Entries tagged with vb.net - Channel 9

LINQ Language Deep Dive with Visual Studio 2008

Beth Massi — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:13:00 GMT

Ever wonder what really happens when you write a simple LINQ query? A lot of new language features went into the compilers in Visual Studio 2008 to make LINQ work. In this interview I sit down with Jonathan Aneja, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Compiler team, who dives deep into these features like Type Inference, Anonymous Types, Lambda Expressions, Expressions Trees, and more. He explains what's actually happening behind the scenes and all the work the compiler is doing for you when you write a LINQ query. My head almost explodes at the end but I learned a lot of important concepts. ;-)

Check out Jonathan on the VB Team Blog.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Implicit Line Continuation in Visual Basic 2010

Kathleen McGrath — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:15:00 GMT

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 Education

Auto-Implemented Properties in Visual Basic 2010

Kathleen McGrath — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:36:00 GMT

In this interview, Doug Rothaus, a programming writer on the Visual Studio User Education team, describes the new auto-implemented properties in Visual Basic 2010. He also demonstrates some of the code examples in his Help topic, Auto-Implemented Properties.

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education

Luca Bolognese: C# and VB.NET Co-Evolution - The Twain Shall Meet

Charles — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:45:00 GMT

For most of their lifetimes, C# and VB.NET have evolved at their own pace and in their own ways (C# added iterators, VB.NET didn't. VB.NET added XML Literals, C# didn't. etc, etc...). Today, Luca Bolognese and team have embarked on a new approach to how .NET's premiere languages will evolve going forward: Co-Evolution. Essentially, new language/compiler features will be developed for each language concurrenly. No longer will C# get new language construct X while VB.NET adds Y. They will both get X (and they will both get Y). Anders Hejlsberg, the father of C#, now oversees both languages and will make sure that language innovations are developed for C# and VB.NET at the same time.

I visited Luca recently to get a sense of the rationale behind this new co-evolutionary approach to two very different languages. Why is co-evolution important? Why not just have the languages, which target different demographics (do they?), evolve in ways that match the needs their users? What's the story here? What's next?

No More Underscores in Visual Basic 10

Beth Massi — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:59:00 GMT

In this interview, Tyler Whitney, a developer on the Visual Basic compiler team, demonstrates how line termination has changed in the Visual Basic 10 compiler making underscores unnecessary as line continuation indicators. This makes your code more readable especially when writing multi-line LINQ queries.

Yes it's true, many underscores are unemployed so the team has created a support group for them at www.unemployedunderscores.com :-)

For more information, check out Tyler's post on the VB Team blog.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

WPF Improvements in Visual Studio 2010 for Building Business Apps

Beth Massi — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:01:00 GMT

At the MVP Summit a few weeks ago, Italian MVP Alessandro del Sole was so excited about the new WPF features in Visual Studio 2010 that he asked me if he could interview Milind Lele himself to get the low-down -- I said sure!

Milind is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team. In this interview he chats with Alessandro about the new WPF improvements in Visual Studio 2010 for building business applications. This time Milind shows off the new Visual Studio UI and the new WPF data grid as he quickly builds a master-details form against an Entity Data Model using the new RAD drag-drop data binding features for WPF.

Also check out Milind's blog post on this topic for more information.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Using the Touchless SDK with Visual Basic

Beth Massi — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:16:00 GMT

The Touchless SDK enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. "Touch without touching." In this interview, Touchless SDK creator Mike Wasserman and Visual Basic Spec Lead Lucian Wischik explain the project and show off a game they developed using Visual Basic 9 in Visual Studio 2008. I almost got my block knocked off playing the game but you'll see how it was worth it ;-)

For additional information mentioned in the video check out:

Touchless SDK: http://touchless.codeplex.com/
SDK Video: http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=a89a217b-fc38-4a6c-87f8-ab59a2028391
VB Game Source code: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vbtouchless
VB Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam
VB Dev Center: http://msdn.com/vbasic
Office Labs: http://www.officelabs.com/

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

ASP.NET MVC using Visual Basic XML Literals

Beth Massi — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:13:00 GMT

In this interview Dmitry Robsman, the Product Unit Manager for ASP.NET, shows us how he implemented ASP.NET MVC views using Visual Basic's XML Literals instead of .aspx pages. He shows us how this makes coding the views much cleaner using standard OOP principals. He also makes some very interesting observations about DSLs and Visual Basic XML literals. You can download the code Dmitry shows in the interview from his blog here.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) in Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Beth Massi — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:07:00 GMT

In this interview Saaid Kahn, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team, shows us how to create an n-tier application against a database using ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) and an Entity Data Model, both now available in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.

