Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Better together: Visual Basic 14 and the Visual Studio 2015 Debugger

"Lambdas! Lambdas! Lambdas! Lambdas! ..." If you hadn't heard, Visual Studio 2015 will support the use of lambda expressions in the debugger windows. (image) We're all very excited to deliver on this longstanding TOP customer request. When LINQ was introduced in 2008 it was a game changer for the way .NET developers think about and code with ...

New Language Features in Visual Basic 14

(image) "Visual Basic 14" is the version of Visual Basic that will ship with Visual Studio 2015. In this blog post I'll talk specifically about the VB language improvements in this release. (Separately, there are a whole host of IDE and project-system improvements as well). There are two overall themes to the language improvements: (1) Make ...

New Language Features in Visual Basic 14 (animated)

(image) "Visual Basic 14" is the version of Visual Basic that will ship with Visual Studio 2015. In this blog post I'll talk specifically about the VB language improvements in this release. (Separately, there are a whole host of IDE and project-system improvements as well). There are two overall themes to the language improvements: (1) Make ...

Post-Release Goodies

(image) The Rosetta lander Philae wasn't the only thing in space last week. Our launch of Visual Studio 2015 Preview and our announcement to open source the full .NET server stack were out of this world. After all, it’s not every day that you can say your work trended higher than Kim Kardashian on Twitter. After an overwhelmingly ...

Introducing the Visual Studio 2015 Preview for VB and C#

Download Visual Studio 2015 Preview and review the release notes. Over the past several years, our team has been hard at work re-implementing the full language stacks for Visual Basic and C#. While this was a long investment, we knew that an improved stack with a cleaner architecture would allow our team to work faster, empower others to build...

.NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") for the Rest of Us

WOW! It’s been a while -- almost exactly 4 years since yours truly, Beth Massi, last posted on the VB Team blog (although it’s cool to see I’m still in the tag cloud ;-)).  I’m honored to be a special guest post today. If you’ve been reading this team blog I’m sure you know by now that the .NET Compiler Platform (code named...

VB Universal Windows App: downloads

Here are download links for the "VB Universal Windows App" series:   App1.vb This is the minimal VB universal app that we'll build in this blog series.   Breakout Universal This is a complete game, based upon all the principles that were covered in the blog series...

VB Universal Windows App Part 5: calling into platform-specific APIs from PCL

This is Part 5 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: So far we've been able to re-use all our code and XAML by placing them in the PCL. Actually, PCLs can only ever contain calls to APIs that are common to the platforms they target. This generally isn't a problem, because most APIs on Windows also exist on Windows Phone, ...

VB Universal Windows App Part 4: using SharpDX for sound effects

This is Part 4 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: So far we've built a solid app, sharing as much code and XAML as possible by placing it in our PCL. For today's post we'll continue the process, adding game-quality sound effects to our app. SharpDX is the best way to do this. Please bear with me. This is a long ...