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...

In the July/August issue of CoDe Magazine there's an article I wrote with Avner Aharoni (the Program Manager on XML literals) called Sharpening Your Axis with Visual Basic 9 . (They just opened up online access to even non-subscribers today!) I highly...

We've started a new page on Code Gallery called "Future Focus" , to collect your feedback on ideas that we're considering for future versions of Visual Studio. The latest post is regarding an IDE feature to help you quickly search for and navigate...

The VB Catch syntax has a unique feature: When. It allows users to filter expressions based on something other than their type. Any arbitrary code can enter a When block to decide whether or not to handle an Exception. Sub Sub1() Try DoSomeAction...

Microsoft has announced the names Visual Studio 10 and .Net Framework 4.0 for the next versions of these two products! Here are a number of references where you can look to find more information about this announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass...

As part of the October VS 2010 CTP , we also shipped a set of walkthrough documents explaining how to use the product to experience the new features. The CTP was released as a Virtual PC image, and can be a pretty hefty download to undertake. So for those...

Code snippets were introduced in the Visual Basic 2005 release. They provide an easy way to learn how to do a particular coding task, or to re-use a piece of code in various parts of your application. Code snippets can be inserted in a variety of ways...

This blog post is part of a series on the walkthroughs included in the October VS2010 CTP . Each walkthrough guides you through a series of steps, to help you experience the new features coming up in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Even if...

There was lots of snow today. The Microsoft campus was almost empty as everyone worked from home. This picture shows what it's like to develop Visual Studio in the snow... Wallpaper sized: http://www.wischik.com/lu/programmer/vbdev/vs_snow_1600x1200...

One of the really fun things about being associated with the Visual Basic team is getting to see all of the varied usages to which our customers put it. From enterprise software to games, our customer base covers a wide range. The most fun to see, however...

Way back in October 2007, I wrote up a few posts ( here and here ) on my experiments with the Windows Media Player object model. The problem I was trying to solve was that, when I had a playlist set to “shuffle,” WMP would break up songs that should always...

Ever wonder how we build Visual Studio and the .NET Framework? I mean literally. You know, the build process that spits out a product at the other end?  Well I sure did and it's not just hitting F5 people ;-). In this interview I sit down with Matt...

Introduction As a bit of a geek, I like to tinker with basic gadgets. I often think of little ideas that would be great to implement but the device involves some hardware and very little software. As a software engineer I tend to think in terms of...

By Amanda Silver I just wanted to let you know that we’re working furiously on turning the VB9 features into an actual product, understanding how the debugger and editor should support them, and getting another CTP out to you all. Your feedback...

Running Code at Design Time from the Immediate Window Back in Visual Basic 6.0, developers were able to evaluate expressions from the Immediate Window at design time (we’ll call this feature ‘DTEE’ – Design Time Express Evaluation from now on)....

A statement we hear a lot is: “The Typed DataSet is great, but the DataAdapters don’t support joined queries. I need a relational model in the database, but I need my application model to flatten things out:” Using the Data...

Posted By: Alexandre Moura, Visual Basic QA, compiler Well, back in the rain in Redmond after a waiting list scare at the airport - with my first TechEd behind me, it's time to recap: The main thing I've brought from this exhibition is that most...

Since we have so many Orcas posts going up on this blog, I've decided to continue with a few that you can use TODAY in Visual Studio 2005. This one is about working with shortcut keys... For those of you using the Visual Basic Development Settings...

I escaped from Redmond this week to present at VSLive Orlando on LINQ in Visual Studio Orcas. As promised, please find the slides and demos included as an attachment below. As mentioned during the talk – that was intended to be an overview. If you...

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...

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...

Here's a list of new data tools features in Visual Studio. I will be discussing each one in more detail in upcoming posts. Object Relational Designer The object relational mapping technology lets you map relational databases to objects. Once 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 ...

Hey there! Last time, I talked a little bit about expression trees and what they are useful for. Expression trees are really interesting to those who want to write LINQ providers and have the ability to reason about the lambda expressions coming into...

The Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Team released the Visual Basic Pack for Visual Studio 2005 SDK on Friday! This download provides the SDK samples in Visual Basic and a new wizard that is used for generating Visual Basic-based integration packages...