney World with kids, it’s the law that you have to go through the “It’s a Small World” ride, thereby having the accompanying song burned into your brain for the next six months.
Secondly, “It’s a Small World” also reminds me of how new technologies are bringing ... [ read more ]
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7/11/2009 12:22:00 AM
About two years ago I posted some code that shows how to dynamically construct LINQ queries at runtime . On average there's a couple questions per month about trying it in some edge case, and usually the support already exists within the API. Recently though someone posted a question that has to do with Datasets and Joins that raised some interesting issues:
I have a dataset with two datatables (One Loaded From A CSV file) and (the other loaded from a query) what I wou ... [ read more ]
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6/26/2009 11:03:00 PM
Who’s the “typical VB.NET developer”? Is there one? There are millions of VB.NET developers in the world, and they each have their own unique story. We decided to talk to some of them to find out what kinds of applications they’re building, what technologies they’re using, and what their favorite features are. Watch the interviews and find out for yourself who today's VB.NET developers really are!
View the interviews
Are you a VB, too? Tell your story here or leave a comm ... [ read more ]
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6/25/2009 6:41:00 PM
By now, many of you will have downloaded the recent beta that we posted to the net, and (hopefully) are getting excited about the features that we’ve been developing. Recently, Beth Massi interviewed me about some of the work that I’ve been doing as a part of that effort. I always enjoy interviews, and Beth is great at pulling out some of the more interesting aspects of a person’s work, but I’m always somehow left with the feeling afterwards that there’s something more th ... [ read more ]
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6/24/2009 3:00:11 PM
A few months ago, Tina started a great series on Channel9 that walks through the history of Microsoft, year by year: The History of Microsoft In the first episode, Bill Gates talks about what it was like to build Altair Basic. He actually shows the tape that represents the instructions for Basic! Lots of rare footage, and an entertaining show on how it all started. Episode #1: The History of Microsoft - 1975
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6/24/2009 7:02:00 AM
For those of you who prefer text over audio, here's a recent InfoQ article that was released based on the podcast I did with Joe Stagner :
InfoQ: Is There a Future for VB.NET?
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6/20/2009 3:35:00 PM
As part of the new VB/C# co-evolution strategy , Visual Studio Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg has broadened his role. In addition to being Chief Architect for C#, he now sets the direction for both the VB.NET and C# languages.
At TechEd, Anders participated in both the VB.NET and C# language presentations. In watching these sessions, you can see that the future trends and directions for the VB.NET and C# languages are now the same.
TechEd NA 2009 Session Video: "Future Directions for ... [ read more ]
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6/19/2009 8:32:53 PM
In the second part of my interview with Doug Rothaus, he describes the new implicit line continuation feature in Visual Basic 2010. Learn about the most common scenarios that no longer require the underscore character (_) in the topic, Statements in Visual Basic . See the Video: implicit Line Continuation --Kathleen McGrath http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen
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6/19/2009 5:57:32 PM
The Misfit Geek, Joe Stagner , asked me this provocative question in a recent episode on his new podcast series : "Does VB have a Future?". Tune in to hear more details on my answer, which of course is YES! :) We talk about plans for increasing the VB.NET content across Microsoft, the great innovations that are happening in VB.NET, idea sharing that's been happening between VB.NET and C#, the similarities and differences between VB.NET and C# developers, and more! Ep ... [ read more ]
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6/19/2009 5:45:00 AM
There are a lot of great Entity Framework samples on Code Gallery that you can now find available in Visual Basic .NET. This was recently announced on the ADO.NET team blog . Browse through the list below and start downloading!
ADO.NET Entity Framework Query Samples (Download)
ADO.NET Entity Framework Query Samples is a small Windows Forms program which contains several basic Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities queries against that NorthwindEF Entity Data Model (a modified versio ... [ read more ]
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6/12/2009 9:46:04 PM
In this interview, Doug Rothaus, a programming writer on the Visual Studio User Education team, describes the auto-implemented properties in Visual Basic 2010. He also demonstrates some of the code examples in his Help topic: Auto-Implemented Properties . See the Video: Auto-Implement Properties . --Kathleen
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6/11/2009 1:03:43 AM
The team at PreEmptive Solutions recently posted a great blog article that walks through all the latest features in VS 2010's Dotfuscator Software Services - Community Edition (previously known as Dotfuscator CE). Browse through the article to learn what's new, or download the beta to follow along in the IDE. What's New with Dotfuscator in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 by Bill Leach
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6/10/2009 4:47:50 PM
I recently received this letter from the Visual Studio Extensibility team, that I thought would be interesting to readers of this blog. Whether you're building Visual Studio extensions or downloading them from others, there's news here for you. News from the Visual Studio Extensibility team… Are you building new tools to simplify your life or change the way people work? Check out the opportunities to create innovative extensi ... [ read more ]
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5/22/2009 7:51:00 PM
Ever wonder how we build Visual Studio and the .NET Framework? I mean literally. You know, the build process that spits out a product at the other end? Well I sure did and it's not just hitting F5 people ;-). In this interview I sit down with Matt Gertz, frequent VB blogger and also the guy in charge of the builds in Developer Division (he has a long title, but I forget what it is :-)). He explains how the build and test processes work on a team of two thousand people all on Team ... [ read more ]
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5/22/2009 3:17:25 PM
To learn more about Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, Kathleen McGrath is highlighting new documentation about these products with a weekly blog post and a daily tweet. If you want to learn more about the new features and scenarios, check out her blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen and her twitter feed at http://twitter.com/kathleenmcgrath . Mary Lee, Programming Writer.
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5/21/2009 5:43:00 PM
In my post “ M. G. Phone Home ,” I discussed how to write a simple phone application for Windows Mobile, using Visual Basic, which accesses the Bluetooth service. What I didn’t discuss was how to deploy it to the phone via CAB. Since I purchased a new phone yesterday (a Samsung Saga, running Windows Mobile 6.1), and I’ve discovered that I need the same app on it, I thought this would be an opportune time to discuss how to do this, since it’s not obvious and slightly differe ... [ read more ]
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5/20/2009 8:56:35 PM
The public availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1 was announced today on Jason Zander's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/05/20/general-download-of-vs2010-net-framework-4-0-beta-1.aspx Below are some resources to use as you download and start using the Beta. Cheers, Lisa Feigenbaum | Program Manager | VS Languages VB, C#, and F# 2010 on MSDN These are the b ... [ read more ]
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5/20/2009 2:28:00 AM
There was a great Channel9 video posted last week on the future directions of VB.NET and C# and how they are related. Charles Torre interviewed Luca Bolognese, who is currently the Group Program Manager for VB.NET, C#, and F#. Please see below for more details.
Luca Bolognese: C# and VB.NET Co-Evolution - The Twain Shall Meet
by Charles Torre
For most of their lifetimes, C# and VB.NET have evolved at their own pace and in their own ways (C# added iterators, VB.NET didn't. VB.NET a ... [ read more ]
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5/15/2009 3:19:08 AM
CodeRush Xpress is a FREE Visual Studio 2008 add-in containing 60+ refactorings, 7 editing features, and full support for C# and Visual Basic. Download here CodeRush Xpress includes the following features. Duplicate Line Highlight All References Increase or Reduce Selection Smart Clipboard Operations Generate from Using (TDD) Quick Navigation Window Quick File Navigation In addition, you receive the following refactorings. Add Par ... [ read more ]
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5/7/2009 6:26:41 AM
Code Cast Episode 20: Interview with Beth Massi This show's interview is Ken interviewing Beth Massi, Microsoft, program manager on Microsoft’s BizApps team in the VS group. Beth discusses her work over the past two years at Microsoft on the VB team and now on the BizApps team, and chats about some cool new features and content in Visual Studio 2010. Topics · Beth Massi (@ 27:28) – Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi Links · VB Team Blog – ... [ read more ]
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5/5/2009 11:20:00 PM
I’ve always enjoyed writing. Putting pen to paper (or, these days, fingers to keyboard) is something that brings a lot of joy into my life, even more than music or any other hobby that I have. I’ve been writing stories since earlier than I can remember, have faithfully kept a daily diary for many years, and have published countless journals, conference papers, and other articles on this or that technology.
So, when I was in my early twenties, it seemed the most o ... [ read more ]
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5/5/2009 3:34:21 PM
MEF stands for Managed Extensibility Framework. MEF is a new .NET library that enables greater reuse of applications and components. Using MEF, .NET applications can be dynamically composed. Kathleen has a great article on MEF in last month's edition of Visual Studio Magazine. She explains what it is, how to use it, and outlines the application scenarios MEF is designed to enable. Visual Studio Magazine "Ask Kathleen" Column: Working with MEF
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5/3/2009 3:15:09 PM
I recently recorded a CodeCast interview with Ken Levy. We discussed the VS2010 Editor, VB.NET line continuation removal, interop with dynamic languages, the Microsoft languages strategy, and the upcoming VS2010 Beta1 release. Recording: CodeCast Episode 17: Visual Basic 2010 Preview with Lisa Feigenbaum This episode includes Ken Levy with a part 2 interview with Microsoft’s VB community program manager Lisa Feigenbaum. Lisa discusses many of the cool new features coming in th ... [ read more ]
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5/2/2009 9:02:00 PM
Steele wrote a great article in last month's issue of Visual Studio Magazine on XML Literals, WCF and LINQ. He shows how to use these three technologies together to produce more responsive ASP.NET pages, and more readable code. Lots of great tips for VB 2008.
VSM's "On VB" Column: XML Literals, WCF and LINQ by Steele Price
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5/1/2009 5:37:39 PM
Beth Massi shot a couple of great episodes last month on dnrTV! If you are interested in learning more about the Open XML SDK, and how to easily access it using VB.NET XML Literals, be sure to check them out. dnrTV Show #137: Beth Massi on the Open XML SDK Our good friend Beth Massi returns to dnrTV to introduce us to the Open XML SDK, Microsoft's tool kit for creating and manipulating Office 2007 documents. dnrTV Show #138: Beth Massi on Open XML and Office Beth Massi i ... [ read more ]
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5/1/2009 3:05:24 AM
TechEd North America 2009 is right around the corner. For those of you attending, we look forward to spending time with you at the VB.NET sessions and Technical Learning Center (a.k.a. booth). I've pasted the VB.NET session list below.
DTL04-INT Strategies to Upgrade Your Microsoft Visual Basic 6 Assets to Microsoft .NET
Mon 5/11 | 1:00 PM-2:15 PM | Blue Theater 2
Presenter: Rob Windsor
DTL315 Getting the Most from Lambda Expressions
Mon 5/11 | 2:45 PM-4:00 PM | R ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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4/30/2009 12:20:00 AM
Hi,
I posted a bit of code the other day which I used to get a list of all Code Snippets we ship in Visual Studio . In a nutshell, I used XElement.Load to create a new XML document from a filename from which I then read elements from (There are way to many ‘”from” in this sentence ;-) ). Unfortunately, I forgot to import the XML Namespace in the code I posted which caused my code not to return any results (but instead provided me with a brilliant opportunity to write another post. he ... [ read more ]
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4/29/2009 7:15:00 PM
You may know Luca Bolognese from his well-known work on C# LINQ. Luca is now the Group Program Manager for VB.NET, C#, and F#. You can check out his blog here . Luca recently blogged his first VB.NET post. It is about asynchronous HTML caching, and is part of a longer series in which he is converting a financial VBA Excel add-in to .NET. The code uses the .NET Parallel Extensions that will be shipping in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Check it out at the link below:
An Async Htm ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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4/23/2009 6:53:00 PM
I needed to create a list of all Code Snippets we ship in Visual Studio the other day containing their title, description and path on disc and size. As you might know, Code Snippets are stored in multiple directories below "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0" so I had to traverse all the subdirectories of the aforementioned path to find all snippets.
