Just released onto the Visual Basic Developer Center , a new article Creating a Text-to-speech add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 with Visual Studio 2008 from a member of our Italian .NET community, Alessandro Del Sole . The article shows how to use Visual...

This week I presented "Microsoft Visual Basic IDE Tips and Tricks" at TechEd US 2008. Thanks to those of you who attended. The presentation materials are listed below. Slide deck 2008 solution - post demo version 2005 solution - post demo...

The VB team has two great sessions coming up on Wednesday June 4th, covering tips & tricks for the language and IDE. Abstracts are below. Hope to see you there! TLA319 Microsoft Visual Basic 2008: Microsoft LINQ Language Tips, Tricks, and Best...

Our Help content architect, Kathleen McGrath , has created a short, anonymous survey (15 questions/10 mins.) to gather input on how and when the Visual Studio and .NET Framework developer Help content is used, how satisfied you are with it, and about...

I presented the following talk this week at VSLive! Orlando 2008 : Visual Studio 2008: LINQ Deep Dive and Best Practices LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a key platform innovation introduced with Visual Studio 2008 which brings SQL-style query expressions...

Last week I went on a user group tour around Southern California. I've uploaded the materials from my talk: Powerpoint presentation Solution at the Start of the Demo Solution at the End of the Demo You can find these all posted together...

LINQ at its core requires any data source to be queryable , which basically means it must implement IEnumerable. (It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, for a full explanation see section 11.21.2 of the Visual Basic 9.0 Language Specification...

Recently I got a customer question about how to use LINQ to Dataset in an .aspx file. The compiler was complaining that it couldn't find the AsEnumerable method that allows LINQ to work over a DataTable ("AsEnumerable is not a member of 'DataTable'")...

The Learn tab of the Visual Basic Developer Center is being updated with a bunch of new content and VS 2008 topics. If you look at the center of the page you'll see the list of topics and when you click one, you should now see some fresh stuff. Currently...

In the last two XML cookbook entries, we talked about the technique of using the ReplaceWith method to perform an identity transform. While this technique may meet your needs, it can introduce a problem in your code commonly referred to as the “Halloween...

This post assumes you’ve read my previous Converting SQL to LINQ posts. I haven’t had much in the way of specific requests for more LINQ posts, so I’d still welcome any suggestions that people want to offer. I did get one request about how to mimic...

I will be presenting on the VB IDE in Southern California this week at a series of user group meetings. The events will be held in the San Diego and the Los Angeles area . Charlie Calvert from the C# team will be flying down from Redmond to speak as well...

Recipe 3 showed one way to work with mixed XML content using the XML Descendant axis property and the ReplaceWith method. This is one way to do an identity transform and we’ll look at another method in a later post. There is a key capability not mentioned...

An identity transform in XSLT does just what the name implies: replace the identity of an element or attribute with a new identity. Identity transforms are especially critical when dealing with XML markup that is less rigid in its structure. Consider...

On Wednesday we released onto the VB Developer Center the second part of Maurice de Beijer's article on Windows Workflow. In this second article about developing custom Workflow Activities , Maurice takes a look at some of the more advanced aspects of...

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...

All - I'm about to go on for my LINQ Deep Dive and Tips &Tricks session at VSLive in San Francisco. I posted all demos & slides here: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=LaunchVB&ReleaseId=805

After some hard but fruitful work, we’ve just finished our “milestone quality” (MQ) efforts, the goal of which was to get ourselves ready for developing the next versions of Visual Studio, Team System, and .NET. Although not specific to Visual Basic,...

Over the last few months, the VB and Data Programmability teams were working on fixing a performance problem with LINQ to SQL (which also manifested in LINQ to Entities). The issue was that LINQ to SQL was generating sub optimal T-SQL queries when the...

Last week I had the privilege of speaking in Lisbon, Portugal & Birmingham, England at launch events for Visual Studio 2008. There seemed to be a lot of buzz and excitement in the air at both events -- no doubt due to the recent release of Visual...

I recently ran into an interesting threading problem that I wanted to share, so that perhaps I can save some people from the same confusion I had. I started with a C# application someone else had written. I’ll call it “DeltaEngine” for the purpose...

If you missed it, last week 48 new How Do I videos ( Forms over data , Windows development , Office development and Security ) were added to the Visual Basic Developer Center in addition to adding new download formats for 12 others. Many thanks to Rob...

One more set of control skins is up and ready for use. I had hoped to have two ready, but one set needed some additional tweaking work that I can't get to until I return to Seattle on 4/14. This new set is very rough and organic in appearance and maybe...

I wanted to let you know about a hotfix we recently released that may help solve some performance issues you may have run into using Visual Studio 2008. Details The hotfix is a 3.98MB download and can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com...

MVP Maurice de Beijer is at it again with another great article on Workflow Foundation (WF), this time showing us how to create custom workflow activities in " The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 1) ". This is the first of a two part series...