Have you seen the buzz about the Visual Basic Futures that have been announced today?

 

Paul Vick introduces project LINQ in his blog entry, and Alan Griver discusses the announcement in his blog entry.  You can think of this as giving you the ability to do queries over data (relational, xml, and objects) simply using the natural, dynamic Visual Basic syntax & experience.   You get the richness of the tool (Intellisense and validation) plus the flexibility of the forgiving language by default – strictness is an option. 

 

Here is a small snippet of sample code using LINQ to query over “Country” data (it should feel very comfortable for VB and SQL users):

 

Dim SmallCountries = Select Country _
From Country In Countries _
Where Country.Population < 1000000

 

Amanda Silver also just posted about a broader set of language features currently planned for the next version of Visual Basic (beyond VB 2005 / Codename “Whidbey”) – very cool stuff.  See her blog entry here. 

 

You can see the official announcements, articles, and even try out working samples via the new Visual Basic Future page on the VBasic dev center, thanks to our content strategist Brad McCabe and his recent post: 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/future/

 

It’s very exciting to be part of the team who is going to take LOB app development to the next level of productivity. 

 

Enjoy.

 

Paul

 

 

Tag: PDC05