Fortunately – linq to the rescue – this came down to a few lines of code :-)
Dim query = From file In My ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
The Visual Basic Team
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4/16/2009 9:30:00 PM
2009 is the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Press ! To celebrate their b-bay they’re giving away two free e-books, namely
Windows Small Business Server 2008 Administrator's Companion by Charlie Russel and Sharon Crawford (27 chapters, 3 appendices, 712 pages)
Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! by Patrice Pelland (9 chapters, Glossary, 254 pages)
Before opening one of the links make sure that you disable your Pop-Up blocker as the windo ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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4/14/2009 3:21:00 AM
As I’ve written elsewhere, the toughest critics for any work you do can always be found in your own family. Pleased at the immense work that I’d done in scanning in and tagging all of my photos and media (as noted in this post ) , and with my ego sufficiently boosted by writing a screensaver in VB that would display not only the pictures but the tags associated with them, it was a deflating experience to have my middle child, Aidan, pepper me with comments like “That’s not me; that ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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4/6/2009 2:47:00 PM
Our recent pos t on "negative sleeps in VB" was an April Fool's joke. VB doesn't have negative sleeps, and isn't going to. But the joke's on me! Several readers wrote back to say that other languages do have negative sleeps. Tony Hoare, inventor of "Quicksort" amongst other things, wrote:
Did you know that negative delays have long been used in practice in the design of systolic circuits? The negative delay is used to synchronise signals in the middle of the network, just l ... [ read more ]
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4/1/2009 7:32:00 AM
[NOTE: please also read the followup to this article]
.NET 4.0 will introduce many new threading and concurrency classes -- SpinLock, Parallel Linq, and ConcurrentDictionary to name but a few.
The new feature that excites me the most is the ability to pass a negative argument to Thread.Sleep . This article describes how you can use it to speed up a program by compensating for internet latency.
Let's start with a simple VB program which retrieves an RS ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
The Visual Basic Team
on
3/29/2009 11:30:52 PM
Be sure to check out the latest episode of CodeCast with two VB interviews, including myself and VB program manager Dustin Campbell! Thursday, February 19, 2009 CodeCast Episode 12: Visual Basic and the VB Community In this episode of CodeCast, Ken Levy, Markus Egger, and Gary Short discuss Internet Explorer 8, Windows 7 beta, Kindle and Sony eBook readers, and Visual Studio 2010. Ken has two in-depth interviews on the topic of Visual Basic, .NET languages, and the VB community. ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
The Visual Basic Team
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3/27/2009 4:00:00 PM
Things are always changing. I was at the Washington State History Museum with my daughter a couple weeks ago. One of the exhibits features pictures of various sites that were taken many years ago. Then it contrasts them with contemporary pictures taken of the same locations. It was really interesting how much things changed and how quickly.
I have a couple computers in my office that I had when I was a kid. My wife suggested that I move my little ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/27/2009 3:56:31 PM
I just posted a new Channel 9 interview . This time it's with Tyler Whitney , a developer on the Visual Basic compiler team. Here he demonstrates how line termination has changed in the Visual Basic 10 compiler making underscores unnecessary as line continuation indicators. This makes your code more readable especially when writing multi-line LINQ queries. Yes it's true, many underscores are unemployed so the team has created a support group for them at www.unemployedundersco ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/26/2009 2:47:00 PM
The Silverlight Toolkit March 2009 release is enhanced with Visual Basic source code. Please follow the links to view these samples for both Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 .
Silverlight 2: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html Silverlight 3: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl3/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html
The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release c ... [ read more ]
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3/26/2009 3:37:00 AM
Today the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team released a download aimed to help Visual Basic developers use the Composite Application Library. It includes VB versions of the QuickStarts, Hands-On-Labs, and How-To topics:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=537da1cd-43e1-4799-88e7-a1da9166fb46
I've included some more information about the Composite Application Guidance below . You can also find more resources on MSDN and on CodePlex .
... [ read more ]
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3/24/2009 7:01:08 PM
Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on WPF Improvements in Visual Studio 2010 for Building Business Apps . At the MVP Summit a few weeks ago, Italian MVP Alessandro del Sole was so excited about the new WPF features in Visual Studio 2010 that he asked me if he could interview Milind Lele himself to get the low-down -- I said sure! Milind is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team. In this interview he chats with Alessandro about the new WPF improvements in ... [ read more ]
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3/20/2009 7:03:25 PM
Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on using the Touchless SDK. The Touchless SDK enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. "Touch without touching." It's actually pretty cool! In this interview I meet up with Touchless SDK creator, Mike Wasserman and Visual Basic Spec Lead, Lucian Wischik. They explain the project and show off a game they developed using Visual Basic 9 in Visual Studio 2008. I almost got my block knocked ... [ read more ]
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3/19/2009 9:06:00 PM
Alex Turner presented VB XML yesterday here at MIX 09. Check out the video from his session!
Video link: http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T72M (The powerpoint slides are attached.)
Making XML Really, Really Easy with Microsoft Visual Basic 9 MIX09-T72M Wednesday March 18 |11:55 AM - 12:15 PM | San Polo 3401 By: Alex Turner Tags: Languages See how Visual Basic 9 makes generating rich XML orders of magnitude easier than using text concatenation or an object model. Come learn h ... [ read more ]
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3/18/2009 1:40:36 PM
MIX 09 is here! ScottGu kicks off the keynote today at 9am PST. Below is the list of Visual Studio related sessions. The full conference list is posted here . Didn't buy a pass? Don't worry. Tune in to http://2009.visitmix.com to watch sessions live, or to view them on-demand within 24hrs of recording. In addition to watching the sessions, here are some other ways to stay connected this week: Follow Tim Sneath's daily reports . Watch the Twitter feed at #mix09. ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/15/2009 8:58:53 PM
Last week, I gave two talks at the Belgian TechDays in Antwerp. This was my first time at the conference, and it was a great event! I've created a resource page on Code Gallery for the presentation materials from my talks: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/techdays I've included the direct links below as well. Future Directions for Visual Basic ( Slide Deck , Demo Code ) In this session, we'll discuss the future direction of Visual Basic both in the near and long ter ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/14/2009 3:37:48 PM
When you have a question about how an API works, most of you will look in the MSDN Library . There are some tips and tricks to finding what you need in this vast resource. First of all, there are two main ways you can read the content in the MSDN Library. The offline version that you can install on your development computer. The online version that you can access via your Web browser. You can also use the MTPS Web service at http://services.msdn.microsoft. ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/1/2009 6:00:00 PM
In part 1 of this series, I constructed a pair of classes to supporting persisting MIDI data to files. In this entry, I’ll now leverage that code to support an (admittedly limited) music editor experience.
Caveat : As I mentioned in the first post, I’m sure many readers will be far more knowledgeable about MIDI than I am, and will justifiably roll their eyes at this code due to its limited scope. I will only be generating simple type-1 MIDI files that only use t ... [ read more ]
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3/1/2009 3:50:00 PM
The results from InfoWorld's 2009 Technology of the Year Awards are in. Visual Studio 2008 was voted Best IDE, with the following commentary: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Visual Studio stands alone as the preferred development environment for applications using Microsoft's .Net Framework, and it's peerless among IDEs for any language. The 2008 version expands the development targets to include SOA, Web 2.0, Windows Presentation Framework, and Silverlight applications, and extends the da ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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2/27/2009 6:01:00 PM
As I’ve alluded to in previous blogs, music has always been a big part of my life, particularly performance music. I’ve been a clarinet and saxophone player for many years, am an avid singer, and (with the help of friends) I’ve done my best to teach myself piano and drums.
Composition of music, however, has always been a problem for me. I’ve written a few small pieces, but any attempt to write something larger has always ended up with me giving up after fifty or ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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2/26/2009 6:58:12 AM
Concurrency is an important topic on everyone's mind, when considering future trends for computing and programming languages. Concurrent Basic is a variant of the Visual Basic language, with new constructs baked in to help handle concurrency and parallelism, in a very natural way. Watch this high-energy video with language guru Erik Meijer, VB spec lead Lucian Wischik, and MS researcher Claudio Russo, to learn more about what Concurrent Basic is all about!
Expert to Expert: Inside Concurren ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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2/25/2009 7:24:42 PM
Have you been following the buzz on VB XML Literals with ASP.NET MVC?! Last week, Beth Massi posted a Channel 9 video with ASP.NET Product Unit Manager Dmitry Robsman. You can find a written description of the topic on Dmitry's blog: ASP.NET MVC View Engine using VB.NET XML Literals There has been an interesting discussion about this technique on ASP.NET Program Manager Phil Haack's blog: Interesting use of XML Literals as a View Engine Finally, check out the InfoQ article tha ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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2/23/2009 6:44:11 PM
For the Visual Basic web developers, be sure to check out MIX this year! The conference will be taking place March 18-20, at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. http://2009.visitmix.com/ The list of sessions is posted here . Included in the agenda will be the following Visual Basic session. Making XML Really, Really Easy with Microsoft Visual Basic 9 By Alex Turner See how Visual Basic 9 makes generating rich XML orders of magnitude easier than using text concatenation or ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
The Visual Basic Team
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2/22/2009 6:32:32 AM
Check out the latest video in the 10-4 Channel 9 series, on Visual Basic 10: Episode 9: Visual Basic 10 In this ninth episode of 10-4 , we introduce some of the new features and functionality coming to the Visual Basic language with the release of Visual Basic 10. We'll cover a whole range of features from Auto-Properties, to Multiline Lambdas, Statement Lambdas, Collection Initializers, Array Literals, and Implicit Line Continuation. In future episodes, we'll look at diving ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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2/16/2009 8:22:32 PM
Today I posted an interview on Channel 9 with Dmitry Robsman, the Product Unit Manager for ASP.NET. In this interview he shows us how he implemented ASP.NET MVC views using Visual Basic's XML Literals instead of .aspx pages. Dmitry shows us how this makes coding the views much cleaner using standard OOP principals. He also makes some very interesting observations about DSLs and Visual Basic XML literals. You can download the code Dmitry shows in the interview from his blog here . Enjo ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/24/2009 2:30:00 AM
I’ve just completed a task that I set out to do about five years ago, and I am pretty proud (and tired)! I have just finished scanning in every single photo that I’ve acquired over my 40+ years of life, fixing up their dates to reflect the date when the picture was taken, not when it was scanned. Furthermore, I have tagged every photo on the disk drive (scanned or originally digital) with metadata saying who was in the photo and where it was taken. All of my family videos have ... [ read more ]
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1/6/2009 9:14:06 PM
Today we released a new How Do I Video onto the VB Dev Center on how to format controls on data entry forms using the IValueConverter like I showed on my blog here . The IValueConverter allows you full control over the display of the data as well as the editing of that data by users in the controls. Check out all the WPF Forms over Data videos here. Enjoy!
