March, 2008

All - I'm about to go on for my LINQ Deep Dive and Tips &Tricks session at VSLive in San Francisco. I posted all demos & slides here: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=LaunchVB&ReleaseId=805

After some hard but fruitful work, we’ve just finished our “milestone quality” (MQ) efforts, the goal of which was to get ourselves ready for developing the next versions of Visual Studio, Team System, and .NET. Although not specific to Visual Basic,...

Over the last few months, the VB and Data Programmability teams were working on fixing a performance problem with LINQ to SQL (which also manifested in LINQ to Entities). The issue was that LINQ to SQL was generating sub optimal T-SQL queries when the...

Last week I had the privilege of speaking in Lisbon, Portugal & Birmingham, England at launch events for Visual Studio 2008. There seemed to be a lot of buzz and excitement in the air at both events -- no doubt due to the recent release of Visual...

I recently ran into an interesting threading problem that I wanted to share, so that perhaps I can save some people from the same confusion I had. I started with a C# application someone else had written. I’ll call it “DeltaEngine” for the purpose...

If you missed it, last week 48 new How Do I videos ( Forms over data , Windows development , Office development and Security ) were added to the Visual Basic Developer Center in addition to adding new download formats for 12 others. Many thanks to Rob...

One more set of control skins is up and ready for use. I had hoped to have two ready, but one set needed some additional tweaking work that I can't get to until I return to Seattle on 4/14. This new set is very rough and organic in appearance and maybe...

I wanted to let you know about a hotfix we recently released that may help solve some performance issues you may have run into using Visual Studio 2008. Details The hotfix is a 3.98MB download and can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com...

MVP Maurice de Beijer is at it again with another great article on Workflow Foundation (WF), this time showing us how to create custom workflow activities in " The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 1) ". This is the first of a two part series...

This entry in the cookbook shows how you can access descendant and ancestor elements in an XML document using Visual Basic, XML Axis properties, and LINQ to XML objects. Descendants Visual Basic provides XML Axis properties that enable you to easily...

Do you use code snippets (introduced in VB 2005)? If you do, then you've probably noticed the green highlighting that stays around for the lifetime of the file. We've heard *a lot* of feedback that once you are done customizing the snippet, it is distracting...

You probably didn’t notice it, but we made some important and beneficial changes to the Support Statement for Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 just a few weeks ago, and I want to share the good news. First, just like Vista...

Jared here again. I very excited to announce we recently released a tool I've been working on to MSDN that will greatly help with using PInvoke in managed code. The tool is called the "PInvoke Interop Assistant" and is included as part of a MSDN article...

All -- I'm very excited to be speaking at launch events in Lisbon, Portugal and Birmingham, England within the next week. After a 17 hour journey, with much jet-lagged-sleepiness in my eyes, I'll be speaking tomorrow morning at 9:30am in room A3 of the...

One of my all time favorite features in C# and CPP has been the conditional operator (?:). The brevity and elegance introduced by this operator in the code is unparalleled. We had IIF in all the previous versions of VB.net, which was not an operator in...

Silverlight 2 beta one is now available with lots of great new functionality!! You can go to Silverlight.net to find important downloads, specific details about new functionality, and very cool sample applications. So, what I want to talk about today...

Go take an early peak at what the VB and C# teams are cooking up for the next version by visiting the Language Futures page on Code Gallery . Code Gallery is not just about samples . It also allows us to host threaded discussions and the teams want your...

I apologize right away that it's been a while since I've blogged about the interop forms toolkit although I've been doing my best to keep up with issues and questions on the interop forums . It seems from the mail I've received that a lot of people are...

Today I posted a Channel 9 interview with Todd Apley, Senior Test Lead on the VB Team, where he shows us a variety of tips and tricks with using the Interop Forms Toolkit on Visual Studio 2008. He also shows us how to deploy a hybrid application built...

I have a confession to make. I’m not a database guy. I’ve done a lot of varied coding over my career, but somehow I’ve never been directly involved in the guts of database coding. Whenever my code needed some sort of data-caching mechanism, I’ve tended...