Lucian's VBlog

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Allow unambiguous types from ambiguous namespaces. This request arises from VB's powerful "import" feature, which is more flexible than that of C#, but which introduces...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] VB already has a powerful "Select Cast" statement, e.g. Select Case x Case Is = 1 Console .WriteLine( "x is equal to 1" ) Case Is > 7 Console .WriteLine(...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA 1: Allow range expressions as a literal for IEnumerable. For instance, ' This expression Dim x = 5 To 14 ' should be syntactic sugar for this one Dim x...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Have different syntax for assignment "=" or ":=", versus comparison "==". Currently "=" is used for both. Bill McCarthy writes, "To determine which one it means, you...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Casts should flow from left to right. Here are some candidate syntaxes: Dim x1 = ( HtmlPage .Document.GetElementsByTagName( "a" ).First As HtmlElement ).Children...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Allow extension methods to be defined in their "extension class". It would look like this: Dim x = "hello" x.LogToDisk() ' extension method defined on strings ...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: GetType should work on instances. ' Currently we can get the System.Type of a named type Dim t As Type = GetType ( IEnumerable ( Of )) ' We'd also like to...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: In a "For Each" loop, put the loop control variable's scope inside the loop. Look at the following code: Dim lambdas(10) As Func ( Of Integer , Integer ) For x...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Use [ ] for arrays. This suggestion came from Bill McCarthy. He writes that it's hard to tell the difference between array-indexing and other uses of parentheses. We...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: An "XML pattern". Currently we have a "collection pattern" so that For Each and "New From {...}" can be used on arbitrary user-defined types. And we also have a "query...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA 1: Shared Classes. We should allow "Shared Classes". Their members are all implicitly shared (like a Module), they can't be instantiated (like a Module), but their contents...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Allow Catch statements in Using blocks. A Using block is just a Try/Finally block that calls "Dispose" in its destructor. It'd be handy if you could stick "Catch" statements...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Reflect on your caller with __CALLER_MEMBER__ . Introduce three new "optional parameter defaults" which are called __CALLER_FILE__, __CALLER_LINE__ and __CALLER_MEMBER__...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Allow date literals in a subset of ISO8601 format , e.g. #2010-01-26# or #2010-01-26T21:16Z#. (Currently VB only allows the US-specific form #MM/dd/yyyy#). Pretty-listing...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Allow statements to start with parentheses. Currently, every statement in VB must start with either an identifier or a keyword. We should allow statements to start with...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Allow a CObj in constants and attributes. Currently it's not allowed, for instance, to write Const x As Object = CObj("hello") or to pass CObj(1) into an attribute, Both...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: "unsafe" and pointer support. VB should support unsafe programming, like C#, with pointers and all that. SCENARIO: Pointer support is useful for people who write marshallers...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Extension properties. We should add extension properties, just like we have extension methods. SCENARIO: In Javascript and a host of web-related DSLs, there are...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB ". Just to note, I've been reading everyone's comments -- thank you everyone for the feedback -- but I want to finish putting up the entire list before I get round to responding.] ...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] VB's "static variables" are a powerful and useful time-saver. They declare a variable with a one-off initialization which is shared amongst all invocations of a instance's...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Custom property templates. We should have an easy way for users to write boiler-plate code in their properties. This would include things like INotifyPropertyChanged...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Add a #light directive, like F#, to reduce VB's verbosity . We already eliminated the dreaded "_" to make VB syntax look cleaner. We could also use layout as in Python...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Allow a non-empty default partial method. (This suggestion from Bill McCarthy ). For instance, Partial Class C Partial Private Sub f( ByVal s As String ) Console...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Introduce a syntax for null-propagating field access. We could use the syntax ".?" for this. For instance, ' What the user writes Dim name = Customer .? Name ...

[This post is part of a series, " wish-list for future versions of VB "] IDEA: Async and Resumable Methods. We should be able to use the "Async Programming Model" (APM) more easily, via an extra keyword "Async": Async Function Test() As Integer...