Lisa Feigenbaum gave a great webcast this morning on LINQ best practices (if you missed it, just click the link and view it on-demand). Here is the deck and the samples she used. Please Note: The sample code is based on a more recent build of Visual...

Back by popular demand! Amanda Silver will be presenting Live From Redmond: VB9 - Conquering XML with LINQ to XML on June 27th. In Visual Basic 9.0, XML becomes a built-in data type with a rich editing experience that completely eliminates the conceptual...

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...

I recently received an email from a customer asking for clarification as to what the difference was between VB 9 , VBx and Sliverlight . In particular, it seems as if we have been releasing so much information about cool new stuff that at least a few...

Thanks to everyone who was able to make it out for this morning's webcast. We covered how to use the Interop Toolkit 2.0 to upgrade VB6 applications to VB.NET, how to deploy hybrid applications, and finally we touched on some other great interop resources...

Hello from Orlando! I’ve been at TechEd 2007 this week in very sunny Orlando. As part of my demo prep, I had to create a little xml transform to convert the TechEd schedule that I got off the www.msteched.com website in an Excel XML format into a more...

(Starting today, we'll be highlighting various tips that might help you when using the InteropForms 2.0 toolkit. With the latest release of the toolkit, you can do some fairly impressive upgrades to your existing VB6 applications. Don't believe me? Check...

(Recently, we released the InteropForms 2.0 toolkit which allows you to add the richness of .net windows forms to your vb6 application. We've gotten a fair number of questions from customers asking for more details on deployment, so this will hopefully...

The snippet feature is one of the features that I’m fondest of in Visual Basic. It was another one of a handful of features that got discussed in a series of “What if…” meetings that Sam & I had during the “Whidbey” planning stages. As I recall, the...

The VB team just posted some Hands On Labs on LINQ and LINQ to SQL for Orcas Beta 1. The first lab provides an introduction to The LINQ Project . You'll look at basic LINQ features including the Standard Query Operators, and you'll see how these features...

I came across a really cool article yesterday by James Ashley, which shows some of the cool things you can do with the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 . The three VB6 examples cover consuming a WebService (complete with a Dilbert icon showing up in the VB6...

Another entry in the annals of BASIC history today…. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sat down for an interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital for the D5 conference. One of the highlights of the video is recalling the agreement Apple...

Jared here again. For previous articles in this series please see Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Method Calls Thus far in the series we've only lifted variables that are declared in the same block/scope. What happens if we lift variables in...

It’s funny how we come up with a VB feature sometimes. I remember one case pretty well. I was the new dev lead of the VB editor at the time, and I was talking about possible features for “Whidbey” (i.e. Visual Studio 2005) with my program manager, Sam...

Last week I talked a bit about operator overloading, and used the concept to support a library of matrix functions. This week, we’ll use those functions in a Smart Device application to create a matrix calculator. Smart Device applications It’s...

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...

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...

Over a decade ago, before I joined Microsoft, I was a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon studying robotics. One of the things that you had to do to get into the doctoral program was pass a qualifier test (“the qual”), which was a three-hour oral examination...

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...

My name is Jared Parsons and I am a developer on the VB Compiler and Debugger. One of the features I implemented for VB 9.0 is lexical closure support. This a great addition to the VB language and I wanted to do a series of blog posts to describe this...

Today we launched the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 , which makes it easier than ever to upgrade VB6 applications to .NET. This new release builds on version 1.0 by adding support for the following features: Interop UserControls - These are .NET controls...

John Lam just posted a screen cast of four dynamic languages interoperating in SIlverlight on the Mac! Check it out!

One of the great things about being on the VB team is that we’re generally in the loop early and often with teams developing new technologies and products. It’s always exciting to see ideas take shape, evolve into a product, and eventually hit the market...

At the Mix conference today in Las Vegas, Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie were dropping goodies like tootsie pops from a piñata. There was so much packed into their over two hour keynote that I thought it would be useful to distill the announcements down...

The title pretty much describes this post. I had fully intended to work on a Smart Device application for VB last week, and post the walkthrough here. VB is a great language for coding against devices, and there are a lot of cool things you can use a...