Last week, I gave two talks at the Belgian TechDays in Antwerp. This was my first time at the conference, and it was a great event! I've created a resource page on Code Gallery for the presentation materials from my talks: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com...

When you have a question about how an API works, most of you will look in the MSDN Library .  There are some tips and tricks to finding what you need in this vast resource.  First of all, there are two main ways you can read the content in the...

In part 1 of this series, I constructed a pair of classes to supporting persisting MIDI data to files. In this entry, I’ll now leverage that code to support an (admittedly limited) music editor experience. Caveat : As I mentioned in the first post...

The results from InfoWorld's 2009 Technology of the Year Awards are in. Visual Studio 2008 was voted Best IDE, with the following commentary: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Visual Studio stands alone as the preferred development environment for applications...

As I’ve alluded to in previous blogs, music has always been a big part of my life, particularly performance music. I’ve been a clarinet and saxophone player for many years, am an avid singer, and (with the help of friends) I’ve done my best to teach myself...

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...

Have you been following the buzz on VB XML Literals with ASP.NET MVC?! Last week, Beth Massi posted a Channel 9 video with ASP.NET Product Unit Manager Dmitry Robsman. You can find a written description of the topic on Dmitry's blog: ASP.NET MVC View...

For the Visual Basic web developers, be sure to check out MIX this year! The conference will be taking place March 18-20, at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. http://2009.visitmix.com/ The list of sessions is posted here . Included in the agenda will be...

Check out the latest video in the 10-4 Channel 9 series, on Visual Basic 10: Episode 9: Visual Basic 10 In this ninth episode of 10-4 , we introduce some of the new features and functionality coming to the Visual Basic language with the release of Visual...

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...

Today I posted an interview on Channel 9 with Dmitry Robsman, the Product Unit Manager for ASP.NET. In this interview he shows us how he implemented ASP.NET MVC views using Visual Basic's XML Literals instead of .aspx pages. Dmitry shows us how this makes...

I’ve just completed a task that I set out to do about five years ago, and I am pretty proud (and tired)! I have just finished scanning in every single photo that I’ve acquired over my 40+ years of life, fixing up their dates to reflect the date when the...

Today we released a new How Do I Video onto the VB Dev Center on how to format controls on data entry forms using the IValueConverter like I showed on my blog here . The IValueConverter allows you full control over the display of the data as well as the...

On behalf of the Microsoft Visual Basic team, I'd like to wish all of our readers a happy & healthy new year. We truly enjoy getting to know you through your comments and emails, so here's an opportunity to say "thanks"!         ...

MSDN Magazine Editor in Chief, Howard Dierking, announced a number of changes to the magazine in the January 2009 Editor's Note . Among that list of changes was the following excerpt: "Furthermore, we recently began moving all of our article code samples...

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...

It's a new week, and the 10-4 video podcast series continues! The topics for this week include an overview of VS 2010, and a special focus on the Start Page. Here's a description of the episode, from the creators: 10-4 Episode 2: Welcome to Visual Studio...

The first episode of the 10-4 podcast series is about downloading the VS 2010 CTP. We had blogged the instructions before, but this video will take you through the process. Download now, and start trying out all the new features! :) Episode 1: Downloading...

Back in seventh grade, I had a pretty heavy crush on a girl named Melissa. She was a good friend of mine, and so I had no problems talking to her. However, being painfully shy back then, I was far too nervous to ever ask her to “go with” me. (For those...

The Visual Studio and .NET Framework evangelism team has announced 10-4 , a new video podcast. 10-4 will feature different capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 every week! To get the episodes, visit the show's new home on Channel9...

This post is in response to a question we received in the blog comments last week. It's often difficult to study future versions of VB and C#, and figure out what's the same and what's different! Therefore, I've put together a chart that shows both the...

If so, vote here to see more Silverlight samples in VB: http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=1222

Do you spend a lot of time on Facebook ? Facebook is now one more way that you can connect with the Visual Basic team, and other fellow Visual Basic friends. Log on and join today ! Friends of the Microsoft Visual Basic Team Facebook Group

Have you downloaded and started using the Visual Studio 2010 Community Technology Preview ("CTP") ? If so, you may have noticed that the Virtual PC it runs on, will expire at the end of the year. See the following blog posts from Brian Keller...

Quick Search has to be one of my favorite features in the 2010 CTP. I find myself using it all the time ! I hope you will find it useful in your development too. The Quick Search functionality has become a pretty common feature in development environments...