Ingredients: · Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to SQL Introduction: As we add cookbook entries, we will include performance improvement tips where appropriate. Here’s a tip that you can use with LINQ to SQL to speed...

Have you downloaded the latest Refactoring tools from Developer Express? There is a free version available on the Visual Basic Developer Center . Once you download, you will discover a number of cool capabilities you can now do in the Visual Basic IDE...

I just posted an interview with Lisa on Channel9 that you'll probably want to check out -- showing the new and much much imporoved Intellisense for Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008: In this interview Lisa Feigenbaum , a Program Manager on the Visual...

Ingredients: - Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) - An assembly which you want to analyze (in this example, we use mscorlib.dll, the assembly which houses String) - A definition for 'Complex Type'. In this instance, a complex type is defined...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Here's a holiday present just for you -- in keeping with what has become a holiday tradition on Channel 9 we have Chris Anderson , Don Box and now our very own Amanda Silver singing you a special holiday song. You can view the full video and sample...

It’s really embarrassing when a bug gets out the door in a product. In particular, it’s hard for me to just sit and take it (however well deserved the criticism is) when a Microsoft product gets nailed in the press for a bad error. It’s much worse when...

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...

For previous articles in this series please see Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Method Calls Part 3: Scope Sorry for the long delay between posts here. We're getting Orcas out the door and getting this series completed takes a back seat to...

I just posted an interview with Amanda on Channel 9 where she walks us through the new LINQ syntax available in VS 2008 Beta 2 . I also posted some How Do I videos on LINQ to help get you started -- look for more of these beginning of next week! In...

Hooray! Visual Basic 2008 Beta2 has been released to the wild today to return to its natural habitat – the desktops of our beloved customers. (Please note our smiling GPM's face on that landing page -- he's so happy the Beta is done.) What’s inside...

This is my first post on the VB blog! I’m a designer on the team with a background in visual and interaction design, and I also have some .NET coding experience. I plan to start blogging on the VB blog on a regular basis, and my goal is to share some...

Hi there! My name is Tim, and I'm the dev lead for the VB compiler team. Recently Amanda convinced me to blog on the VB team blog rather then my own blog for a variety of reasons, and so here I am. My current plan is that I'll post VB related postings...

I'm happy to announce the redesign of the Visual Basic Developer Center ! This is the first step in a series of community-focused and dynamic content changes you'll be seeing on the Developer Center . Many thanks to the people over at MSDN, ( especially...

We just published an article by Bill Burrows on Programming With XML Using Visual Basic 9 . Bill has also created a series of video tutorials that walk you through the details of how to use the new XML features in Visual Basic 9. Bill takes an easy to...

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...

Back when I first started writing code, I got interested in game writing, and was fairly sure I could write out text-based games as well as the other offerings one could find on mainframes and, later, on the Commodores/TRS/Apples of the day. The flow...

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),...

Coding a Euchre Game, Part 9: Into the Wild Blue Yonder So, here we are at the end of this series, which I hope you’ve found interesting. In this final post, I’m going to talk about deployment – getting your code shipped to another person. Oh, and...

Friday we posted the first 8 videos of the Visual Basic Forms over Data "How-to" video series on MSDN. If you don't have the Visual Basic Dev Center as your homepage you might have missed the headline. ;-) This how-to video series is dedicated to getting...

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...

The story of Edit and Continue (which I’ll refer to as EnC) is a very long one. Having been a cornerstone of Visual Basic in the past, it had always been planned for us to ship an Edit and Continue experience with Visual Studio 2002. But we didn’t. Why...