ADO.NET Data Services use WCF REST-ful services and provides all the plumbing so you can focus on the program logic by programming against a service proxy. ADO.NET Data Services allow you to easily create data services exposed on the web using URIs to point to pieces of data and simple, well-known formats to represent that data.

Saaid shows us how to create a simple service and then consume it using a Windows client via the "Add Service Reference" dialog in Visual Studio. He also walks through the client proxy methods that work with the data service.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Meet the Visual Studio Managed Languages Development Experience Team

Beth Massi — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:45:00 GMT

In this interview I meet with the team that brings us the "experience" of coding in Visual Studio, also sometimes referred to as the VS IDE Team. I ask them how their design process works, what the top requested features are for the code editors, how they work with the language teams as well as what their favorite and hardest features are to build and test.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

New Editor Features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Beth Massi — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:57:00 GMT

In this short interview, Yang Xiao, a tester on the VB IDE team is back demonstrating new improvements to the "Go To Definition", "Find All References" and Rename capabilities in the editor when flipping between code and XAML in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

XML Schema Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Beth Massi — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:03:00 GMT

In this interview, Yang Xiao, a tester on the Visual Basic IDE shows us the new XML Schema Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. This new window is invoked when you right-click on an XML literal element or namespace and select "Show in XML Schema Explorer" in Visual Basic programs. It's a nice way to visually display the structure of your schema sets which makes you even more productive when working with XML in Visual Basic.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

SQL 2008 & Occasionally Connected Client Support in Visual Studio SP1

Beth Massi — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 00:07:00 GMT

In this interview, Milind Lele, a PM on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team shows us the improvements made to the tooling in Visual Studio SP1 for occasionally connected clients as well as the new data type support for SQL Server 2008. Using SQL 2008 built-in change tracking, you don't need to make modifications to your table schemas like you have to do with SQL 2005. Additionally he shows off a "smarter" DataSet designer where you can have tables coming from server and client data stores all contained within one model.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, VS Community

The P-Invoke Interop Assistant

Beth Massi — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:14:00 GMT

In this interview, Jared Parsons, a Developer on the Visual Basic IDE, shows us the P/Invoke Interop Assistant available on CodePlex. The tool helps with converting unmanaged C code to managed P/Invoke signatures and vice versa. Say goodbye to digging through random header files or MSDN documentation to find the right constants, structures and signatures. The P/Invoke Interop Assistant does a smarter translation for you using SAL (Source Code Annotation Language).

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Visual Basic Language Design Meeting

Beth Massi — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:21:00 GMT

I sat down with the VB Language design team and asked them about their design process, favorite features, their thoughts on other languages, as well as what the Visual Basic language strategy really is. It was a fun and enlightening interview with a group of really smart people lead by Paul Vick. You can find most of the team members on the Visual Basic Team Blog.

And as for the "grey shirt joke" that's mentioned in the interview, see this post on the VB Team Blog.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Tips and Tricks with the Interop Forms Toolkit

Beth Massi — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:39 GMT

In this interview, Todd Apley, Senior Test Lead on the VB Team, shows us a variety of tips and tricks with using the Interop Forms Toolkit on Visual Studio 2008. He also shows us how to deploy a hybrid application built with VB 6 and VB.NET using XCopy deployment and RegFree-COM.

The Interop Forms Toolkit, available from the Visual Basic Developer Center, enables you to take a phased migration approach to upgrading your VB 6 applications. Instead of having to do a complete rewrite, you can instead create .NET user controls and forms that can be run from within your current VB 6 applications.

Todd will also be posting follow-up information on the VB Team blog.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Code To Live: Dave Donaldson on CodeKeep

joshholmes — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:47:18 GMT

Josh Holmes caught up with Dave Donaldson to talk about the cool project that he started back in 2005 called CodeKeep. This is a fantastic example of a passionate guy putting up a project that everyone can benefit from with no financial motivation.

This is one of the longer episodes so far (close to 30 minutes) but there's a lot of great content here.

The New DataRepeater Control in the Latest Power Packs Release

Beth Massi — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:41:46 GMT

In this interview John Hart, QA Lead on the Visual Basic Team, shows us the new DataRepeater control that has just been added to the latest Power Packs release on the Visual Basic Developer Center. Power Packs are free Add-Ins, Controls, Components, and Tools for you to use with Visual Basic to make developing applications even easier.

The new DataRepeater control allows you use standard Windows Forms controls to display rows of your data in a scrollable container giving you more flexibility and customization than standard grid controls.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

XML Properties and Enabling IntelliSense

Beth Massi — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:36:00 GMT

Join me and Avner Aharoni, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, as he shows us how to enable XML IntelliSense in Visual Basic using the XML to Schema Wizard. Avner shows the differences between how IntelliSense works with axis properties on XDocument and XElement objects and speaks to how the wizard can infer multiple schemas from multiple sources as well as the affect XML namespaces have on IntelliSense.