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VBTeam via
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1/2/2009 6:31:32 AM
On behalf of the Microsoft Visual Basic team, I'd like to wish all of our readers a happy & healthy new year. We truly enjoy getting to know you through your comments and emails, so here's an opportunity to say "thanks"! As we move forward to 2009, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at "the best of 2008". Here's a list of the most popular posts each month (based on the # of aggregate vie ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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12/31/2008 11:51:00 PM
MSDN Magazine Editor in Chief, Howard Dierking, announced a number of changes to the magazine in the January 2009 Editor's Note . Among that list of changes was the following excerpt:
"Furthermore, we recently began moving all of our article code samples to MSDN Code Gallery . This will allow our team to be much more agile in managing and updating code samples as needed. In that agility, we are now also able to translate all C# code samples into Visual Basic."
* GOING FORWARD, AL ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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12/30/2008 5:00:00 PM
It's common that you want to launch an external process but supply input and capture the output. Here's one attempt:
' BAD CODE
Using p As New System.Diagnostics.Process
p.StartInfo.FileName = "cat"
p.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = False
p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = True
p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardInput = True
... [ read more ]
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12/29/2008 8:46:14 PM
It's a new week, and the 10-4 video podcast series continues! The topics for this week include an overview of VS 2010, and a special focus on the Start Page. Here's a description of the episode, from the creators: 10-4 Episode 2: Welcome to Visual Studio 2010 In this second episode of 10-4 , we’ll take a very high-level look at Visual Studio 2010. We’ll discuss what types of features you can expect to see in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 depending on what ty ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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12/27/2008 4:00:00 PM
The first episode of the 10-4 podcast series is about downloading the VS 2010 CTP. We had blogged the instructions before, but this video will take you through the process. Download now, and start trying out all the new features! :)
Episode 1: Downloading and Using the Visual Studio 2010 September CTP
For this first episode of 10-4, we’ll look at how to download and use the Virtual PC image of the Visual Studio 2010 September CTP. We’ll give you tips on how to download this massive ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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12/27/2008 3:00:00 PM
Back in seventh grade, I had a pretty heavy crush on a girl named Melissa. She was a good friend of mine, and so I had no problems talking to her. However, being painfully shy back then, I was far too nervous to ever ask her to “go with” me. (For those not steeped in American traditions, to “go with” a girl or boy in junior high school meant that you were publicly asserting that the two of you were somehow romantically involved, whatever that actually meant when you wer ... [ read more ]
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12/25/2008 4:00:00 PM
The Visual Studio and .NET Framework evangelism team has announced 10-4 , a new video podcast. 10-4 will feature different capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 every week! To get the episodes, visit the show's new home on Channel9:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/
There you will also have the option to subscribe to the RSS feed of your choice, depending on the media format you’re interested in.
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VBTeam via
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12/23/2008 9:57:00 PM
This post is in response to a question we received in the blog comments last week. It's often difficult to study future versions of VB and C#, and figure out what's the same and what's different! Therefore, I've put together a chart that shows both the VB 10.0 and C# 4.0 feature lists together. (VB 10.0 and C# 4.0 are the language versions that will be included in the Visual Studio 2010 release.) One thing you may notice is that the lists look very much the same! That is part of our efforts t ... [ read more ]
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12/23/2008 1:06:00 AM
If so, vote here to see more Silverlight samples in VB:
http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=1222
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VBTeam via
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12/21/2008 4:00:00 PM
Do you spend a lot of time on Facebook ? Facebook is now one more way that you can connect with the Visual Basic team, and other fellow Visual Basic friends. Log on and join today !
Friends of the Microsoft Visual Basic Team Facebook Group
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VBTeam via
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12/20/2008 4:00:09 PM
Have you downloaded and started using the Visual Studio 2010 Community Technology Preview ("CTP") ? If so, you may have noticed that the Virtual PC it runs on, will expire at the end of the year. See the following blog posts from Brian Keller and Jeff Beehler, on how to turn off the synchronization between the Virtual PC and the host OS, and fix this problem! Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC: Dealing with Activation Messages Dealing with the Team System 2010 CTP expiration
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VBTeam via
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12/19/2008 4:00:22 PM
Quick Search has to be one of my favorite features in the 2010 CTP. I find myself using it all the time ! I hope you will find it useful in your development too. The Quick Search functionality has become a pretty common feature in development environments today. That's because it since it handles such a common scenario - needing to find something in your code! Read on to learn more about this exciting addition in VS 2010. This blog post is part of a series on the walkthroughs included in th ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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12/19/2008 8:30:00 AM
There was lots of snow today. The Microsoft campus was almost empty as everyone worked from home. This picture shows what it's like to develop Visual Studio in the snow...
Wallpaper sized: http://www.wischik.com/lu/programmer/vbdev/vs_snow_1600x1200.jpg (378k) Widescreen: http://www.wischik.com/lu/programmer/vbdev/vs_snow_1920x1200.jpg (445k)
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12/18/2008 5:00:00 PM
We we released a new community article onto the Visual Basic Developer Center by one of our MVPs, Jeff Certain , called Scaling ADO.NET DataTables . In this article Jeff shows shows us how to query and aggregate data using the built in DataTable methods as well as LINQ to DataSets. He compares the performance on indexed and non indexed DataTables in a variety of scenarios. See for yourself what Jeff recommends on large sets of data.
Enjoy, - Beth Massi , Visual Studio Commun ... [ read more ]
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12/17/2008 4:00:36 PM
This blog post is part of a series on the walkthroughs included in the October VS2010 CTP . Each walkthrough guides you through a series of steps, to help you experience the new features coming up in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Even if you choose not to download the CTP, you may find that you are still able to give feedback based on the descriptions and illustrations below. Please leave your feedback on this feature set at the end of this post, or at the following forum: htt ... [ read more ]
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12/15/2008 4:00:24 PM
This is another walkthrough , demonstrating how to use some new Visual Studio 2010 features available in the October VS2010 CTP . It provides steps to follow in the CTP build; however, you may find that you are able to give feedback on the descriptions below without actually downloading and executing the steps yourself. Please leave your feedback on this feature set at the end of this post, or at the following forum:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vs2010ctpvbcs/thread/6172ef ... [ read more ]
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12/13/2008 4:00:58 PM
As part of the October VS 2010 CTP , we also shipped a set of walkthrough documents explaining how to use the product to experience the new features. The CTP was released as a Virtual PC image, and can be a pretty hefty download to undertake. So for those of you just interested to know what's there, reading the walkthroughs can be a good alternative!
Below is the combined VB/C# walkthrough for "Generate From Usage". Please tell us your feedback on this new IDE feature, either at the end of t ... [ read more ]
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12/11/2008 4:00:00 PM
Some of you may be using the 2005 posters we released last year. There is now a 2008 version available as well!
There aren't too many changes. We've actually tried to stay pretty consistent with the VB keybindings (going back to at least VB6), since we know there's nothing more frustrating than upgrading and finding the keystroke that used to take you to the watch window now deletes the current line. :)
However, we have added a few new keyboard shortcuts for 2008 features, so you migh ... [ read more ]
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12/10/2008 4:00:00 PM
It's common today to switch back and forth between VB.Net and C# for different projects, jobs, teams, etc. VB MVP Kathleen Dollard and C# MVP Bill Wagner have gathered some tips to keep in mind when you make these transitions. They both write for Visual Studio Magazine , which is where these articles were released last week as part of the December edition.
What C# Devs Should Know About VB by Kathleen Dollard
What VB Devs Should Know About C# by Bill Wagner
Editor in Chief, Patrick M ... [ read more ]
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12/9/2008 9:26:00 PM
M. G. Phone Home (Matt Gertz)
I have a slight problem with my cell phone. It’s a smartphone; I love it, I use it all the time, and I don’t what I’d do without it, but I’ve been pretty aggravated with its support of Bluetooth. It will fail to pair with the Sync system in the car at random times, which drives me crazy as I’ll only notice the problem when I’m on the highway or something. Here in Washington State, it is (thankfully) illegal to drive and operate a hands- ... [ read more ]
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12/9/2008 4:00:00 PM
The ability to unwind the call stack from exceptions is one of the debugger features that was newly introduced in Visual Basic.NET 2005. When the debugger hits a first-chance exception, you can unwind the call stack in order to make code edits to fix the exception and continue debugging with the changes. The exception assistant UI will have an “Enable Editing” option which will unwind the debugger to the topmost call stack frame with code in the current solution.
When an exception is ... [ read more ]
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12/8/2008 4:00:20 PM
"Visual Basic Tips & Tricks" is an Italian online community that was started 10 years ago today. To be exact, the first tips were actually published in 1996 on a personal web page of the founder and leader, Gianluca Cannalire. However, the group recognizes the first day of the "real community" as December 8th 1998, when a web portal was created with articles, forums, mailing lists, downloads, and tips. "Visual Basic Tips & Tricks" currently hosts 36,300 subscribers, and is the secon ... [ read more ]
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12/7/2008 4:00:00 PM
Code snippets were introduced in the Visual Basic 2005 release. They provide an easy way to learn how to do a particular coding task, or to re-use a piece of code in various parts of your application. Code snippets can be inserted in a variety of ways. The method you choose will depend upon the situation. When browsing for a code snippet, use the Code Snippet Inserter:
Code Snippet Inserter
The Code Snippet Inserter can be invoked in the following two ways: by typing ‘?+T ... [ read more ]
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12/6/2008 4:00:53 PM
I've blogged the session materials for this presentation before, but now we finally have the video available too! Here are some section markers: Enjoy! http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/developer/tv/default.aspx?vid=79
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12/5/2008 4:00:40 PM
We've had a couple recent posts about the Code Focused development experience coming up in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE: Code Focus Announcements in the TechEd EMEA Keynote Code Focus Videos on Channel 9 Now for the ultimate coverage (a complete TechEd presentation on the subject), check out the following video by Karen Liu! http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/developer/tv/default.aspx?vid=80
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12/4/2008 4:00:00 PM
There's a great Channel9 series that was recently released, with lots of videos on what to look forward to in VS 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0! The landing page is here ; full lineup is below.
Intro (Monday, November 10th): - Visual Studio 2010 Overview, Jason Zander - Key Themes for Visual Studio 2010, Soma - Lab Management in Visual Studio Team System 2010 Languages Day (Tuesday, November 11th): - C# 4.0 Implementation and Design Questions, Anders Hejlsberg - VB 10, Lucia ... [ read more ]
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12/3/2008 4:25:00 AM
That's right... Just downstairs from our offices there is a VB user group that meets the fourth Monday each month. It's let by Robert Green , a former Microsoft employee, who used to work on the VB team! There are a lot of Microsoft speakers at this user group, so if you live in the area it's a great way to meet some folks on the team, and tell us what you think about Visual Basic!
The user group website is here: http://www.dotnetda.com/
Usual agenda is below...
