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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...

There’s a new feature coming to VB, and already included in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview . The feature is called Namespace Global and it’ll make your life easier… if you part of your code belongs in a different namespace from the rest of your project, if you use...

Some great new video's on MSDN showing how to do async programming using the Async CTP. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh378091.aspx There are different versions of video's for both VB and C#. This is a great opportunity to see the power of the new Async languages featuresand follow through...

We're very happy to announce today the Async CTP for Visual Basic and C#. Async CTP homepage : http://msdn.com/vstudio/async Installer : http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=203690 Async discussion forums : http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/async/threads Asynchronous programming...

Visual Studio 2010 is almost out the door. Now is a good time to look back at what we didn't get into the language in this release, but would have wanted to, and so will consider for future releases. Over the coming weeks, each day, I'll blog on blogs.msdn.com/lucian about the ideas on our wish-list...

Our recent pos t on "negative sleeps in VB" was an April Fool's joke. VB doesn't have negative sleeps, and isn't going to. But the joke's on me! Several readers wrote back to say that other languages do have negative sleeps. Tony Hoare, inventor of "Quicksort" amongst other things, wrote: Did you...

[NOTE: please also read the followup to this article] .NET 4.0 will introduce many new threading and concurrency classes -- SpinLock, Parallel Linq, and ConcurrentDictionary to name but a few. The new feature that excites me the most is the ability to pass a negative argument to Thread.Sleep...

Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on using the Touchless SDK. The Touchless SDK enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. "Touch without touching." It's actually pretty cool! In this interview I meet up with Touchless SDK creator, Mike Wasserman...

Concurrency is an important topic on everyone's mind, when considering future trends for computing and programming languages. Concurrent Basic is a variant of the Visual Basic language, with new constructs baked in to help handle concurrency and parallelism, in a very natural way. Watch this high-energy...

We've just had a fascinating article about using VB's XML literals to produce web pages. I've been interested in the other side of the process: using VB's XML support to scrape web-pages for data. Here's the essential bit of code, which looks for something like <div class="content"><h2>Title<...

It's common that you want to launch an external process but supply input and capture the output. Here's one attempt: ' BAD CODE Using p As New System.Diagnostics.Process p.StartInfo.FileName = "cat" p.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = False p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = True p.StartInfo...

"Visual Basic Tips & Tricks" is an Italian online community that was started 10 years ago today. To be exact, the first tips were actually published in 1996 on a personal web page of the founder and leader, Gianluca Cannalire. However, the group recognizes the first day of the "real community" as...

1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead but I'm not really" 2. Romeo receives the message 3. Romeo finds Juliette looking dead, but knows she's not really dead 4. They live happily ever after vs. 1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead...

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0\bin\ildasm.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin\ildasm.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\ildasm.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\x64\ildasm.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\NETFX...

"My dog has no type." "How does he smell?" " Awful! " Two of the new features of VB10 -- array literals and multi-line lambdas -- are interesting from the language perspective because their expressions have no type! This article is for language lawyers. I remember at my very first undergraduate computer...

Here's a community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time with Lucian Wischik, a Developer on the team. I'm just getting to know Lucian but he is a very interesting and bright person who is just a pleasure to talk with (I hope he starts blogging a lot more ). When...

I recently blogged about the new VB 2010 language features announced at PDC, as well as the video available from Paul and Lucian's "VB Futures" session . Another way to learn about the new features coming out in 2010 is by watching the following Channel9 video with VB specification lead, Lucian Wischik...

Didn't make it to the PDC? No problem. You can still check out the *hottest* presentation at the Professional Developers Conference this year, available publicly on demand! Paul Vick (Principal Architect) and Lucian Wischik (VB Specification Lead & Software Engineer) gave an awesome presentation...

Say you're demonstrating some code at a conference. What's the best way to do it? If you show only the code window, then you're counting on the audience's imagination about how the code will work (and their trust that it does!). But if you hit F5 to run it then this breaks the flow. And I find it hard...

Reflection on .Net objects is done through System.Type and is very easy. For instance, "Dim type = GetType(System.String)" and now you can look at all the members and inheritance hierarchy of the System.String class. Reflection on COM types is also easy if they have an interop assembly . For instance...

I once visited an ancient tower in China. A sign said "tread carefully for you bear the weight of history on your shoulders". Our guide explained that the tower was over 800 years old! Oh yes, he said, it was built 800 years ago, had burnt to the ground three times in its history, had been moved to completely...

How do I convert an IEnumerable(Of CheckingAccount) into an IEnumerable(Of Account) ? (where CheckingAccount inherits from Account). Currently this conversion isn't allowed, but we're considering a VB language feature to support it. The topic is called "co- and contravariance", and has been in the...