Crystal Reports has been a part of Visual Basic since 1993, and a part of Visual Studio since its first release in 2002. Crystal Reports has been a very successful component of these products. With the release of Visual Studio 2010, SAP and Microsoft...

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...

Let's say that you've developed an application using the free Visual Studio Express Edition. Now, you want to deploy your application to the masses, and you read documentation about How to: Create or Add Deployment Projects . Here's how the topic starts...

Simple Animation in Visual Basic (Matt Gertz) The basics: You're almost certainly used to placing controls on a form; however, you probably have an expectation that they will stay in place once you put them there. That need not be the case, however...

A common requirement in forms-over-data applications is that users be able to search by any combination of fields to construct a dynamic query at run time. For example, the search feature in this application allows the user to find all records that meet...

One feature in Visual Studio 2008 I would like to highlight is our support of Windows Communication Foundation. WCF was introduced with .NET Fx3.0 as a next generation communications API. Previously if you wanted apps to talk you needed to make a lot...

As you may already know, VB LINQ statements enable SQL-like syntax for queries in the VB language. LINQ syntax doesn't match SQL syntax exactly, so if you are already working with SQL or familiar with SQL queries, you may find yourself wanting to convert...

by Kathleen McGrath Have you ever wished that you could have someone show you how to accomplish a programming task instead of having to read through the steps on how to perform the task? Or maybe you just need a little more clarification about where...

Twenty years ago , May 20 th , 1991 at Windows World, in Atlanta, Microsoft founder Bill Gates demoed Visual Basic 1.0 . Twenty years later, the 10 th version of this latest in an unbroken line of Microsoft BASIC languages stretching back to Microsoft’s...

This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series. After my post on joins , I’ve had some questions about outer joins. As you can see in part 6, VB9 doesn’t have smooth support for Left or Right join. I showed how to get similar functionality...

Eric Gunnerson writes about C# supporting Nullable types. We've heard a lot of positive feedback on the Nullable types. Just so everyone's aware, this is NOT a C# specific feature. Just as with all generics, VB will both emit and consume the full set...

Looking for another reason to upgrade to 2008? How about performance! In addition to making tasks easier for you from release to release, another way we can save you time and make you more productive is by making the product faster! This is a goal we...

In Whidbey we’ve done a lot of work to enable design time support for object based data binding. This leaves the question of how to load and save custom objects. How do developers get the rich functionality of DataSet but using their own object model? In this article I’ll describe some common infrastructure for building a set of base classes to enable round tripping your objects to/from the database....

A number of posts have asked how to extend TableAdapters to support additional functionality. It may be related to supporting transactions across multiple updates, or how do I set the UserId as a parameter on an update statement that isn’t represented...

This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators Converting...

As you may have read in Jason’s announcement , today we announced that Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download . This is a huge release for Visual Basic as it provides full platform support for building Windows 8 Metro style apps, a...

This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators Converting...

Yesterday I promised to post about the hidden gems in Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2008 that you haven’t read about in blog posts or seen at conferences. I forgot that I mentioned a few of my favorite features in the Beta1 announcement where I...

This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT Continuing with specific query clauses, I will cover topics related to DISTINCT, WHERE...

Today, Microsoft announced the Kinect SDK for PC http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/download.aspx VB Samples are there at launch and available for downloading http://files.ch9.ms/coding4fun/KinectSDKSamplesVB...

I’m excited to announce that the Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Power Pack has been released and is now available for download on MSDN! In this release we have two components: Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 - This toolkit is aimed at simplifying...

(This is part 3 of the Paint-by-Numbers series) There are four issues I want to deal with in this post: New, Open, Save (As), and Exit. I’ll be doing these in order, but all of them depend on knowing whether or not the application is dirty, so I’ll...

This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series: Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators Converting...

There are a lot of great Entity Framework samples on Code Gallery that you can now find available in Visual Basic .NET. This was recently announced on the ADO.NET team blog . Browse through the list below and start downloading! ADO.NET Entity Framework...

Tips and Tricks of Visual Studio File and Project References Cameron McColl, Bill Horst Visual Basic Product Team Microsoft Corporation August 2004 Summary: This paper describes some of the interesting properties and quirks of the Visual...