January, 2008

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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... ...

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...

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 :)

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...

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...

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...

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...