Amanda Silver

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...

I’m very excited to announce that the next tech preview of Visual Basic 9.0 which includes support for Language INtegrated Query (codename LINQ) and XML integration atop the XLinq API is now available on the VB Future and the LINQ project websites. This is the result of a ton of hard work for a significant portion of the team and we’re very happy to get it out to you. ...

The first preview of the next version of Visual Basic goes live this morning! I’m sitting in Bill and Jim’s keynote right now, waiting for our announcement to be made public. The release is part of the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework, code-named...

Just wanted to point out a paper Brian Beckman and Erik Meijer wrote on the XML features of VB9.

By Amanda Silver John Rivard , one of the two tech leads on the Visual Basic team, has entered the blogosphere! His first post is a doosey – it explains why Visual Studio 8.0 doesn’t cross target (let you target version 1.0 and 1.1 of the CLR and...

By Amanda Silver I just wanted to let you know that we’re working furiously on turning the VB9 features into an actual product, understanding how the debugger and editor should support them, and getting another CTP out to you all. Your feedback...

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...

At the Mix conference today in Las Vegas, Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie were dropping goodies like tootsie pops from a piñata. There was so much packed into their over two hour keynote that I thought it would be useful to distill the announcements down...

Pleased to announce that the Visual Basic 2005 Language Specification is now live and available here . Also, be sure to check out Ken Levy’s channel9 interview of S. Somasegar , the Vice President of the Developer Division, where he talks about none other...

Woohoo! Its official , we finally got Orcas Beta1 out the door! We’re very excited to get this release out to you so we can finally talk about some of the stuff we’ve been working on in addition to the LINQ and XML feature-set. We believe that Orcas Beta1...

Some videos on VB futures have been posted on Channel9 at: · Paul Vick and Amanda Silver - VB Language Futures : http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=116700 · Paul Vick and Erik Meijer - Dynamic Programming in Visual Basic http:/...

Hello from Orlando! I’ve been at TechEd 2007 this week in very sunny Orlando. As part of my demo prep, I had to create a little xml transform to convert the TechEd schedule that I got off the www.msteched.com website in an Excel XML format into a more...

Developers in the Bay area! Next week, John Rivard, a tech lead on the Visual Basic team, will be talking about best practices and gotchas when versioning .NET assemblies. Here's the talk abstract: This presentation addresses the topic of versioning ...

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

We've gotten asked a few times what the VB 9.0 preview bits available here work on. It works on the RC candidate that's available on the PDC CD & for download on MSDN. Enjoy! - Amanda

Waiting for my ridiculously priced latte this morning (I am a Seattleite , after all) made me miss the intro to Eric’s keynote session. As I was walking toward exhibit Hall A, I noticed people conspicuously looking at me. I thought it was because I had...

Hooray! Visual Basic 2008 Beta2 has been released to the wild today to return to its natural habitat – the desktops of our beloved customers. (Please note our smiling GPM's face on that landing page -- he's so happy the Beta is done.) What’s inside...

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...

I'm *really* excited to be at the PDC this year. I've been to a few PDCs in the past and I think that this one is going to be the best, by far. In addition to the great demos, panels, and meet the team events, there will be a lot of buzz and discussion...

I just posted an interview with Amanda on Channel 9 where she walks us through the new LINQ syntax available in VS 2008 Beta 2 . I also posted some How Do I videos on LINQ to help get you started -- look for more of these beginning of next week! 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...

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

If you haven't seen or experienced Second Life it's pretty amazing. It's an online, 3D, digital world. Visual Studio has created an island where you can come listen to live Microsoft presenters in this virtual world's live presentation theater! Amanda...

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...

Now that Orcas Beta1 is on your machines, we’re trying to finish up the Beta2 version of Orcas to deliver those features you are so eagerly awaiting – features like Group By, explicit Joins, Nullable, keyword Intellisense, and Lambda Expressions. Things...