6:30PM Come Ear ... [ read more ]
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12/3/2008 12:36:43 AM
Do you spend a lot of your day in code? (Writing code, navigating code, modifying code, understanding code, testing code, debugging code, etc.) If so, then the Visual Studio 2010 IDE has got a lot in store for you! In this release we're focusing on optimizing for code-focused development, which covers each of these tasks. There are a number of new features being added, designed to make your day easier. Here's the list: Quick Search for better navigation... ... [ read more ]
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12/2/2008 4:51:10 PM
TechEd EMEA kicked off on November 10th with an announcement-packed keynote by Visual Studio General Manager, Jason Zander! The 82min video has been made available for public viewing here . Below are some minute markers as well, in case you don't have time to watch the whole thing. Here's some other coverage you may want to check out, as well: 10min Interview on Jason's announcements in the keynote Jason's blog post on the VS 2010 announcements Minute markers for ... [ read more ]
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11/26/2008 8:00:04 PM
I just posted a new Channel 9 video with Milind Lele , Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team. In this interview Milind shows one of the new RAD improvements I was talking about that is coming to WPF in Visual Studio 2010 -- Drag-Drop Data Binding. Also check out his blog post on this topic for more information. His team is looking for feedback on this feature so visit the Visual Studio 2010 CTP page to download the CTP and visit the feedback forums. See it ... [ read more ]
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11/25/2008 11:54:00 PM
Visual Basic 9.0 introduces a feature called XML Literals , which makes programming against XML a lot more natural, and dramatically decreases the number of lines of code you need to write. In fact, it makes working with XML in Visual Basic *so* much easier that many C# developers are moving to VB.Net for their XML work! To learn more about this phenomenon, watch the following panel from TechEd US, entitled:
"VB XML Literals for C# developers or: How I learned to stop worrying a ... [ read more ]
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11/25/2008 8:43:00 PM
After three and a half days visiting user groups through Spain, Jon and I have flown back to the US. We got to meet some great people and had lots of fun talking about VB. The slide decks that we used on the trip are attached at the end of this post.
PPT: Deep Dive on VB 9.0 (link to be added shortly) PPT: Visual Basic IDE Tips and Tricks
User group meeting in Valencia:
User group meeting in Alicante:
Final pic with our host Pep Lluis after the user group meeting ... [ read more ]
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11/25/2008 1:06:00 AM
Using Visual Basic, and thinking about Functional Programming? Here's an excerpt from Eric White's blog , explaining why you should:
Functional Programming (FP) has the potential to reduce program line count by 20% to 50%, reduce bugs and increase robustness, and move us in the direction of taking advantage of multiple core CPUs.
He believes that the reasons many developers don't take advantage of functional programming are the learning curve and the u ... [ read more ]
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11/19/2008 8:39:00 PM
One of the improvements in VS2010 (CTP available for download here ) is drag and drop data binding for WPF. Drag-drop data binding has been available for WinForms since Visual Studio 2005. So those of you that are familiar with that will find the WPF experience quite similar and readily usable. In VS2010 we've brought that to WPF.
VS2008 SP1 brought the ability to add an Entity Data Model (EDM) to your projects. In VS2010 we've added support for EDM in the data sources window. Thus ... [ read more ]
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11/18/2008 11:07:03 PM
By now, you have heard of all the great new features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 . Now that you've developed your new applications, you want to include the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as a prerequisite in your Setup project or your ClickOnce installer. The default deployment experience in VS2008 SP1 is to download and install the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 from the Microsoft Download Center. However, you can add the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to the Visual Studio bo ... [ read more ]
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11/18/2008 7:30:00 AM
Yesterday I turned a year older, and spent the day meeting new people at user groups in Spain. Here's how the day went:
07:45 Meet our host, VB MVP Pep Lluis Blano. Leave the hotel in Barcelona and head to Vic in our van, rented for the week.
09:30 - 12:30 User group presentations in Vic.
12:30 - 14:30 Lunch with user group members in Vic. Chocolate birthday cake for all. :)
Streets in Vic outside the restaurant:
My birthday gift from Pep. (Very nice scarf!) Marta, a woman inv ... [ read more ]
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11/17/2008 11:04:00 PM
This week Jonathan Aneja and I are traveling from city to city, and presenting to VB.Net user groups in Spain. We began the tour in Barcelona where we were speaking at TechEd EMEA, and will finish in Madrid. VB MVP Pep Lluis Blano organized the entire itinerary!
Here are the topics for the presentations:
IDE: 2005, 2008, 2010
Language: LINQ, VB XML, VB 9, VB 10
VB6: Interop Forms Toolkit
The schedule is below. Each meeting is 3hrs. Come joi ... [ read more ]
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11/17/2008 5:00:00 PM
1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead but I'm not really" 2. Romeo receives the message 3. Romeo finds Juliette looking dead, but knows she's not really dead 4. They live happily ever after
vs.
1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead but I'm not really" [the message is lost in a plague-related network outage] 2. Romeo ... [ read more ]
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11/15/2008 1:51:00 AM
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0\bin\ildasm.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin\ildasm.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\ildasm.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\x64\ildasm.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools\ildasm.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools\x64\ildasm.exe C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\ildasm.exe C:\Program Files (x86)\Micr ... [ read more ]
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11/11/2008 4:00:03 PM
This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole . This time we have Doug Rothaus, a writer on the documentation side. Doug has blogged up an XML cookbook here on the team blog with a bunch of "recipes" on how to use different features of XML Literals and LINQ to XML in Visual Basic. Check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a ... [ read more ]
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11/10/2008 7:33:00 PM
I'm here at TechEd Barcelona, and the week has gotten off to a great start. Jason Zander did the keynote this afternoon, and announced lots of great tooling support that will be included in Visual Studio 2010! Exciting stuff.
I have 4 sessions here, starting tomorrow. I've attached the materials at the end of this post, in case you want to follow along during the talks!
TLA325 Conquering XML with Visual Basic 9.0
*CLICK HERE FOR SESSION MATERIALS*
Tu ... [ read more ]
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11/6/2008 6:17:00 AM
In this short 10min video, I interview language architect Paul Vick about what industry trends he would think about while designing the Visual Basic language. Some of these trends have motivated features in the next version of the Visual Basic language (VB 10.0), such as interop with dynamic languages. Others are things the team is currently thinking about, and plans to address in future versions. These include concurrency, and "opening up the black box" to expose the Visual Basi ... [ read more ]
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11/5/2008 5:33:00 PM
"My dog has no type." "How does he smell?" " Awful! "
Two of the new features of VB10 -- array literals and multi-line lambdas -- are interesting from the language perspective because their expressions have no type! This article is for language lawyers. I remember at my very first undergraduate computer science lecture, the lecturer Frank King handed out the class list and asked for corrections. One student raised his hand, apologized for being pedantic, and said that his name had an "å ... [ read more ]
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11/4/2008 4:02:32 PM
I posted two more WPF "Forms over Data" videos onto the Developer Center that you should check out. How Do I: Edit Tabular Data in WPF? - learn how to create a simple data grid in WPF for editing tabular data using Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. How Do I: Create a Master-Detail Data Entry Form in WPF? - learn how to create a master-detail (or one-to-many) data entry form in WPF using Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. Subscribe to the How Do I video ... [ read more ]
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11/3/2008 7:06:00 PM
In this video, I interviewed language architect Paul Vick about what new language features are coming in the next release of Visual Basic. We talked about auto-implemented properties, collection initializers, statement lambdas, removal of the line continuation feature, and more. These features were recently announced at last week's Professional Developers Conference.
Visual Basic 10: New Features (video)
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11/3/2008 5:00:34 PM
Here's a community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time with Lucian Wischik, a Developer on the team. I'm just getting to know Lucian but he is a very interesting and bright person who is just a pleasure to talk with (I hope he starts blogging a lot more ). When I told him that out Italian community had sent some interview questions over he responded to them in Italian! I feel totally lame that he speaks fluently and I don't, although he had the benefi ... [ read more ]
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11/3/2008 8:48:00 AM
The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP) is now publicly available! It's time to try out the features that you've been hearing about from the PDC. :)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=922B4655-93D0-4476-BDA4-94CF5F8D4814&displaylang=en
Once you download the CTP, start Visual Studio and you will see a link to the CTP Walkthroughs from the Start Page. These walkthroughs are meant to guide you through the ... [ read more ]
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11/3/2008 6:10:00 AM
After you discover the PDC videos online , and you watch the Future Directions for Microsoft Visual Basic , you may wonder what other sessions this year's PDC has to offer for the VB developer... Lots!
Here's a list of PDC sessions related to the VB language and IDE:
Scott Guthrie's speech in the 2nd day keynote:
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/KYN02/ (See 1hr 28min)
Scott showed the new 2010 editor in his presentation. He explained that it's built on MEF (the Micr ... [ read more ]
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11/3/2008 1:48:00 AM
I recently blogged about the new VB 2010 language features announced at PDC, as well as the video available from Paul and Lucian's "VB Futures" session . Another way to learn about the new features coming out in 2010 is by watching the following Channel9 video with VB specification lead, Lucian Wischik.
Title: Lucian Wischik and Lisa Feigenbaum: What's new in Visual Basic 10 Abstract: In this demo-heavy video, Lucian shows off a number of new features in Visual Basic 10 including Co ... [ read more ]
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11/3/2008 1:30:00 AM
Last week at the Professional Developers Conference , the VB and C# teams held a special dinner in honor of the VB and C# MVPs in attendance. ("MVP" = Most Valued Professional ) It was a great opportunity to connect with folks, talk about the exciting things being announced at the conference, and even hear from Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander! VB and C# language architects Paul Vick and Anders Hejlsberg were also in attendance, as were a number of other members from the team. ... [ read more ]
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11/3/2008 1:07:00 AM
This year at the Professional Developers Conference , there was a new trend called PDC badges. To fully understand the buzz, check out the following blog post and Channel9 video by Adam Kinney (badge extraordinaire):
http://adamkinney.com/blog/366/default.aspx http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Countdown-to-PDC2008-Badges-We-dont-need-no-stinkin-badges/
You might have heard references to the VB badges in the "VB Futures" presentation . Here's what they looked like:
What ... [ read more ]
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11/3/2008 12:59:00 AM
That's right... All sessions from last week's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles have been videotaped and made available for FREE on Channel9.
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/
Check it out and enjoy the conference. :)
For photos, see the "PDC2008" tag on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=pdc2008&m=tags&s=int
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11/3/2008 12:20:00 AM
Didn't make it to the PDC? No problem. You can still check out the *hottest* presentation at the Professional Developers Conference this year, available publicly on demand! Paul Vick (Principal Architect) and Lucian Wischik (VB Specification Lead & Software Engineer) gave an awesome presentation on the Future of VB. The presentation included VB 2010 and beyond.
Title: Future Directions for Microsoft Visual Basic Abstract: Hear language architect Paul Vick and specifica ... [ read more ]
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11/2/2008 11:34:00 PM
Last week at the Professional Developers Conference , we made a number of very exciting announcements regarding the future of Visual Basic. Here is the list of VB 2010 features we've announced:
Collection Initializers . Initialize collections in fewer lines of code! Use the "From" keyword followed by a list, rather than successive calls to the Add method.
