Last week at the Professional Developers Conference , we made a number of very exciting announcements regarding the future of Visual Basic. Here is the list of VB 2010 features we've announced: Collection Initializers . Initialize collections in...

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...

Ingredients: · Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ-To-XML Instructions: · Create a new Console Application in Visual Basic. · Create an RSS document. Add the following code to Sub Main . Dim rss = <? xml version...

One of the improvements in VS2010 (CTP available for download here ) is drag and drop data binding for WPF. Drag-drop data binding has been available for WinForms since Visual Studio 2005. So those of you that are familiar with that will find the WPF...

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...

This example is intended as a ‘primer’ for following recipes (so we don’t repeat the same instructions multiple times). This recipe takes you through everything you need, and assumes only that you've installed Visual Studio (and in so doing, you've installed...

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 :)

Last week I got the chance to visit the Toronto .NET User Group and give a talk on all the great new language features in VB2008. It was great to see so much excitement a round LINQ and especially XML Literals ! The slides and demo code are posted...

I needed to create a list of all Code Snippets we ship in Visual Studio the other day containing their title, description and path on disc and size. As you might know, Code Snippets are stored in multiple directories below "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual...

As part of the explore program, myself as well as the other VB Explorers have been developing an application to deploy onto the Pocket PC. One of the necessary components of our application is to be able to store information that the user inputs as well...

posted by Emily Yaich Hello everyone! I am Emily Yaich and I am another one of the Microsoft Explorers working on the visual basic team. I have been here since the second week in June, and I am loving every minute of it! We haven't gotten into the...

A few weeks ago I mentioned I was working on a side project. Well, then the soccer, tennis, and school season hit and..well I won't tell you the rest. What I had started to do was take all of the samples in Charles Petzold's book Applications = Code ...

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...

Supporting the “pajama programmer” Telecommuting is a great thing, and as the environmentally-conscious person that I strive to be, is something I wholeheartedly endorse when it can be done practically. My current job involves a lot of face-to-face...

Folks, we’re gonna start a ‘cookbook’ of LINQ entries, which we’ll be building over time. This is just meant to be a series of solutions to specific scenarios, that the team comes across when writing code and using queries. I can't think of a better way...

For previous articles in this series, please see Part 1 - The basics Jared here again. This part of the series will focus on how method calls are handled in closures. As stated in the previous article, the purpose of closures is to allow all...

I’ve always enjoyed writing. Putting pen to paper (or, these days, fingers to keyboard) is something that brings a lot of joy into my life, even more than music or any other hobby that I have. I’ve been writing stories since earlier than I can remember...

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...

Woohoo! Its official , we finally got Orcas Beta1 out the door! We’re very excited to get this release out to you so we can finally talk about some of the stuff we’ve been working on in addition to the LINQ and XML feature-set. We believe that Orcas Beta1...

For the past year, I've been organizing the Visual Basic chats that appear at http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/ . For the most part, these chats focused on answering your questions about Visual Basic. Naturally, now that the Beta 1 for Visual Basic...

Yesterday I got a question from a developer asking whether or not we could add something called "Option Strict Warn" to the language. This would give a developer a warning when using something like late binding or an implicit conversion, rather than disabling...

Today we announced availability of the Microsoft Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools . You can download the release here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=201859 This CTP is to be used with the Windows Phone Developer...

By Zain Naboulsi ( Blog ) Default: CTRL + ALT + K Menu: View | Call Hierarchy Command: View.CallHierarchy; EditorContextMenus.CodeWindow.ViewCallHierarchy Versions: Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview Languages: VB With the announcement...

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...

Some videos on VB futures have been posted on Channel9 at: · Paul Vick and Amanda Silver - VB Language Futures : http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=116700 · Paul Vick and Erik Meijer - Dynamic Programming in Visual Basic http:/...