Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 2: Descendants and Ancestors (Doug Rothaus)

This entry in the cookbook shows how you can access descendant and ancestor elements in an XML document using Visual Basic, XML Axis properties, and LINQ to XML objects.DescendantsVisual Basic provides XML Axis properties that enable you to easily refer to child nodes and attributes. As is often the case with XML, you may need to reference sub...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 1: XML Transformations using XML Literals (Doug Rothaus)

I was working on a blog entry about replacing XSLT transforms with Visual Basic XML Literals. As the entry progressed, I noticed that it was really, really long. So, Avner Aharoni and I talked things over and we decided to break it up into multiple entries and start a series, much like the LINQ Cookbook that was started a few months back. ...

Source code of Visual Basic runtime has been released to public. (Vladimir)

  One of the things we have been working on recently was publishing sources of VisualBasic runtime library. I am very excited to announce that the sources of VB runtime (Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll) are publicly available now!  This is a part of a more general work on making .Net Framework sources available to public ( ...

LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 12: Calculate the Standard Deviation (Doug Rothaus)

Ingredients:·         Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to Objects Introduction:LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 11 showed how you can use LINQ queries to perform calculations on sets of data using a set of standard aggregate functions such as Average, and Sum. In this recipe, ...

LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 11: Desktop Search Statistics (Doug Rothaus)

Ingredients:·        Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher) Categories: LINQ to DataSet Introduction:You can use aggregate functions in LINQ queries to perform calculations on sets of data. Visual Basic includes a set of standard aggregate functions for LINQ queries: All, Any, Average, Count, ...

Launching External Tools from inside Visual Studio (Jonathan Aneja)

Visual Studio has a small but extremely useful feature that allows you to hook external tools directly into the IDE’s Tools menu.  All you have to do is click Tools->External Tools… and then you can add your own custom menu items that will launch a specified program.   On a typical day I’ll probably fire up Reflector and/or ...

Drawing Maps with Visual Basic (Scott Wisniewski)

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 ...

Awesome VB9 Blog Series by Bart De Smet (Amanda Silver)

I guess I've been working too hard on getting the product ready to ship to notice that Bart has put together an awesome blog series on VB9. It includes discussion of a feature called runtime agility or compiler agility that we haven't taken up on this blog. We introduced this feature to make it much easier for new .NET platforms (think ...

Hidden Gems in Visual Basic 2008 (Amanda Silver)

Yesterday I promised to post about the hidden gems in Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2008 that you haven’t read about in blog posts or seen at conferences. I forgot that I mentioned a few of my favorite features in the Beta1 announcement where I showed off the improvements in the Intellisense experience – statement completion for ...

Visual Basic 2008 Ships!!! (Amanda Silver)

Hooray! Today we’ve finally shipped Visual Studio 2008, previously known as “Orcas”, previously known as some symbol which doesn’t have an ascii representation. We’ve come a long way, but it’s been a great ride. In his blog, Soma mentions many of the flagship features at a high-level that will undoubtedly ...