Dim y As New List(Of String) From {"hello", "world"}
Dim x As New Dictionary(Of String, Integer) From { ... [ read more ]
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10/31/2008 9:22:00 PM
I was once temporarily taken off the VB team to get an unrelated project back on track, just a mere handful of weeks before it was due to ship. I won’t go into the gory details; suffice it to say that we had reason to believe that the product would have to ship without delay, and that any major failure in the deliverable could create some seriously undesirable problems for both us and our customers.
In the interest of expediting the development of the product, a exte ... [ read more ]
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10/31/2008 4:00:25 PM
This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole . This time we have Adrian Bowles (who's nickname is Spotty), a Tester on the VB Compiler. Someday Spotty will have to tell us how he got his nickname. Please check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. Here's the interview with Spotty: 1. Nice t ... [ read more ]
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10/29/2008 4:00:55 PM
This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole . This time we have Sophia Salim, a Tester on the VB Compiler. I'm very happy to see Sophia reach out to the community and am looking forward to more interesting posts from her here . I'm always interested in what really goes on inside that compiler. Check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for ... [ read more ]
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10/27/2008 4:00:28 PM
Here's a community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole with John Stallo, a Program Manager working on RAD tools. I first met John on my interview loop at Microsoft. What immediately stuck me when I met him was his Italian name but he has a very cool Australian accent. Being that we both have an Italian heritage, in the first part of my interview we talked about where we were from. That broke the ice quickly and I think I did well in the rest of the interview. :-) ... [ read more ]
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10/25/2008 4:00:26 AM
Here's another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time with Eric Knox, Development Manager on the VB IDE Team. I got to know Eric at TechEd this year where we had a lot of fun floating in the pool on bright pink inner-tubes. ;-) You can also see Eric in the interview I did with the IDE Team a while back on Channel 9 . Also check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Cente ... [ read more ]
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10/23/2008 3:15:15 PM
If you missed it, this week a new community submitted article was released onto the Visual Basic Developer Center and the Office Development with Visual Studio Portal by Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole . In this article learn how to control the Vista operating system's speech recognition engine in .NET from a custom task pane in Microsoft Word 2007. This article compliments Alessandro's previous article on a text-to-speech add-in for Word 2007. Enjoy, - Beth Massi , ... [ read more ]
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10/22/2008 4:00:32 PM
Continuing the community interviews from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time we have Bill Horst, a tester on the VB Team. You might know Bill from his awesome series of blog posts on Converting SQL to LINQ . Also check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. Here's the interview with Bill: 1. Nice to meet you Bill Horst! Let’s be ... [ read more ]
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10/21/2008 9:31:14 PM
In this interview Saaid Kahn, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team (and former member of the VB Team), shows us how to create an n-tier application against a database using ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) and an Entity Data Model, both now available in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. ADO.NET Data Services use WCF REST-ful services and provides all the plumbing so you can focus on the program logic by programming against a service proxy. ADO.NET Data Services allow y ... [ read more ]
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10/20/2008 4:00:04 PM
Here's another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time with yours truly . ;-) I decided to release this one today since it's my birthday. Don't forget to check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. My picture up there is from a couple years ago when the Oakland A's went to the playoffs... ahh.. memories.... Anyway, ... [ read more ]
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10/18/2008 4:00:00 PM
Say you're demonstrating some code at a conference. What's the best way to do it? If you show only the code window, then you're counting on the audience's imagination about how the code will work (and their trust that it does!). But if you hit F5 to run it then this breaks the flow. And I find it hard to keep both the code and the output in my mind at the same time.
I think this is one of those problems that can be solved by technology! So here's a small plugin for Vi ... [ read more ]
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10/17/2008 4:00:04 PM
Here's another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time with Matt Gertz. Matt still posts frequently on the VB Team blog even though he's changed roles (look at how big his name still is in our tag cloud on the right ;-)). Matt is a great technical leader here at Microsoft and he really loves the Visual Basic community so we welcome him here on the Visual Basic "virtual" team! You can also check out the Visual Basic Team page for p ... [ read more ]
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10/15/2008 4:00:19 PM
Here's another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time with Jared Parsons, a Developer on the VB Team. Jared is a great developer and loves the community. You can check out his personal blog here . You can also check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. Here's the interview with Jared: 1. Nice to meet you Jared ... [ read more ]
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10/13/2008 4:00:12 PM
Continuing the community interviews from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time we interview Patrick Dengler. You can take a look at the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. Here's the interview with Patrick: 1. Nice to meet you Patrick Dengler! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: where are you from? I was born in New York, grew up ... [ read more ]
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10/12/2008 4:00:00 PM
Reflection on .Net objects is done through System.Type and is very easy. For instance, "Dim type = GetType(System.String)" and now you can look at all the members and inheritance hierarchy of the System.String class.
Reflection on COM types is also easy if they have an interop assembly . For instance, add a project reference to the COM Microsoft Speech Library and again do "GetType(SpeechLib.SpVoice)". This lets you reflect on the .Net "Runtime Callable Wrapper" that's in the ... [ read more ]
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10/11/2008 4:00:00 PM
Bill Burrows , VB MVP, has released some great videos on the ASP.Net Dynamic Data features that were added in VS2008 SP1. What is Dynamic Data?
"ASP.Net Dynamic Data provides a framework that enables you to quickly build a functional data-driven application, based on a LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework data model. It also adds great flexibility and functionality to the DetailsView, FormView, GridView, and ListView controls in the form of smart validaton and the ability to easily change the d ... [ read more ]
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10/10/2008 4:00:41 PM
Continuing the community interviews from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time we interview Jonathan Aneja, VB Compiler Program Manager. Remember that you can take a look at the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. Here's the interview with Jonathan: 1. Nice to meet you Jonathan Aneja! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: where are ... [ read more ]
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10/9/2008 4:00:00 PM
Bart and Lisa Simpson - well actually, Bart de Smet and I recorded an interview about the .Net Managed Languages. :) You can find that interview on the TechEd Online South Africa library page . Otherwise, you can also launch the video directly from here . Below is the abstract from our discussion:
.NET, A Multi-Language Platform In this talk, Lisa Feigenbaum and Bart de Smet introduce the Microsoft language portfolio and discuss WPF, new features in Visual Basic and Vis ... [ read more ]
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10/9/2008 3:00:00 PM
The VB Catch syntax has a unique feature: When. It allows users to filter expressions based on something other than their type. Any arbitrary code can enter a When block to decide whether or not to handle an Exception. Sub Sub1()
Try
DoSomeAction()
Catch ex As Exception When Filter(ex)
Stop
End Try
End Sub
Newsgroups often ask, "Why's this so special? I could effectively get the same behavior out of C# by doin ... [ read more ]
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10/8/2008 4:00:08 PM
Continuing the community interviews from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time we interview Lisa Feigenbaum, now a Visual Basic Community Program Manager! Cool! Remember that you can take a look at the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these interviews as well. Here's the interview with Lisa: 1. Nice to meet you Lisa! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: ... [ read more ]
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10/7/2008 4:00:00 PM
There are a bunch of great How-Do-I videos on the http://silverlight.net site to get you started! There are four different categories of videos, and they all include Visual Basic code available for download.
Silverlight 2 Basics
Controls
Web Services and Data
Data
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VBTeam via
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10/6/2008 10:25:00 PM
Most XSLT programmers are familiar with this XSLT transform to copy an XML file.
<? xml version = " 1.0 " encoding = " utf-8 " ?>
< xsl:stylesheet version = " 1.0 " xmlns:xsl = " http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform " >
< xsl:output method = " xml " indent = " yes " />
< xsl:template match = " @* | node() " >
&nb ... [ read more ]
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10/6/2008 4:00:53 PM
One of our Italian Visual Basic MVPs, Alessandro Del Sole , sent over some interview questions for the Visual Basic Team members to get our thoughts on the language and favorite features but mostly to share some of our personal interests to help you get to know us better. I also learned some fun facts about the team as well! Alessandro is also translating these interviews and posting them on the Italian Visual Basic Tips&Tricks site. You can take a look at the Visual Basic Team page ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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10/4/2008 10:10:00 PM
Microsoft has announced the names Visual Studio 10 and .Net Framework 4.0 for the next versions of these two products! Here are a number of references where you can look to find more information about this announcement:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/sep08/09-29VS10PR.mspx
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Microsoft-Announces-Visual-Studio-2010-and-NET-Framework-40/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2008/products/cc948977.aspx
http://msdn.micros ... [ read more ]
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10/2/2008 11:34:00 PM
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
On the File menu, point to Add, then click New Project.
In the resulting Add New Project dialog box, in the Project Types pane, open the Other Project Types node and select Setup and ... [ read more ]
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9/28/2008 10:26:00 PM
We have quite a few trips coming up over the next couple months, and we want to connect with you while we’re on the road. Here is our plan. Let us know where we can find you. ;-)
October 6-7, 2008
Software Development Conference 2008 : http://www.sdc.nl/
Beth Massi
October 8-10, 2008
TechEd Hong Kong: http://www.microsoft.com/hk/technet/teched2008/
Karen Liu
October 21-23, 2008
OOPSL ... [ read more ]
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9/23/2008 5:17:00 AM
I once visited an ancient tower in China. A sign said "tread carefully for you bear the weight of history on your shoulders". Our guide explained that the tower was over 800 years old! Oh yes, he said, it was built 800 years ago, had burnt to the ground three times in its history, had been moved to completely different locations twice, but it still counted as 800 years old.
Back in VB land I was making two different calls into some framework, and each call gave me back a filename, a ... [ read more ]
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9/22/2008 3:10:00 PM
Did you know that Sara Ford just recently passed the 300 mark for her Visual Studio Tips & Tricks? Sara used to be a tester on the Visual Studio Core IDE team, and knows the IDE inside and out! I remember the first time I met Sara was 4 years ago when she was writing some automation and called to find out the expected behavior for arrowing over tab stops in VB. :-) Now she works on CodePlex , but she still keeps up her Tips & Tricks blog g ... [ read more ]
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9/20/2008 6:11:00 AM
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, that’d be a lie. Even though my immediate fire drills in engineering process have died down, I’m going to be flying a lot in Oct ... [ read more ]
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9/19/2008 8:20:00 PM
The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is coming up next month, October 27-30 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The conference will focus on the future of the Microsoft platform. Here is the website for more information: http://www.microsoftpdc.com/
At this future-looking conference, we will be giving a talk on the future of Visual Basic. Here are the details:
Title: Future Directions of Visual Basic Speaker: Paul Vick Abstract: In this talk, language archit ... [ read more ]
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9/19/2008 6:00:00 AM
Here's a brief addition to my Visual Basic Around the World post ... This one's for the folks in SouthEast Asia. The TechEd MVP and Speaker dinner made it into the local Malaysian paper. You can see a copy of the article below. The theme was "Bling-tastic!". I'm at the bottom left with other international speakers: David Tesar, Steve Riley, and Ronald Beekelaar.
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9/15/2008 12:44:00 AM
Maybe you just started a job at a company whose development is in VB. Maybe you're working with XML, or Office, and heard that VB would be the best language for this project. Or maybe you're just switching over, to understand what millions of developers around the world love about VB! :) Whatever your reason may be, this post is for you.
