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...

Do you use code snippets (introduced in VB 2005)? If you do, then you've probably noticed the green highlighting that stays around for the lifetime of the file. We've heard *a lot* of feedback that once you are done customizing the snippet, it is distracting...

You probably didn’t notice it, but we made some important and beneficial changes to the Support Statement for Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 just a few weeks ago, and I want to share the good news. First, just like Vista...

Jared here again. I very excited to announce we recently released a tool I've been working on to MSDN that will greatly help with using PInvoke in managed code. The tool is called the "PInvoke Interop Assistant" and is included as part of a MSDN article...

All -- I'm very excited to be speaking at launch events in Lisbon, Portugal and Birmingham, England within the next week. After a 17 hour journey, with much jet-lagged-sleepiness in my eyes, I'll be speaking tomorrow morning at 9:30am in room A3 of the...

One of my all time favorite features in C# and CPP has been the conditional operator (?:). The brevity and elegance introduced by this operator in the code is unparalleled. We had IIF in all the previous versions of VB.net, which was not an operator in...

Silverlight 2 beta one is now available with lots of great new functionality!! You can go to Silverlight.net to find important downloads, specific details about new functionality, and very cool sample applications. So, what I want to talk about today...

Go take an early peak at what the VB and C# teams are cooking up for the next version by visiting the Language Futures page on Code Gallery . Code Gallery is not just about samples . It also allows us to host threaded discussions and the teams want your...

I apologize right away that it's been a while since I've blogged about the interop forms toolkit although I've been doing my best to keep up with issues and questions on the interop forums . It seems from the mail I've received that a lot of people are...

Today I posted a Channel 9 interview with Todd Apley, Senior Test Lead on the VB Team, where he shows us a variety of tips and tricks with using the Interop Forms Toolkit on Visual Studio 2008. He also shows us how to deploy a hybrid application built...

I have a confession to make. I’m not a database guy. I’ve done a lot of varied coding over my career, but somehow I’ve never been directly involved in the guts of database coding. Whenever my code needed some sort of data-caching mechanism, I’ve tended...

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...

Yesterday on the Visual Basic Developer Center we released a new article by VB MVP , Maurice DeBeijer on getting started with Windows Workflow called Windows Workflow 101 . This is the first in a series of Workflow articles by Maurice. If you're struggling...

Check it out, the team just released a new version of the Visual Basic Power Packs which now includes a Data Repeater control. Power Packs are free Add-Ins, Controls, Components, and Tools for you to use that make developing .NET applications even easier...

This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series. It makes the same assumptions as Part 8, and I will pick up where I left off, covering Full Outer Join. Once again, I recognize this isn’t an ideal situation, so if you’d like to see better...

This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series. After my post on joins , I’ve had some questions about outer joins. As you can see in part 6, VB9 doesn’t have smooth support for Left or Right join. I showed how to get similar functionality...

I once had to learn how to juggle in a very brief time in order to get an “A” in my high school computer science class. I am not making this up. The idea was that juggling, being a systemic process, was somehow analogous to writing programs and… well...

I've just posted a final set of chapters (Chapters 25 - 31). This completes our conversion efforts and you now have access to entire sample code from Petzold's book in VB. I would like to thank Evan and Ged who have been working with me on this. You guys...

In addition to Connect , you can now report Visual Basic bugs directly in the Visual Basic Forums.  The forum posts get entered as a bug or product suggestion into VB’s internal bug tracking system. With this we hope to take Forums (our vibrant...

One of the things we have been working on recently was publishing sources of VisualBasic runtime library. I am very excited to announce that the sources of VB runtime (Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll) are publicly available now! This is a part of a more general...

Today I posted a Channel 9 interview with Avner Aharoni, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team. In this interview Avner shows us how to enable XML IntelliSense in Visual Basic using the XML to Schema Wizard . He also shows the differences between...

Our goal in designing VB2008 IntelliSense was to make users of the feature the most productive that they could be. One problem we found in watching people use the feature, is that sometimes intelliSense displays so many items that it is hard to know whether...

There's a lot of cool functionality built into VS debugger datatips that often goes unnoticed... For example, did you know that not only can you *see* values in the expanded datatips, but you can also edit them ? Watch the following walk-through... ...

Just like Alt+Tab for Windows you can use Ctrl+Tab for Visual Studio. Ctrl+Tab will show you the active tool windows *and* the active files, so it is a good navigation tool for both. VS2008 has even added a cool miniature-sized visualization to this view...

With the help of one little hotkey, you can now make the VS2008 IntelliSense list transparent! Just press CTRL . This is especially convenient when you need to see the code underneath the list. Watch it in action :)