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As you may have read in Jason’s announcement , today we announced that Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download . This is a huge release for Visual Basic as it provides full platform support for building Windows 8 Metro style apps, a first-class asynchronous programming experience, and...

If you’re looking for ways to get started with Entity Framework 4.0 in Visual Basic then be sure to check out this month’s issue of CODE Magazine. In it the Entity Framework team has put together a walkthrough that shows how to use EF4 in Silverlight, and best of all the entire article’s...

By now you've likely heard about the major new features coming in VB 2010, but there's also a number of smaller additions in the language and IDE that might not be as readily noticeable. "Hidden Gems" will be a multi-part series where we'll explore some of these smaller enhancements. First up - serialization...

This one’s going to be long, but for those of you who’ve felt the first 3 in this series were too easy I promise this one’s tougher J . Let’s say you want to list all the customers from a table in a ComboBox, and update the UI based on which one is selected. To do this we’ll need to bring back...

What’s wrong with the following WPF code? Class Window1 Sub OK_Click(sender As Object , e As RoutedEventArgs) Handles OK.Click MsgBox( "Button Clicked" ) End Sub End Class < Window x : Class ="Window1" xmlns ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation...

In yesterday’s post we saw that the use of the wrong comparison operator with Nothing in an If block can lead to surprising results. Let’s look at a slightly different case today: Dim x As Integer = Nothing If x = Nothing Then MsgBox( "A true statement - we land here" ) Else MsgBox...

Microsoft has this neat mailing list called “Spot the Bug” where developers can send interesting snippets of code that look correct but actually have subtle bugs in them. The puzzles are a lot of fun and I’ve always thought it’d be a fun thing to try here on the team blog. Over the past year or so I...

The other day I got an email from a developer asking an interesting question about VB10’s Auto-implemented Properties feature. “I am, however, somewhat confused regarding the properties feature you mentioned - i.e. turning 11 lines of get/set/backing variable into one line. Wouldn't this be exactly the...

About two years ago I posted some code that shows how to dynamically construct LINQ queries at runtime . On average there's a couple questions per month about trying it in some edge case, and usually the support already exists within the API. Recently though someone posted a question that has to do with...

As part of the new VB/C# co-evolution strategy , Visual Studio Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg has broadened his role. In addition to being Chief Architect for C#, he now sets the direction for both the VB.NET and C# languages. At TechEd, Anders participated in both the VB.NET and C# language presentations...

TechEd North America 2009 is right around the corner. For those of you attending, we look forward to spending time with you at the VB.NET sessions and Technical Learning Center (a.k.a. booth). I've pasted the VB.NET session list below. DTL04-INT Strategies to Upgrade Your Microsoft Visual Basic...

After three and a half days visiting user groups through Spain, Jon and I have flown back to the US. We got to meet some great people and had lots of fun talking about VB. The slide decks that we used on the trip are attached at the end of this post. PPT: Deep Dive on VB 9.0 (link to be added shortly...

This week Jonathan Aneja and I are traveling from city to city, and presenting to VB.Net user groups in Spain. We began the tour in Barcelona where we were speaking at TechEd EMEA, and will finish in Madrid. VB MVP Pep Lluis Blano organized the entire itinerary! Here are the topics for the presentations...

Continuing the community interviews from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time we interview Jonathan Aneja, VB Compiler Program Manager. Remember that you can take a look at the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center...

We have quite a few trips coming up over the next couple months, and we want to connect with you while we’re on the road. Here is our plan. Let us know where we can find you. ;-) October 6-7, 2008 Software Development Conference 2008 : http://www.sdc.nl/ Beth Massi October 8-10, 2008...

Last week I got the chance to visit the Toronto .NET User Group and give a talk on all the great new language features in VB2008. It was great to see so much excitement a round LINQ and especially XML Literals ! The slides and demo code are posted at the link below; here’s the session abstract...

LINQ at its core requires any data source to be queryable , which basically means it must implement IEnumerable. (It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, for a full explanation see section 11.21.2 of the Visual Basic 9.0 Language Specification ). Now when working with LINQ to Dataset we have...

Recently I got a customer question about how to use LINQ to Dataset in an .aspx file. The compiler was complaining that it couldn't find the AsEnumerable method that allows LINQ to work over a DataTable ("AsEnumerable is not a member of 'DataTable'"). The code he sent looks correct, so why is the compiler...

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 specified program. On a typical day I’ll probably...

Yesterday I got a question from a developer asking whether or not we could add something called "Option Strict Warn" to the language. This would give a developer a warning when using something like late binding or an implicit conversion, rather than disabling it altogether (through an error). As it...

A common requirement in forms-over-data applications is that users be able to search by any combination of fields to construct a dynamic query at run time. For example, the search feature in this application allows the user to find all records that meet criteria defined on multiple columns: ...

Ingredients: - Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) - Connection to Northwind database Categories: LINQ-To-Objects, LINQ-To-SQL Instructions: · Create a new Windows Forms project with a Northwind DataContext (for step-by-step instructions on how to do this please see Recipe #6 )...

Ingredients: - Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ-To-Objects Instructions: - Open Visual Studio 2008, and Click ‘File/New Project’. Find and double-click the ‘Console Application’ Icon - Add the following code: Module Module1 Sub Main() Dim primes...

Thanks to everyone who was able to make it out for this morning's webcast. We covered how to use the Interop Toolkit 2.0 to upgrade VB6 applications to VB.NET, how to deploy hybrid applications, and finally we touched on some other great interop resources available on MSDN. As promised the slide deck...

I came across a really cool article yesterday by James Ashley, which shows some of the cool things you can do with the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 . The three VB6 examples cover consuming a WebService (complete with a Dilbert icon showing up in the VB6 toolbox!), implementing multithreading using the BackgroundWorker...