You'll find that there are a lot of similarities between Visual C# and Visual Basic. Afterall we're both built on top of the same Common Language Runtime! Ho ... [ read more ]
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9/11/2008 8:30:00 PM
Now you can! Expression Encoder just released an update last month allowing VB developers to use the Expression Encoder 2 SDK. Here's the announcement:
http://blogs.msdn.com/expressionencoder/archive/2008/07/26/8773569.aspx
Expression Encoder is a tool for video encoding, and is a member of the Expression product suite. It allows you to import and encode video files, produce live webcasts, enhance media with watermarks and advertising, and publish with Microsoft Silverlight. You can ... [ read more ]
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9/9/2008 8:30:00 PM
After watching this video, you just might be convinced to try it out! VB MVP Billy Hollis demonstrates that Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is about a lot more than just pretty UI. He shows how the technology can be used in an extremely useful way, to create killer line-of-business applications. Watch a few minutes, and you'll understand what I mean!
The webcast is hosted on http://www.dnrtv.com/ . You can find a direct link to the video HERE . Brad Abrams has also crea ... [ read more ]
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9/8/2008 7:00:07 PM
Today I posted another Channel9 interview . This time I met with the team that brings us the "experience" of coding in Visual Studio, also sometimes referred to as the VS IDE Team. I ask them how their design process works, what the top requested features are for the code editors, how they work with the language teams as well as what their favorite and hardest features are to build and test. Meet the Visual Studio Managed Languages Development Experience Team Enjoy, ... [ read more ]
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9/8/2008 3:00:00 PM
If so here's a great tutorial video for you to check out, by VB MVP Bill Burrows:
http://www.myvbprof.com/2007_version/MVC_P4_Tutorial.aspx
Here's a description of the tutorial:
"This tutorial covers an overview to the MVC pattern using MVC Preview 4 and Visual Basic. It highlights the changes in the MVC model since the release of Preview 1 and covers both 'drill-down' applications as well as showing how to update an existing database record and add a new record."
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9/6/2008 11:00:00 PM
Interested in hearing about what the Visual Basic and CSharp program managers *really* think about the two IDEs? Come join Karen Liu and me as we chat about the goals, similarities and differences of the VB & C# IDEs. We also discuss our favorite features and where we think IDEs are going in the future. This talk was recorded at TechEd North America 2008 Developers conference. The video is posted at the TechEd Online Library . You can also find a direct link here .
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9/5/2008 6:00:00 PM
Have you refreshed your VB Dev Center page today? If you did, you'll notice a new look on both the Home page and the Learn tab . Also check out the new Forums and Community pages. For more info on the specific changes, please see these blog posts by Beth Massi and John Martin , who were involved in the redesign.
Have you set the Visual Basic Developer Center to be your new home page? I know I have. :) http://msdn.com/vbasic
The Visual Basic Developer Center is yo ... [ read more ]
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9/3/2008 9:29:00 PM
This is a follow-up to my presentations at TechEd SouthEast Asia. Please find all the descriptions and materials for the presentations on the following resource page: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/techedsea
Here are some direct links to the materials:
TLA 314 - Visual Basic 2008 Tips and Tricks
TLA 323 - Best Practices for the VB9.0 and CSharp 3.0 Features that Make LINQ Work
TLA 335 - Conquering XML with Visual Basic 9.0
And now, some pictures below. :)
... [ read more ]
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9/2/2008 10:22:00 PM
Thanks to those of you who attended my sessions at TechEd South Africa 2008. As promised here are the presentation materials I used, so you try out the examples yourself! I've created a Code Gallery resource page to host the material, with all the session abstracts, powerpoints, and solutions. That resource page is available here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/tesalf/
More details on the individual sessions are below. Please click the talk names to view their downloadable materia ... [ read more ]
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9/1/2008 11:52:00 PM
I just finished a month-long 'round the world trip, where I was speaking about Visual Basic and meeting with local Microsoft representatives. I started off in Durban in early August, where I spoke at TechEd South Africa 2008. (More info on my talks and presentation materials to follow in my next post.) Then I continued on to TechEd SouthEast Asia in Kuala Lumpur. Here's a picture from the TechEd SouthEast Asia MVP and speaker dinner:
Left to right: Prasanna Amirthalingam (VB MVP, Sri Lank ... [ read more ]
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8/29/2008 10:49:00 PM
Chris Williams (VB MVP) started an interview series on his blog. In the series, he interviews various members in the technical community by asking them 9 questions. If you've read my blog posts and are interested to get to know me a little better, check out my 9 answers to Chris' questions!
http://www.ninequestions.net/
If you want to let us get to know you a little better, answer the questions about yourself in the comments to this post. :)
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8/28/2008 10:42:00 PM
With the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you can now add smart tags to Excel by using an add-in. In this video, I show you how to add them to both a document-level customization and an add-in project.
How Do I: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks?
This video is based on the topic: How to: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks , where you can get the code and follow along step-by-step.
Enjoy, Kathleen
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8/23/2008 12:00:02 AM
Today I posted another Channel 9 interview on SP1. This time, Yang Xiao, a tester on the VB IDE team is back demonstrating new improvements to the "Go To Definition", "Find All References" and Rename capabilities in the editor when flipping between code and XAML in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 . New Editor Features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Enjoy, - Beth Massi , Visual Studio Community
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8/21/2008 4:55:00 AM
Last week I got the chance to visit the Toronto .NET User Group and give a talk on all the great new language features in VB2008. It was great to see so much excitement a round LINQ and especially XML Literals !
The slides and demo code are posted at the link below; here’s the session abstract (with links inserted so you can find more info on each topic):
Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is a new platform feature in Vis ... [ read more ]
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8/15/2008 9:23:06 PM
Today I posted an interview on Channel 9 with Yang Xiao , a tester on the VB IDE. In this interview Yang shows us the new XML Schema Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 . This new window is invoked when you right-click on an XML literal element or namespace and select "Show in XML Schema Explorer" in Visual Basic programs. It's a nice way to visually display the structure of your schema sets which makes you even more productive when working with XML in Visual Basic. ... [ read more ]
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8/11/2008 5:43:29 PM
Today we shipped Service Pack 1 (SP1) for both Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5. This is the first time we’ve release both a VS SP and a .NetFramework SP at the same time! Additionally, we released ENU, JPN and 8 additional languages that ship with SQL 2008 at the same time! See the announcement on Soma’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2008/08/11/service-pack-1-for-vs-2008-and-net-fx-3-5-released.aspx Here are the links for information and w ... [ read more ]
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8/9/2008 2:11:00 AM
I just posted a new Channel 9 interview with Milind Lele, a PM on the VS Pro Tools team. In this interview Milind shows us the improvements made to the tooling in Visual Studio SP1 for occasionally connected clients as well as the new data type support for SQL Server 2008.
Using SQL 2008 built-in change tracking, you don't need to make modifications to your table schemas like you have to do with SQL 2005. Additionally he shows off a "smarter" DataSet designer where you can have tables comi ... [ read more ]
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8/7/2008 8:52:00 PM
How do I convert an IEnumerable(Of CheckingAccount) into an IEnumerable(Of Account) ? (where CheckingAccount inherits from Account).
Currently this conversion isn't allowed, but we're considering a VB language feature to support it. The topic is called "co- and contravariance", and has been in the CLR since 2005 or so, but no one's yet released a .Net language that uses it. Eric Lippert has written a series of blog posts to explore how variance might appear in a hypothetical f ... [ read more ]
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7/29/2008 1:25:00 AM
Today I posted an interview screencast on Channel 9 . In this interview, Jared Parsons , a Developer on the Visual Basic IDE, shows us the P/Invoke Interop Assistant available on CodePlex . The tool helps with converting unmanaged C code to managed P/Invoke signatures and vice versa. Say goodbye to digging through random header files or MSDN documentation to find the right constants, structures and signatures. The P/Invoke Interop Assistant does a smarter translation for ... [ read more ]
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7/23/2008 10:00:00 PM
Last month when I was in Redmond I was pulled into a photo with some of the people working on Visual Basic. Do you notice something quirky about these pictures (besides me)? Yes, they are all wearing grey shirts! There's apparently a running joke going on with how Jonathan Aneja (top row, 4th from the left in the first picture) only wears grey. So the team all wore grey to see if he would even notice!
The joke is explained in this Channel 9 interview with the VB Language Design Team ... [ read more ]
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7/22/2008 2:45:00 PM
Last post , I introduced the VS Languages Future Focus page on Code Gallery. This time, we'd like to get your feedback on another potential IDE feature: Call Hierarchy.
Please find a description of the feature here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vslangfutures/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Call%20Hierarchy&referringTitle=Home
Please leave your feedback here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Thread/View.aspx?ProjectName=vslangfutures&ThreadId=123
Thanks! Lisa
DISCLAIMER: It ... [ read more ]
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7/21/2008 8:07:00 AM
We've started a new page on Code Gallery called "Future Focus" , to collect your feedback on ideas that we're considering for future versions of Visual Studio.
The latest post is regarding an IDE feature to help you quickly search for and navigate to symbols in your code. Please see a description of the feature here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vslangfutures/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Symbol%20Search&referringTitle=Home
Please leave your feedback on this feature here: ht ... [ read more ]
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7/18/2008 5:19:00 PM
This week on the VB Dev Center we're featuring another community submitted article by Maurice de Beijer (VB MVP) on Using Windows Communication Foundation with Windows Workflow Foundation . Maurice has a great wiki as well that you should check out if you're doing Windows Workflow development.
In this article he shows you how to use SendActivity which enables you to call WCF as well as standard web services in your workflows. Stay tuned for the next article which ... [ read more ]
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7/17/2008 9:34:00 PM
If you haven't noticed, we released a couple new how-to videos on the VB Dev Center starting a new series which is focused on data-based application development in Windows Presentation Foundation using Visual Studio 2008. The videos are also being featured on www.WindowsClient.net today. Look for many more in the coming weeks!
Enjoy, - Beth Massi , VS Community
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6/20/2008 4:27:45 PM
I'm happy to announce that the PInvoke Interop Assistant tool is now available on CodePlex. This includes the binaries, source code and the dev authored unit tests.
It is hosted on the more general CLR Interop Tools page.
http://www.codeplex.com/clrinterop
I will be actively maintaining this tool in the future and (hopefully) adding more features. There were several features we cut just before release due to QA costing that I would like to add back (including V ... [ read more ]
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6/17/2008 2:30:00 PM
In yesterday’s blog post, I walked through an engine for translating DNA to its amino acid results via messenger RNA. In today’s blog, we’ll work on the visualization using WPF StackPanels. (This example requires VS2008, although it could certainly be written in WinForms as well with just a little bit of extra work.)
