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...

Greetings, all! I’m Matt Gertz, the Dev Manager for Visual Basic team. I’ve been on the team for a bit over 12 years, via the Blackbird/Visual InterDev side of the product, and in that time have been a dev on various features (mostly IDE-related),...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is now available for download. We’d like to thank everyone in the Visual Basic community for providing feedback on SP1 and helping us identify and address issues for this service pack. In some areas, more than 50% of the bugs addressed...

OK, so when you're playing around with LinQ and all it's various additional bits, you really do get to have a bit of fun. I've made this available simply because i enjoyed doing it. The basic idea is to time and then compare the duration of various...

We’ve heard from you that popular hotfixes should be a public download rather than requiring a call to support. Based your feedback, we’ve launched a pilot program that will allow you to download the most frequently requested Visual Basic 2005 hotfixes...

Recently the VB team released the Interop Forms Toolkit , which allows VB6 developers to extend their existing applications using .NET. The toolkit allows developers to write a regular Windows Form in VB.NET, click “Generate Wrapper Classes”, and then...

All, I recently went on a trip to 3 Asian countries, and thought I would share the notes. Here’s my summary of the recent trip a colleague and I made to Asia . The trip was cut short due to a typhoon in Manila , which was a real shame: my colleague...

The .NET Framework teams are providing several Live Meeting presentations spanning application technologies like Smart Clients, Web 2.0 (AJAX) and Mobile. Check out SimonMu 's blog for more information: http://blogs.msdn.com/simonmu/archive/2006/10/09...

by Kathleen McGrath If you're a Visual Basic developer who wants to learn about ASP.NET, you should check out this new MSDN article: A Visual Basic Developer's Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0 There's also a number of introductory webcasts and multimedia...

by Kathleen McGrath I've created a screencast that shows you how to create a Windows form in Visual Basic 2005 that you can call from your Visual Basic 6 application using the Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 . The screencast is about 6 minutes...

I’m excited to announce that the Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Power Pack has been released and is now available for download on MSDN! In this release we have two components: Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 - This toolkit is aimed at simplifying...

By Kathleen McGrath The beta release of Visual Studio Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (VSTO 2005 SE) was announced today. VSTO 2005 SE is a free add-on for Visual Studio (Professional or above) that enables you to create add-ins for the...

by Kathleen McGrath Have you ever wished that you could have someone show you how to accomplish a programming task instead of having to read through the steps on how to perform the task? Or maybe you just need a little more clarification about where...

So I cleaned up my teched demos and editted the notes so hopefully, someone other than me (without access to what's inside my head ;-)) can follow along and see some of the cool new things in VB2005. Simply unzip the solution, open it, and remember to...

So at TechEd-2006, I gave a chalktalk on generics patterns and practices. I've zipped the content up here so folks can check it out if they want. I start by giving a quick background on generics (the GenericsBasics solution attached), then looking...

Hey folks, my name's Kit George and I've joined the VB team from the CLR. VB is after all, the best language, so of course, it makes sense to work directly on it! Like all languages, VB has it's little 'oddities', so i thought i would start a series...

By Jonathan Aneja Hi, my name’s Jonathan and I’m a Program Manager on the VB team, working mainly on LINQ features. One of the things I love about LINQ is it’s not just limited to querying over databases and XML – you can query over any collection...

PaulYuk and I just returned from the EMEA tour where we demoed tons of new VB 2005 features to groups in Brussells, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Belfast, and Dublin. Here (as promised) are links to more information on what I presented. If you didn't make it...

Just wanted to point out a paper Brian Beckman and Erik Meijer wrote on the XML features of VB9.