May, 2007

One of the great things about being on the VB team is that we’re generally in the loop early and often with teams developing new technologies and products. It’s always exciting to see ideas take shape, evolve into a product, and eventually hit the market...

My name is Jared Parsons and I am a developer on the VB Compiler and Debugger. One of the features I implemented for VB 9.0 is lexical closure support. This a great addition to the VB language and I wanted to do a series of blog posts to describe this...

Over a decade ago, before I joined Microsoft, I was a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon studying robotics. One of the things that you had to do to get into the doctoral program was pass a qualifier test (“the qual”), which was a three-hour oral examination...

Jared here again. For previous articles in this series please see Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Method Calls Thus far in the series we've only lifted variables that are declared in the same block/scope. What happens if we lift variables in...

I escaped from Redmond this week to present at VSLive Orlando on LINQ in Visual Studio Orcas. As promised, please find the slides and demos included as an attachment below. As mentioned during the talk – that was intended to be an overview. If you...

Friday we posted the first 8 videos of the Visual Basic Forms over Data "How-to" video series on MSDN. If you don't have the Visual Basic Dev Center as your homepage you might have missed the headline. ;-) This how-to video series is dedicated to getting...

For previous articles in this series, please see Part 1 - The basics Jared here again. This part of the series will focus on how method calls are handled in closures. As stated in the previous article, the purpose of closures is to allow all...

Today we launched the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 , which makes it easier than ever to upgrade VB6 applications to .NET. This new release builds on version 1.0 by adding support for the following features: Interop UserControls - These are .NET controls...

It’s funny how we come up with a VB feature sometimes. I remember one case pretty well. I was the new dev lead of the VB editor at the time, and I was talking about possible features for “Whidbey” (i.e. Visual Studio 2005) with my program manager, Sam...

John Lam just posted a screen cast of four dynamic languages interoperating in SIlverlight on the Mac! Check it out!

Last week I talked a bit about operator overloading, and used the concept to support a library of matrix functions. This week, we’ll use those functions in a Smart Device application to create a matrix calculator. Smart Device applications It’s...

Another entry in the annals of BASIC history today…. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sat down for an interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital for the D5 conference. One of the highlights of the video is recalling the agreement Apple...