Caution : The point of this blog is to demonstrate StackPanels, and specifically how you can control their orientation and nesting. Consequen ... [ read more ]
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6/17/2008 5:21:00 AM
As I was preparing to graduate from the University of Michigan way back in the late eighties, I had a big decision to make regarding grad school – robotics at Carnegie Mellon, or biology at Washington State? On the one hand, biology was something I’d always really loved, having even intended to go to med school at one point. On the other hand, robotics was more likely to help me pay off my debts a very exciting field with a lot of challenges still ahead of it. Ultima ... [ read more ]
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6/13/2008 8:01:00 PM
Just released onto the Visual Basic Developer Center , a new article Creating a Text-to-speech add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 with Visual Studio 2008 from a member of our Italian .NET community, Alessandro Del Sole .
The article shows how to use Visual Studio 2008 to create an add-in for Word 2007 that will read your documents out loud to you using the text-to-speech APIs in .NET Fx 3.0.
Enjoy, - Beth Massi , VS Community
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6/5/2008 3:11:00 PM
This week I presented "Microsoft Visual Basic IDE Tips and Tricks" at TechEd US 2008. Thanks to those of you who attended. The presentation materials are listed below.
Slide deck
2008 solution - post demo version
2005 solution - post demo version
2008 solution - pre demo version
2005 solution - pre demo version
Thanks! Lisa
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6/4/2008 7:46:00 AM
The VB team has two great sessions coming up on Wednesday June 4th, covering tips & tricks for the language and IDE. Abstracts are below. Hope to see you there!
TLA319 Microsoft Visual Basic 2008: Microsoft LINQ Language Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices
Wednesday, June 4 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM, S220 E
Speaker(s): Amanda Silver
Track(s): Developer Tools and Languages
Level: 300 - Advanced
Session Type: Breakout Session
LINQ (Langua ... [ read more ]
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5/22/2008 12:00:20 AM
Our Help content architect, Kathleen McGrath , has created a short, anonymous survey (15 questions/10 mins.) to gather input on how and when the Visual Studio and .NET Framework developer Help content is used, how satisfied you are with it, and about areas that need improvement: Link to the Visual Studio and .NET Framework Developer Documentation Survey (Kathleen will also be taking this survey with her to TechEd in June.) The focus of this survey is content improvement. We want to ... [ read more ]
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5/15/2008 11:45:00 PM
I presented the following talk this week at VSLive! Orlando 2008 :
Visual Studio 2008: LINQ Deep Dive and Best Practices LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a key platform innovation introduced with Visual Studio 2008 which brings SQL-style query expressions into VB and C# enabling you to describe what data to reason about instead of how to access the data. In this session, by taking a much closer look at the language features that enable LINQ-enabled frameworks, we’ll uncover tips, tricks ... [ read more ]
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5/15/2008 6:54:00 AM
Last week I went on a user group tour around Southern California. I've uploaded the materials from my talk:
Powerpoint presentation
Solution at the Start of the Demo
Solution at the End of the Demo
You can find these all posted together on the following Code Gallery page .
The demo requires installation of Refactor!, which is a 3rd party tool available for free on MSDN . I also pointed out a number of resources at the end of the talk that you might be interested in: ... [ read more ]
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5/14/2008 11:52:00 PM
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 implement IEnumerable, so how can we query over it?
As we saw yesterday , Visual Studio 2008 includes an assembly ... [ read more ]
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5/14/2008 1:35:00 AM
Recently I got a customer question about how to use LINQ to Dataset in an .aspx file. The compiler was complaining that it couldn't find the AsEnumerable method that allows LINQ to work over a DataTable ("AsEnumerable is not a member of 'DataTable'"). The code he sent looks correct, so why is the compiler not picking up the extension method (defined in System.Data.DataSetExtensions.dll)?
<% @ Page Language ="vb" AutoEventWireup ="false" Co ... [ read more ]
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5/9/2008 8:55:00 PM
The Learn tab of the Visual Basic Developer Center is being updated with a bunch of new content and VS 2008 topics. If you look at the center of the page you'll see the list of topics and when you click one, you should now see some fresh stuff. Currently there's over 200 items presented on the topic pages and we're adding more every week. Right now each of the topics are displayed in a fixed order by content type (i.e. Webcast, Video, Article, Blog, etc.) but we plan on ... [ read more ]
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5/8/2008 4:47:00 PM
In the last two XML cookbook entries, we talked about the technique of using the ReplaceWith method to perform an identity transform. While this technique may meet your needs, it can introduce a problem in your code commonly referred to as the “Halloween” problem. Let’s take a look at what the problem is, and how to solve it. (For details on the “Halloween” problem and recommended solutions, see this topic in the documentation .)
The “Halloween” problem describes a scenario wh ... [ read more ]
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5/7/2008 11:54:00 PM
This post assumes you’ve read my previous Converting SQL to LINQ posts.
I haven’t had much in the way of specific requests for more LINQ posts, so I’d still welcome any suggestions that people want to offer. I did get one request about how to mimic the LIKE keyword functionality in VB LINQ.
In SQL, the LIKE keyword compares a string field against a pattern and returns a Boolean value representing whether the string matches the pattern. F ... [ read more ]
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5/5/2008 9:36:00 AM
I will be presenting on the VB IDE in Southern California this week at a series of user group meetings. The events will be held in the San Diego and the Los Angeles area . Charlie Calvert from the C# team will be flying down from Redmond to speak as well.
The schedule is as follows:
May 6, 6:00 PM: San Diego, http://sddotnetdg.org/
May 7, 6:30 PM: Irvine, http://www.ocdotnet.org/
May 8: 6:30 PM: Torrence, http://www.southbaynet.org/south ... [ read more ]
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5/1/2008 11:50:00 PM
Recipe 3 showed one way to work with mixed XML content using the XML Descendant axis property and the ReplaceWith method. This is one way to do an identity transform and we’ll look at another method in a later post. There is a key capability not mentioned in Recipe 3 that you will need for fully-functioning identity transforms. That is the concept of copying the inner XML of an element. You get the inner XML of an element from the Nodes property.
Recipe 3 transformed ... [ read more ]
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4/25/2008 6:19:00 PM
An identity transform in XSLT does just what the name implies: replace the identity of an element or attribute with a new identity. Identity transforms are especially critical when dealing with XML markup that is less rigid in its structure. Consider a documentation structure for news articles. Whenever a title is referred to within an article, it is highlighted with italics. However, the XML schema for the article does not specify italics, it specifies that the term is some type of title so t ... [ read more ]
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4/14/2008 9:18:00 PM
On Wednesday we released onto the VB Developer Center the second part of Maurice de Beijer's article on Windows Workflow. In this second article about developing custom Workflow Activities , Maurice takes a look at some of the more advanced aspects of Workflow Activity development.
Enjoy, - Beth Massi , VS Community
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4/3/2008 6:50:00 PM
Supporting the “pajama programmer”
Telecommuting is a great thing, and as the environmentally-conscious person that I strive to be, is something I wholeheartedly endorse when it can be done practically. My current job involves a lot of face-to-face meetings with people, so I don’t actually do a lot of it. However, I do work from home in the evenings (for example, when crafting blog posts), so it’s important to me that my setup for working from home is usable.
The challe ... [ read more ]
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3/31/2008 9:19:26 PM
All - I'm about to go on for my LINQ Deep Dive and Tips &Tricks session at VSLive in San Francisco. I posted all demos & slides here: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=LaunchVB&ReleaseId=805
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3/28/2008 6:46:00 PM
After some hard but fruitful work, we’ve just finished our “milestone quality” (MQ) efforts, the goal of which was to get ourselves ready for developing the next versions of Visual Studio, Team System, and .NET. Although not specific to Visual Basic, I’ve opted to use this “bully pulpit” to let you know about these efforts, which certainly do impact Visual Basic along with other Visual Studio and .NET products.
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the MQ work doesn’t ... [ read more ]
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3/28/2008 3:58:45 PM
Over the last few months, the VB and Data Programmability teams were working on fixing a performance problem with LINQ to SQL (which also manifested in LINQ to Entities). The issue was that LINQ to SQL was generating sub optimal T-SQL queries when the VB LINQ queries included filters over nullable columns.
For example, consider the following query: Dim q = From o In db.Orders Where o.EmployeeID = 123 Select o.CustomerID
In this scenario, the Orders.EmployeeID field is a nullable ... [ read more ]
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3/24/2008 11:41:24 PM
Last week I had the privilege of speaking in Lisbon, Portugal & Birmingham, England at launch events for Visual Studio 2008. There seemed to be a lot of buzz and excitement in the air at both events -- no doubt due to the recent release of Visual Studio. TechDays, Portugal The TechDays event is similar to TechEd in that it's a four-day long affair with an ITPro track and a Developer track and tons of exciting sessions, breakouts, Hands-on-Labs, and experts at booths. I only a ... [ read more ]
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3/24/2008 7:47:00 PM
I recently ran into an interesting threading problem that I wanted to share, so that perhaps I can save some people from the same confusion I had.
I started with a C# application someone else had written. I’ll call it “DeltaEngine” for the purpose of this post. DeltaEngine calls into a native assembly and handles certain events from it.
I created a solution where I referenced DeltaEngine as a library project, and called into it from a VB proje ... [ read more ]
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3/24/2008 7:07:00 PM
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 uploaded a couple more that I did on Windows Forms development. One is on the new DataRepeater control available in the ... [ read more ]
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3/24/2008 3:36:00 AM
One more set of control skins is up and ready for use. I had hoped to have two ready, but one set needed some additional tweaking work that I can't get to until I return to Seattle on 4/14.
This new set is very rough and organic in appearance and maybe even a bit esoteric, but it can still work on various sites or it can be used in early mockups of a site to give the mockups a rough and sketched appearance. I take this sort of approach to many of my early mockups; especially, if I don’t ... [ read more ]
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3/23/2008 8:22:00 PM
I wanted to let you know about a hotfix we recently released that may help solve some performance issues you may have run into using Visual Studio 2008.
Details
The hotfix is a 3.98MB download and can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946344
It addresses performance issues in the following scenarios:
• The IDE takes a long time to build/rebuild the solution.
... [ read more ]
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3/21/2008 2:03:00 AM
MVP Maurice de Beijer is at it again with another great article on Workflow Foundation (WF), this time showing us how to create custom workflow activities in " The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 1) ". This is the first of a two part series on how to create custom activities but if you need to get started with an intro first you can check out his Workflow Foundation 101 article as well. Thanks Maurice!
And don't forget to check the VB Dev Center often for more great ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/19/2008 11:23:00 PM
This entry in the cookbook shows how you can access descendant and ancestor elements in an XML document using Visual Basic, XML Axis properties, and LINQ to XML objects.
