If you find yourself looking for something to do with your awesome new copy of Visual Studio 2008 , you should check out the December 2007 edition of MSDN magazine . It features an article, written by me, that provides a walk through on how to visualize data on a map using VB 9, WPF and LINQ. To give...

I recently received an email from a customer who had a few questions about "enum inheritance" in VB, specifically as to why it wasn't supported. In particular, he sent us the following snippet of VB code (I've changed the names of the classes and methods involved) : Option Strict On Public Class...

I just posted an interview with Scott on Channel9 where he talks about extension methods, a new language feature in Visual Basic 9.0: In this in interview Scott Wisniewski , a Developer on the Visual Basic Team, talks about Extension Methods and shows us a couple interesting LINQ providers. In his...

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? So much that there might be more new features than...

If you get a chance, you should check out the August 2007 edition of MSDN Magazine. In addition to its usual array of awesome goodies, this month's edition features a super cool Basic Instincts column, written by me. In it I discuss the design of Query Comprehensions in VB, giving an overview of the...

I recently received an email from a customer asking for clarification as to what the difference was between VB 9 , VBx and Sliverlight . In particular, it seems as if we have been releasing so much information about cool new stuff that at least a few people have become confused, making them a bit nervous...

About two weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the product group dinner associated with the Global MVP Summit that was behind held here at Microsoft. Besides a free meal, this also gave me the excellent opportunity to meet with some of our MVPs and discuss their impressions with Visual Studio and...

This is the sixth installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here . Today I am going to talk about some best practices for using extension methods. Most of this content is geared toward authors of class libraries designed for wide spread...

The March 2007 Orcas CTP is now available for download. You can see Soma's anouncement about it here . This is the first Orcas CTP to include new VB 9.0 features and is the first update of VB LINQ since last year's May 2006 LINQ CTP. Amongst a lot of other really cool Orcas stuff, this CTP includes...

This is the 5th installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here . Originally I had planned on discussing extension method versioning issues, but I've decided to postpone that topic to my next post and talk about extension methods and generics...

This is the fourth installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here . Today I'm going to talk about extension methods and late binding. Essentially there isn't much to say about it, other than the fact that we don't support late bound execution...

In my previous 2 posts I talked about some of the benefits of extension methods and then delved into the details of our new binding rules for consuming them in your programs. Today I'm going to talk about some perils to be aware of when defining extension methods. First, however, I'm going to dig...

In my previous post I gave a high level overview of some of the benefits of using Extension Methods in VB 9.0. Today I'm going to delve into some of the details about how to define extension methods and then use them in your programs. Defining Extension Methods You can define an extension method...

Hi. I'm Scott Wisniewski, a dev on the VB Compiler Team. I've been here for a while now (about a year and a half), but this is my first blog post. I've been spending the past seven months or so working on Orcas, and finally decided it would be a good time to come up for some air, talk about what I...