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Visual Studio 2010 has a new feature, Embed Interop Types , that can simplify application deployment and solve those pesky issues that can arise when using COM Interop and Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). If you’ve ever had to ship multiple versions of an application that automates Microsoft...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus) It’s been a while since I wrote one of these XML cookbook entries. Here’s some info on a common problem: Really big XML files. I’m going to show you two things in this recipe. The first is a tip on reading very...

A while back, I remember being asked if there was a simple way to expose a source XML document as an object with properties. That is, if the root XML element had a child element <Name>Doug</Name> , then the object would have a Name property that was a string and returned “Doug”. The catch...

While helping some Windows API folks with some sample code this week, I stumbled upon...uh...I mean “carefully researched” an issue that you might find handy. You may be aware that the RaiseEvent statement automatically checks to verify if an event handler exists before raising the event. If the event...

In the second part of my interview with Doug Rothaus, he describes the new implicit line continuation feature in Visual Basic 2010. Learn about the most common scenarios that no longer require the underscore character (_) in the topic, Statements in Visual Basic . See the Video: implicit Line Continuation...

In this interview, Doug Rothaus, a programming writer on the Visual Studio User Education team, describes the auto-implemented properties in Visual Basic 2010. He also demonstrates some of the code examples in his Help topic: Auto-Implemented Properties . See the Video: Auto-Implement Properties .  ...

This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole . This time we have Doug Rothaus, a writer on the documentation side. Doug has blogged up an XML cookbook here on the team blog with a bunch of "recipes" on how to use different...

Most XSLT programmers are familiar with this XSLT transform to copy an XML file. <? xml version = " 1.0 " encoding = " utf-8 " ?> < xsl:stylesheet version = " 1.0 " xmlns:xsl = " http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform " > < xsl:output method = " xml " indent = " yes " /> ...

In the last two XML cookbook entries, we talked about the technique of using the ReplaceWith method to perform an identity transform. While this technique may meet your needs, it can introduce a problem in your code commonly referred to as the “Halloween” problem. Let’s take a look at what the problem...

Recipe 3 showed one way to work with mixed XML content using the XML Descendant axis property and the ReplaceWith method. This is one way to do an identity transform and we’ll look at another method in a later post. There is a key capability not mentioned in Recipe 3 that you will need for fully-functioning...

An identity transform in XSLT does just what the name implies: replace the identity of an element or attribute with a new identity. Identity transforms are especially critical when dealing with XML markup that is less rigid in its structure. Consider a documentation structure for news articles. Whenever...

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 refer to child nodes and attributes. As is often...

I was working on a blog entry about replacing XSLT transforms with Visual Basic XML Literals. As the entry progressed, I noticed that it was really, really long. So, Avner Aharoni and I talked things over and we decided to break it up into multiple entries and start a series, much like the LINQ Cookbook...

Ingredients: · Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to Objects Introduction: LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 11 showed how you can use LINQ queries to perform calculations on sets of data using a set of standard aggregate functions such as Average , and Sum . In this recipe,...

Ingredients: · Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to DataSet Introduction: You can use aggregate functions in LINQ queries to perform calculations on sets of data. Visual Basic includes a set of standard aggregate functions for LINQ queries: All , Any , Average ,...

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 up queries that you will call numerous times...

Ingredients: · Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ-To-XML Introduction: You can use the Order By clause to easily sort the results of a LINQ query in Visual Basic. A common requirement for sorted data, however, is that the user be able to choose the fields that the...

Ingredients: · Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ-To-XML Instructions: · Create a new Console Application in Visual Basic. · Create an RSS document. Add the following code to Sub Main . Dim rss = <? xml version = " 1.0 " ?> < rss version = " 2.0...