Descendants
Visual Basic provides XML Axis properties that enable you to easily refer to child nodes and attributes. As is often the case with XML, you may need to reference sub-elements that show up in different levels of the XML hierarchy. In that case, you can use the XML Descendant axis property . ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/15/2008 8:50:00 PM
Do you use code snippets (introduced in VB 2005)? If you do, then you've probably noticed the green highlighting that stays around for the lifetime of the file. We've heard *a lot* of feedback that once you are done customizing the snippet, it is distracting to see this highlighting stay around. To address this, VB 2008 has improved the heuristics that determine when you are done using the snippet. It has also added some new commands that allow you to control whether or not the highlighting app ... [ read more ]
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3/15/2008 8:46:31 PM
You probably didn’t notice it, but we made some important and beneficial changes to the Support Statement for Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 just a few weeks ago, and I want to share the good news. First, just like Vista, the Visual Basic 6 runtime is officially supported on Windows Server 2008. Second, we have expanded the list of ActiveX controls that are officially supported as part of Vista and Windows Server 2008. For background, when we first ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/14/2008 4:56:17 PM
Jared here again. I very excited to announce we recently released a tool I've been working on to MSDN that will greatly help with using PInvoke in managed code. The tool is called the "PInvoke Interop Assistant" and is included as part of a MSDN article on marshalling data for PInvoke and Reverse PInvoke scenarios. Here is a link to the article and tool Article: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164193.aspx Tool: CLRInsideOut2008_01.exe The motivat ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/14/2008 1:53:08 AM
All -- I'm very excited to be speaking at launch events in Lisbon, Portugal and Birmingham, England within the next week. After a 17 hour journey, with much jet-lagged-sleepiness in my eyes, I'll be speaking tomorrow morning at 9:30am in room A3 of the Centro de Congressos de Lisboa. DEV10 - Expert VB.NET 2008: Past, Present, and Future Do you remember your first Basic program? Visual Basic has come a long way from a simple event handling language to a fully capable Object-Orie ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/12/2008 5:36:00 AM
One of my all time favorite features in C# and CPP has been the conditional operator (?:). The brevity and elegance introduced by this operator in the code is unparalleled. We had IIF in all the previous versions of VB.net, which was not an operator in the true sense (It was a call to a function). But now with Visual Studio 2008, we have taken an "i" from this function and promoted it to operator status. "IF" can now be used instead of "IIF" . It provides ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/12/2008 12:19:00 AM
Silverlight 2 beta one is now available with lots of great new functionality!! You can go to Silverlight.net to find important downloads, specific details about new functionality, and very cool sample applications. So, what I want to talk about today is the controls that Silverlight 2 now provides. There are a bunch of new controls available and these include...
§ Button
§ Toggle Button
§ Radio Button
§ Check ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/11/2008 10:18:00 PM
Go take an early peak at what the VB and C# teams are cooking up for the next version by visiting the Language Futures page on Code Gallery . Code Gallery is not just about samples . It also allows us to host threaded discussions and the teams want your feedback on some features they are considering for the next version of Visual Studio. Charlie has moved his Future Focus blog discussions into this Code Gallery page as well so that all the teams can engage with the community ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/5/2008 5:51:00 PM
I apologize right away that it's been a while since I've blogged about the interop forms toolkit although I've been doing my best to keep up with issues and questions on the interop forums . It seems from the mail I've received that a lot of people are having good success at extending their legacy vb6 apps in interesting ways using the toolkit. This post is a follow-up to the channel9 video that Beth posted here .
What's New - VS 20 ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/5/2008 6:23:00 AM
Today I posted a Channel 9 interview with Todd Apley, Senior Test Lead on the VB Team, where he shows us a variety of tips and tricks with using the Interop Forms Toolkit on Visual Studio 2008. He also shows us how to deploy a hybrid application built with VB 6 and VB.NET using XCopy deployment and RegFree-COM. Todd will also be posting follow-up information here on this blog. Also, check out interop posts here , articles on my blog on interop as well as ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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3/3/2008 1:25:00 AM
I have a confession to make. I’m not a database guy. I’ve done a lot of varied coding over my career, but somehow I’ve never been directly involved in the guts of database coding. Whenever my code needed some sort of data-caching mechanism, I’ve tended to “roll my own,” as the saying goes. Therefore, when we first started working on Linq for VS2008, I was quite excited as it was my chance to really learn something about the ins and outs of data programming. &nbs ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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2/21/2008 8:22:00 PM
I was working on a blog entry about replacing XSLT transforms with Visual Basic XML Literals. As the entry progressed, I noticed that it was really, really long. So, Avner Aharoni and I talked things over and we decided to break it up into multiple entries and start a series, much like the LINQ Cookbook that was started a few months back.
Introducing the VB XML Cookbook. We’ll use these entries to show quick and easy solutions using XML Literals in Visual Basic. In many cases we’ll referen ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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2/19/2008 5:00:00 PM
Yesterday on the Visual Basic Developer Center we released a new article by VB MVP , Maurice DeBeijer on getting started with Windows Workflow called Windows Workflow 101 . This is the first in a series of Workflow articles by Maurice. If you're struggling with how to use this technology in your applications this is a great place to start. The next couple articles will explore more advanced senarios and building custom activities. Thanks Maurice!
Enjoy, - Beth Massi , Visual Studio Co ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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2/18/2008 7:50:00 PM
Check it out, the team just released a new version of the Visual Basic Power Packs which now includes a Data Repeater control. Power Packs are free Add-Ins, Controls, Components, and Tools for you to use that make developing .NET applications even easier.
From the Power Packs Team:
Today we are announcing the release of the third version of the Microsoft Visual Basic Power Packs!
This version includes a new Data Repeater control that enables you to use ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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2/12/2008 4:47:00 PM
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series. It makes the same assumptions as Part 8, and I will pick up where I left off, covering Full Outer Join. Once again, I recognize this isn’t an ideal situation, so if you’d like to see better support of Full Outer Join in a future VB release, you can file a suggestion from our product feedback site.
A Full Outer Join is basically like the union of the results of a Left Outer Join and Right Ou ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/31/2008 7:37:00 PM
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series.
After my post on joins , I’ve had some questions about outer joins. As you can see in part 6, VB9 doesn’t have smooth support for Left or Right join. I showed how to get similar functionality with Group Join, but I’ve looked into the subject some more, and want to give everyone a more extensive explanation of how to get left, right, and full ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/31/2008 4:20:00 AM
I once had to learn how to juggle in a very brief time in order to get an “A” in my high school computer science class. I am not making this up. The idea was that juggling, being a systemic process, was somehow analogous to writing programs and… well, it sort of made sense at the time.
I’d done well that semester (my final semester) and was looking forward to getting a good grade in the class. The instructor (probably the best teacher I’d ever had) gave m ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/29/2008 11:02:00 PM
I've just posted a final set of chapters (Chapters 25 - 31). This completes our conversion efforts and you now have access to entire sample code from Petzold's book in VB. I would like to thank Evan and Ged who have been working with me on this. You guys rock!!!
A few things to note:
I moved all the code to the new MSDN Code Gallery . This is a central place where we can share sample applications and code snippets. You can also participate and contribut ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/22/2008 6:19:41 PM
In addition to Connect , you can now report Visual Basic bugs directly in the Visual Basic Forums. The forum posts get entered as a bug or product suggestion into VB’s internal bug tracking system. With this we hope to take Forums (our vibrant online channel for feedback) a step further by making it easier to submit bugs and product suggestions. Currently this pilot is integrated with 3 Visual Basic Forums, Visual Basic Language , Visual Basic Interop and Upgrade and Visual Bas ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/19/2008 4:01:00 PM
One of the things we have been working on recently was publishing sources of VisualBasic runtime library. I am very excited to announce that the sources of VB runtime (Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll) are publicly available now! This is a part of a more general work on making .Net Framework sources available to public ( http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx ). The most important res ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/18/2008 3:54:00 AM
Today I posted a Channel 9 interview with Avner Aharoni, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team. In this interview Avner shows us how to enable XML IntelliSense in Visual Basic using the XML to Schema Wizard . He also shows the differences between how IntelliSense works with axis properties on XDocument and XElement objects and speaks to how the wizard can infer multiple schemas from multiple sources -- as well as the affect XML namespaces have on IntelliSense. Get ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/11/2008 5:30:00 PM
Our goal in designing VB2008 IntelliSense was to make users of the feature the most productive that they could be. One problem we found in watching people use the feature, is that sometimes intelliSense displays so many items that it is hard to know whether or not you're close to the item you're looking for. You basically have to read them all of them to know. (Not very time-efficient...) Thus, we added a new feature in VB2008 IntelliSense to make the list filter-as-you-type. Here's an illustra ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/10/2008 5:30:00 PM
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 tip and view the variable's members:
Click on a value in the righthand column to edit it. Start typing:
To verify, look in the ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/9/2008 5:30:00 PM
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:
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VBTeam via
The Visual Basic Team
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1/9/2008 7:00:00 AM
With the help of one little hotkey, you can now make the VS2008 IntelliSense list transparent! Just press
CTRL . This is especially convenient when you need to see the code underneath the list.
Watch it in action :)
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VBTeam via
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1/9/2008 12:52:00 AM
I've decided to start a "Did you know?" series with tips & tricks. First off is my favorite IDE feature in VB2008: IntelliSense Everywhere! Did you know about all the new places where you can now find intelliSense in VB2008? If you're like me, once you try 2008 IntelliSense you won't be able to go back to 2005.
VB's mission statement is to be the most productive tool for building .NET-connected applications. The VB IDE tools certainly support this point, with intelliSense in particular. ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/8/2008 7:31:00 PM
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series:
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators
Converting ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/7/2008 7:59:00 PM
Happy new year! Hope you enjoyed your holiday break! And hopefully you found some time to read Petzold's book and try out VB samples we've posted so far. :)
Evan and Ged had been working very hard to convert rest of chapters throughout December and I just posted Chapters 13 - 24 to Applications = Code + Markup (Charles Petzold) Visual Basic Code Sample page. We also have several more chapters converted but since we have a couple of chapters missing bet ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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1/4/2008 4:08:00 PM
Looking for another reason to upgrade to 2008? How about performance! In addition to making tasks easier for you from release to release, another way we can save you time and make you more productive is by making the product faster! This is a goal we are very commited to on the VB team, and for which we have dedicated an entire virtual team for the Orcas release. Take a look at the stats below to see some interesting improvements.
[**DISCLAIMER: The data posted here is what I have ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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12/31/2007 6:45:00 PM
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series:
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators
Converting ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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12/28/2007 12:23:00 AM
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 the team can offer a direction. "
You bet! We have a lot of attention to LINQ and Forms-over-data in VB in our learning content , but we're ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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12/23/2007 10:41:00 PM
Here's a holiday present just for you -- in keeping with what has become a holiday tradition on Channel 9 we have Chris Anderson , Don Box and now our very own Amanda Silver singing you a special holiday song.
You can view the full video and sample code here on Channel9 (Thanks Jeff and C9 team!): http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=367997%20%20
With love,
Microsoft Friends of VB
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VBTeam via
The Visual Basic Team
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12/19/2007 4:01:00 PM
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 understood some of what Brian showed me ;). Visual Basic is a great language for mathematics as well as all kinds of other applications. Brian ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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12/19/2007 4:00:00 PM
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 Algebra, a branch of mathematics, sometimes called Abstract Algebra. Consider fields and vector spaces . I'll show you operator overloads ... [ read more ]
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12/19/2007 12:05:00 AM
This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series:
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators
C ... [ read more ]
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VBTeam via
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12/18/2007 11:09:00 PM
Ingredients:
· Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher)
Categories: LINQ to Objects
Introduction:
LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 11 showed how you can use LINQ queries to perform calculations on sets of data using a set of standard aggregate functions such as Average , and Sum . In this recipe, you will learn how to add an extension method so that you can include your own cust ... [ read more ]
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