Get started with LINQ to XML in Visual Basic with these How-to Videos. And here are some good articles too.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, VS Community

Happy Holidays Niners

Jeff Sandquist — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:00:11 GMT

In keeping with what has become a holiday tradition here on Channel 9 he have Chris Anderson, Don Box and now Amanda Silver singing you a special holiday song.

You can compile along with them by grabbing the Very Beautiful holiday season! For even more holiday cheer, please check out episodes I, II,III and )
            With i
                Console.Write(.Value)
            End With REM a language so true
            If i IsNot Nothing Then
               Console.WriteLine()
            End If REM
            Console.Write(<some>xml</some>)
        Next
    End Sub
End Module

'Lyrical-indenting

Module VB : Dim myvar As _
Integer?() = {3 * 3}
Sub Main() : For Each i In myvar
Console.Write("Hello VB")
With i : Console.Write(.Value)
End With REM a language so true

If i IsNot Nothing Then
Console.WriteLine() : End If REM
Console.Write(<some>xml</some>)
Next : End Sub : End Module

Brian Beckman Does Higher Algebra with Visual Basic

Beth Massi — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:19:29 GMT

In this interview, Brian Beckman, Principal Developer (currently working with Erik Meijer), attempts to teach me higher algebra using Visual Basic, generics, and operator overloading. Brian is a wonderful person and brilliant physicist and we have a lot of fun with vectors and matrices and VB. I actually think I understood some of what Brian showed me ;).

Visual Basic is a great language for mathematics as well as all kinds of other applications. Brian makes the point that he has fun coding in VB because of its intuitive style and how easy it is to be immediately productive. Check out Brian's blog post on the VB Team blog! And for all you abstract algebra aficionados, here's the code to play with.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, VS Community

XML Literals Performance and Namespaces Explained

Beth Massi — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:54:00 GMT

Join me and Avner Aharoni, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, as he dives into LINQ to XML and XML Literals in Visual Basic 9 and explains namespace bubbling and the performance gains you may see using XML Literals. This is a good interview to pay attention to if you are struggling with how XML namespaces work in Visual Basic.

One funny note here about the interview -- I was having a hard time pronouncing Avner's last name so when I introduced him I was so focused on getting his name pronounced correctly (which I did) that I messed up and said "feature related to SQL to XML" instead of "feature related to LINQ to XML" Doh!

Get started with LINQ to XML in Visual Basic with these How-to Videos. And here are some good articles too.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, VS Community

Refactoring in Visual Basic with Refactor!

Beth Massi — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 01:39:45 GMT

Join me and Lisa Feigenbaum, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, as she shows us how to use Refactor!, the free add-in for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 that provides over 30 refactorings for Visual Basic. Lisa walks us through all the new refactorings that were added for the latest version of Visual Basic 2008. You can download Refactor! here. You can get the demo code she used here.

Enjoy!
-Beth Massi, VS Community

VS2008 Training Kit: What's new in Visual Basic 9.0?

DavidAiken — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 13:56:12 GMT

Hi and welcome to another Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit screencast.

This session was presented by Amanda Silver and is the from the Visual Studio 2008 training kit available from http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7602397.

Do you remember your first Basic program? Visual Basic has come a long way from a simple event handling language to a fully capable Object-Oriented language with the power of the .NET frameworks behind it. Visual Basic 9 will bring unparalleled productivity for line of business applications in the form of SQL-style query expressions and XML as a first class data type. But LINQ isn't the only important feature for the VB developer. We’ll continue to deliver on the productivity promise for VB devs with a vastly improved Intellisense experience in VS 2008 that should jazz those not ready to move to .NET 3.5. Off-cycle releases will ease migration from VB6 to .NET and address some missing features like line and shape, repeater, and PrintForm controls. Did you know that refactoring support is available for VB developers for free for VS 2003 – 2008?
In this brief session, you will learn about some of the key new language enhancements that are provided as part of Visual Basic 9, which is included with Visual Studio 2008.

Recorded September 2007.

Type Inference in Visual Basic with Bill Horst

Beth Massi — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:20:43 GMT

In this interview Bill Horst, a member of the Visual Basic QA team, shows us the ins and outs type inference in the newest version of Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008. He shows us how the new Option Infer works and how various types are inferred by the compiler without having to explicitly declare them. Type inference is one of the new features in Visual Basic to support LINQ.

Also make sure to check out these LINQ How-Do-I videos on the VB Dev Center.

Enjoy!
-Beth Massi, VS Community