VB.NET

Async involves some new concepts. They're not difficult; just unfamiliar. Over the past year Lucian Wischik has been watching how people use async/await in C# and VB. This series distils out the three top async patterns and anti-patterns. Tips: Async void is for top-level event-handlers only, and…

Async Tip #1: Async void is for top-level event-handlers only, and event-like things. Don't use it elsewhere in your code. Slides are available on Lucian's blog. Async void is a "fire-and-forget" mechanism: the caller is unable to know when an async void has finished, and the…

Async Tip #2: It's crucial to distinguish CPU-bound work (should be done on threadpool) from IO-bound work (which needn't). You can download slides for this talk from Lucian's blog. I remember reading an old Android dev blog post. It said: "1. A good practice in creating responsive…

Async Tip #3: You can wrap events up in Task-returning APIs and await them. This can dramatically simplify code. Slides and source code are available on Lucian's blog. This video introduces a new pattern for dealing with events: you can await them! Now why would you want to do that? Well,…

What is Roslyn? Traditionally, compilers are black boxes – source code goes in one end and object files or assemblies come out the other end. The Roslyn project changes that model by opening up the Visual Basic and C# compilers as APIs. These APIs allow tools and end-users to share in the wealth of…

In this interview, Doug Rothaus, a programming writer on the Visual Studio User Education team, describes the new implicit line continuation feature in Visual Basic 2010.  You can also learn more in his Help topic, Statements in Visual Basic. Kathleen McGrath Visual Studio User…

Brian Beckman is a fascinating individual. Ex-cosmologist, ex-military operating system and simulation developer (have you ever considered processes that move both forward and backward in time? Well, Brian and team at JPL created just that. He explains in this interview...). Brian was one of…

LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query and in a nutshell, it makes query and set operations, like SQL statements first class citizens in .NET languages like C# and VB. Here we visit Anders Hejlsberg in his office to get more on LINQ. Dan Fernandez, also seen in this video, just put up a blog…

One of the cool new features of ASP.NET 2.0 is its rich declarative databinding. In addition to traditional techniques like databinding to a back-end SQL database, you can also databind to web services, using the ObjectDataSource.In this DevNugget, Mid-Atlantic .net Developer Evangelist G. Andrew…

In this interview Spotty Bowles, a tester on the VB Compiler team, shows us a couple of new language features: Array and Collection Initializers. He gives us insight into how they are implemented in the compiler and best practices on how to use them in our code. Additionally, he discusses…