November, 2007

This post assumes you’ve read Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics . I’ve made the following name changes since the last post, which I hope will make the code examples clearer: · Customers -> CustomerTable · Orders -> OrderTable...

Visual Studio has a small but extremely useful feature that allows you to hook external tools directly into the IDE’s Tools menu. All you have to do is click Tools->External Tools… and then you can add your own custom menu items that will launch a...

If you find yourself looking for something to do with your awesome new copy of Visual Studio 2008 , you should check out the December 2007 edition of MSDN magazine . It features an article, written by me, that provides a walk through on how to visualize...

Been a while since I posted Chapter 3 of Petzold's WPF book converted to VB . In case you missed it, Patrick started working on this project which I took over early this month. Anyway, I am very excited to tell you about progress we've been able to make...

I guess I've been working too hard on getting the product ready to ship to notice that Bart has put together an awesome blog series on VB9 . It includes discussion of a feature called runtime agility or compiler agility that we haven't taken up on this...

Today 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...

Yesterday I promised to post about the hidden gems in Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2008 that you haven’t read about in blog posts or seen at conferences. I forgot that I mentioned a few of my favorite features in the Beta1 announcement where I...

As you may already know, VB LINQ statements enable SQL-like syntax for queries in the VB language. LINQ syntax doesn't match SQL syntax exactly, so if you are already working with SQL or familiar with SQL queries, you may find yourself wanting to convert...

Hooray! Today we’ve finally shipped Visual Studio 2008, previously known as “Orcas”, previously known as some symbol which doesn’t have an ascii representation. We’ve come a long way , but it’s been a great ride. In...

(This post assumes that you’ve read my previous post on Windows Media at http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2007/10/30/let-the-music-play-matt-gertz.aspx – I will be modifying that code in this post.) After posting my media player blog sample a couple...

It looks like Don Box is really liking Visual Basic 9 and it's unique XML support, LINQ query syntax , and lambdas . He even mentions in a post about authentication with REST that his dream stack would be doing direct XML payload programming with Visual...

We recently announced the availability of Windows Home Server . Here's an interview on Channel 9 with Dev Lead, Chris Gray, where he talks about the extensibility model and then walks through how to create an add-in for the Home Server console using Visual...

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...

Ingredients: · Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to SQL Introduction: As we add cookbook entries, we will include performance improvement tips where appropriate. Here’s a tip that you can use with LINQ to SQL to speed...

I am Young Joo, PM @ VB team. I will be helping out Patrick on converting samples in Charles Petzold's WPF book (Applications = Code + Markup) to Visual Basic. This is an exciting project and I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. Another exciting news...

Have you downloaded the latest Refactoring tools from Developer Express? There is a free version available on the Visual Basic Developer Center . Once you download, you will discover a number of cool capabilities you can now do in the Visual Basic IDE...

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...