Visual Basic Blog

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Scott Wisniewski - Visual Basic Blog

Drawing Maps with Visual Basic (Scott Wisniewski)

November 26, 2007 Nov 26, 2007 11/26/07
VBTeam
If you find yourself looking for something to do with your awesome new copy of Visual Studio 2008, you should check out the December 2007 edition of MSDN magazine. It features an article, written by me, that provides a walk through on how to visualize data on a map using VB 9, WPF and LINQ. To give you a sneak preview of what the app ...

A Note about Enums (Scott Wisniewski)

October 15, 2007 Oct 15, 2007 10/15/07
VBTeam
I recently received an email from a customer who had a few questions about "enum inheritance" in VB, specifically as to why it wasn't supported. In particular, he sent us the following snippet of VB code  (I've changed the names of the classes and methods involved)  : Option Strict On Public Class BaseClass    Public ...

Lambdas, and Take While, and Group By, Oh My!

July 26, 2007 Jul 26, 2007 07/26/07
VBTeam
Hooray! Visual Basic 2008 Beta2 has been released to the wild today to return to its natural habitat – the desktops of our beloved customers. (Please note our smiling GPM's face on that landing page -- he's so happy the Beta is done.) What’s inside? So much that there might be more new features than we released in Beta1, but who’s ...

Shameless Plug (Scott Wisniewski)

July 12, 2007 Jul 12, 2007 07/12/07
VBTeam
If you get a chance, you should check out the August 2007 edition of MSDN Magazine. In addition to its usual array of awesome goodies, this month's edition features a super cool Basic Instincts column, written by me. In it I discuss the design of Query Comprehensions in VB, giving an overview of the basic framework used by the compiler to ...

What is the difference between VB 9, VBx and Silverlight? (Scott Wisniewski)

June 7, 2007 Jun 7, 2007 06/7/07
VBTeam
I recently received an email from a customer asking for clarification as to what the difference was between VB 9, VBx and Sliverlight. In particular, it seems as if we have been releasing so much information about cool new stuff that at least a few people have become confused, making them a bit nervous about the future of VB. The customer had ...

Partial Methods

March 28, 2007 Mar 28, 2007 03/28/07
VBTeam
About two weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the product group dinner associated with the Global MVP Summit that was behind held here at Microsoft. Besides a free meal, this also gave me the excellent opportunity to meet with some of our MVPs and discuss their impressions with Visual Studio and all the cool new features we are ...

Extension Methods Best Practices (Extension Methods Part 6)

March 10, 2007 Mar 10, 2007 03/10/07
VBTeam
This is the sixth installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here. Today I am going to talk about some best practices for using extension methods. Most of this content is geared toward authors of class libraries designed for wide spread consumption. Developers of such libraries often...

March 2007 Orcas CTP Available

February 28, 2007 Feb 28, 2007 02/28/07
VBTeam
The March 2007 Orcas CTP is now available for download.You can see Soma's anouncement about it here.This is the first Orcas CTP to include new VB 9.0 features and is the first update of VB LINQ since last year's May 2006 LINQ CTP.Amongst a lot of other really cool Orcas stuff, this CTP includes previews of the following VB 9.0 ...

Extension methods and Generics (Extension Methods Part 5)

February 15, 2007 Feb 15, 2007 02/15/07
VBTeam
This is the 5th installment in my series of posts about extension methods. You can find links to the rest of the series here. Originally I had planned on discussing extension method versioning issues, but I've decided to postpone that topic to my next post and talk about extension methods and generics instead. In Orcas we've introduced a new ...