Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Lucian Wischik - Visual Basic Blog

New Async Programming Video's

August 12, 2011 Aug 12, 2011 08/12/11
VBTeam
Some great new video's on MSDN showing how to do async programming using the Async CTP. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh378091.aspx There are different versions of video's for both VB and C#.    This is a great opportunity to see the power of the new Async languages featuresand follow through a series of examples ...

Announcing the Async CTP for Visual Basic (and also Iterators!)

October 28, 2010 Oct 28, 2010 10/28/10
VBTeam
We're very happy to announce today the Async CTP for Visual Basic and C#. Asynchronous programming is something that helps make your UI more responsive, especially in applications that interact with databases or network or disk. It's also used to make ASP servers scale better. And it's the natural way to program in Silverlight. Until now...

What didn't get into VB10: a wish-list for future versions of VB

January 28, 2010 Jan 28, 2010 01/28/10
VBTeam
Visual Studio 2010 is almost out the door. Now is a good time to look back at what we didn't get into the language in this release, but would have wanted to, and so will consider for future releases.Over the coming weeks, each day, I'll blog on blogs.msdn.com/lucian about the ideas on our wish-list, along with our evaluation of ...

Negative delays: not in VB (Lucian Wischik)

April 6, 2009 Apr 6, 2009 04/6/09
VBTeam
Our recent post on "negative sleeps in VB" was an April Fool's joke. VB doesn't have negative sleeps, and isn't going to. But the joke's on me! Several readers wrote back to say that other languages do have negative sleeps. Tony Hoare, inventor of "Quicksort" amongst other things, wrote: Did you know that negative delays have long been ...

Using "negative sleeps" to improve responsiveness in VB web apps

April 1, 2009 Apr 1, 2009 04/1/09
VBTeam
[NOTE: please also read the followup to this article]  .NET 4.0 will introduce many new threading and concurrency classes -- SpinLock, Parallel Linq, and ConcurrentDictionary to name but a few.The new feature that excites me the most is the ability to pass a negative argument to Thread.Sleep. This article describes how...

Concurrent Basic on Channel 9 (Lucian Wischik, Lisa Feigenbaum)

February 26, 2009 Feb 26, 2009 02/26/09
Lisa Feigenbaum
Concurrency is an important topic on everyone's mind, when considering future trends for computing and programming languages. Concurrent Basic is a variant of the Visual Basic language, with new constructs baked in to help handle concurrency and parallelism, in a very natural way. Watch this high-energy video with language guru Erik Meijer, VB...

Web-scraping using Visual Basic's XML support

February 20, 2009 Feb 20, 2009 02/20/09
VBTeam
We've just had a fascinating article about using VB's XML literals to produce web pages.I've been interested in the other side of the process: using VB's XML support to scrape web-pages for data. Here's the essential bit of code, which looks for something like <div class="content"><h2>Title</h2> <table><tr&...