Today I 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...

Scott posted a podcast with with Paul Vick , Principal VB Architect, and Paul Yuknewicz , Senior Program Manager on the VB Team about the past, present and future of Visual Basic. Check it out ! Enjoy!

I just posted a Channel 9 interview with Avner Aharoni , a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, as he dives into LINQ to XML and XML Literals in Visual Basic 9 and explains namespace bubbling and the performance gains you may see using XML Literals...

I just released a Channel 9 screencast with Lisa Feigenbaum , PM on the VB IDE Team, where she shows us how to use Refactor!, the free add-in for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 that provides over 30 refactorings for Visual Basic. Lisa walks us through all...

Rod Paddock's latest Community Article is up on the Visual Basic Developer Center on Creating Visual Studio Add-Ins which first appeared in CoDe Magazine . Rod goes a little bit deeper than I did when building an add-in and shows how to work with the...

One of the Dev's, Matt Manela , on my VS community team has started playing with Visual Basic. I always enjoy reading the adventures a developer has learning a new language. You can read the excitement someone has as they learn. I think I'm the same way...

I've mentioned before that you can use XML literals in VB 9 to do text merging so I figured it should be pretty easy to do some mail merging in Word the same way. Word 2007 (and Excel, etc) now uses a standard XML format called Office Open XML to describe...

With Visual Basic 9 and LINQ you can easily create XML from multiple data sources including relational data, other XML sources or any other queryable object. Since most modern systems interact with each other in some form of XML the possibilities are...

All good things come to an end. My last day at DevTeach I filled in for a speaker that got caught at the border at the last minute and presented a session focusing completely on LINQ to XML in Visual Basic 9. I went through a lot of examples and got really...

My second day at the conference has been the best so far. First off, I presented a great session on "What's New in Visual Basic 9" and it was a hit! It may have been because of the beer that was available outside ;-) but I think it was because of all...

I'm up in Vancouver at DevTeach and I have to say that so far it's been a great conference! I did a demo of my Visual Studio Tip of the Day browser and built an add-in ( like I showed here ) for part of the keynote with Ken Levy of the VSX team . This...

Yesterday the VS Ecosystem team released the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 and the Visual Studio 2008 shell . The VS 2008 SDK contains full native Visual Basic support and contains many VB samples. What was in the VB Pack for the VS 2005 SDK is now included...

Early holiday gifts from Microsoft! Today we announced the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5! Come and get it: Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition (FREE) .NET Framework 3.5 (FREE) Visual Studio 2008 Trials Also check out...

I made some modifications to my Visual Studio Tip of the Day browser application I created last week. There I am downloading the RSS feed from Sara's blog and saving it to disk so that I only retrieve the next tip every 24 hours. However, the RSS only...

If you missed Young's post on the VB Team blog , he has started helping Patrick convert all the samples from Charles Petzold's WPF book (Applications = Code + Markup). Evan Lim who currently teaches WPF & Blend courses at Foothill Community College...

I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Bill Horst , a member of the Visual Basic QA team. Bill shows us the ins and outs type inference in the newest version of Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008. He shows us how the new Option Infer works and how...

I'm sitting here with writer's block on an article I'm supposed to be writing so in order to coax the technical writing muse I decided to write an application I've been meaning to do for over a month. If you didn't know, on Sara's blog she has a category...

I'll be speaking at DevTeach in Vancouver November 26th - 30th. This is a great conference that I've been speaking at for a few years. Normally in Montreal (in the Spring), they're starting to hit the other major Canadian cities. The level of speakers...

If you missed the BIG announcement , Soma announced during the keynote at TechEd Barcelona that we will release Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 by the end of November 2007! Yeeehaaa! I'm so exited to get the final version of VS into all...

Here's a summary of all the content the VB team members, including myself, have created for you on the Developer Center these past couple of months to make it easier to find. We launched a new UI on the Developer Center and it's a great place to visit...

There's a new article up on the VB Dev Center by Rob Windsor , a follow up from his first Getting Started with WCF article, called Using Custom Business Objects with Windows Communication Foundation . Rob explains how to serialize your own custom business...

We just released a new set of How-Do-I videos in our LINQ series on LINQ to XML in Visual Basic. These 4 new videos will help get you up to speed on using this new language feature in Visual Basic 2008. They walk you through the basics of LINQ to XML...

One of my very favorite holidays is Halloween. I've always loved dressing up as something really gross or scary and freaking people out. Every year I throw a costume party the Saturday before Halloween. This year I was a demon and Alan was the devil....

One really handy thing to do with relational data is to import and export it to Excel. This can be a total snap using LINQ to XML in Visual Basic 2008. For example, let's say I want to import data from an Excel spreadsheet into a local database file like...

A couple quick tips here when using XML literals in your Visual Basic programs. #1: I've started using XML literals everywhere I had been using multiline strings and text merging (as I explained in this post ). For instance, I started using them in...