Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

October 2008 - Visual Basic Blog

Shell Games (Matt Gertz)

October 31, 2008 Oct 31, 2008 10/31/08
Anthony D. Green [MSFT]
I was once temporarily taken off the VB team to get an unrelated project back on track, just a mere handful of weeks before it was due to ship.  I won’t go into the gory details; suffice it to say that we had reason to believe that the product would have to ship without delay, and that any major failure in the deliverable could ...

Community Interview with Adrian 'Spotty' Bowles (Beth Massi)

October 31, 2008 Oct 31, 2008 10/31/08
Beth Massi
This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole. This time we have Adrian Bowles (who's nickname is Spotty), a Tester on the VB Compiler. Someday Spotty will have to tell us how he got his nickname.Please check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the ...

Community Interview with Sophia Salim (Beth Massi)

October 29, 2008 Oct 29, 2008 10/29/08
Beth Massi
This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole. This time we have Sophia Salim, a Tester on the VB Compiler. I'm very happy to see Sophia reach out to the community and am looking forward to more interesting posts from her here. I'm always interested in what really goes on ...

Community Interview with John Stallo (Beth Massi)

October 27, 2008 Oct 27, 2008 10/27/08
Beth Massi
Here's a community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole with John Stallo, a Program Manager working on RAD tools. I first met John on my interview loop at Microsoft. What immediately stuck me when I met him was his Italian name but he has a very cool Australian accent. Being that we both have an Italian heritage, in ...

Community Interview with Eric Knox (Beth Massi)

October 25, 2008 Oct 25, 2008 10/25/08
Beth Massi
Here's another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with Eric Knox, Development Manager on the VB IDE Team. I got to know Eric at TechEd this year where we had a lot of fun floating in the pool on bright pink inner-tubes. ;-) You can also see Eric in the interview I did with the IDE Team a while ...

Community Article: Enabling Speech Recognition in Microsoft Word 2007 with Visual Studio 2008 (Beth Massi)

October 23, 2008 Oct 23, 2008 10/23/08
Beth Massi
If you missed it, this week a new community submitted article was released onto the Visual Basic Developer Center and the Office Development with Visual Studio Portal by Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole. In this article learn how to control the Vista operating system's speech recognition engine in .NET from a custom task pane in Microsoft ...

Community Interview with Bill Horst (Beth Massi)

October 22, 2008 Oct 22, 2008 10/22/08
Beth Massi
Continuing the community interviews from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time we have Bill Horst, a tester on the VB Team. You might know Bill from his awesome series of blog posts on Converting SQL to LINQ.Also check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic ...

Channel 9 Interview: ADO.NET Data Services in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Beth Massi)

October 21, 2008 Oct 21, 2008 10/21/08
Beth Massi
In this interview Saaid Kahn, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team (and former member of the VB 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 ...

Community Interview with Me! (Beth Massi)

October 20, 2008 Oct 20, 2008 10/20/08
Beth Massi
Here's another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with yours truly. ;-) I decided to release this one today since it's my birthday. Don't forget to check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center for a link to all these ...

A VS plugin to background-run your code and see the output (Lucian Wischik)

October 18, 2008 Oct 18, 2008 10/18/08
VBTeam
Say you're demonstrating some code at a conference. What's the best way to do it? If you show only the code window, then you're counting on the audience's imagination about how the code will work (and their trust that it does!). But if you hit F5 to run it then this breaks the flow. And I find it hard to keep both the code ...