Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Romeo and Juliette and Windows Azure (Lucian Wischik)

1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead but I'm not really"2. Romeo receives the message3. Romeo finds Juliette looking dead, but knows she's not really dead4. They live happily ever aftervs.1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead but I'm not really"     &...

Where are the Windows "SDK tools"? Where is ildasm? (Lucian Wischik)

C:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv6.0binildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv6.0Abinildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0Abinildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0Abinx64ildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0AbinNETFX 4.0 Toolsildasm.exeC:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv7.0AbinNETFX 4.0 ...

Typeless expressions (Lucian Wischik)

"My dog has no type.""How does he smell?""Awful!"Two of the new features of VB10 -- array literals and multi-line lambdas -- are interesting from the language perspective because their expressions have no type! This article is for language lawyers. I remember at my very first undergraduate computer science lecture, the lecturer Frank King ...

Community Interview with Lucian Wischik (Beth Massi)

Here's a community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with Lucian Wischik, a Developer on the team. I'm just getting to know Lucian but he is a very interesting and bright person who is just a pleasure to talk with (I hope he starts blogging a lot more). When I told him that out Italian community had ...

TL12: Future Directions for Microsoft Visual Basic (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Didn't make it to the PDC? No problem. You can still check out the *hottest* presentation at the Professional Developers Conference this year, available publicly on demand! Paul Vick (Principal Architect) and Lucian Wischik (VB Specification Lead & Software Engineer) gave an awesome presentation on the Future of VB. The presentation&...

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

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 ...

Reflection on COM objects (Lucian Wischik)

Reflection on .Net objects is done through System.Type and is very easy. For instance, "Dim type = GetType(System.String)" and now you can look at all the members and inheritance hierarchy of the System.String class.Reflection on COM types is also easy if they have an interop assembly. For instance, add a project reference to the COM ...

To compare two filenames (Lucian Wischik)

I once visited an ancient tower in China. A sign said "tread carefully for you bear the weight of history on your shoulders". Our guide explained that the tower was over 800 years old! Oh yes, he said, it was built 800 years ago, had burnt to the ground three times in its history, had been moved to completely different locations twice, ...

Co- and contra-variance (Lucian Wischik)

How do I convert an IEnumerable(Of CheckingAccount) into an IEnumerable(Of Account) ? (where CheckingAccount inherits from Account).Currently this conversion isn't allowed, but we're considering a VB language feature to support it. The topic is called "co- and contravariance", and has been in the CLR since 2005 or so, but no one's yet released...