A group blog from members of the VB team
November 12, 2018Nov 12, 201811/12/18Visual Basic in .NET Core 3
Update: Oct 8, 2019
.NET Core 3.0 contains portions of the Visual Basic.NET Runtime (microsoft.visualbasic.dll) that do not depend on WinForms.
Visual Basic.NET support for WinForms, WPF, and other application types in .NET Core 3.0 is similar to C#.
June 5, 2018Jun 5, 201806/5/18Visual Basic supports .NET Core starting in Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 (15.3). This opens new possibilities for new applications and modernizing existing applications. Preserving domain-specific code when modernizing applications allows step-wise conversions, decreases cost, and avoids disruptions.
This post covers using Visual Basic ASP.NET Core WebAPI for the back end,
October 2, 2017Oct 2, 201710/2/17So, you’ve heard that VB (and C#) are open source now and you want to dive in and contribute. If you haven’t spent your life building compilers, you probably don’t know where to start. No worries, I’ll walk you through it.
September 7, 2017Sep 7, 201709/7/17This post was authored by guest blogger André Obelink, a Visual Basic MVP, and published by the VBTeam on his behalf.
In my previous post, I wrote about the basics of dependency injection. I explained the technique to define an interface and injecting the dependencies to a client object.
August 28, 2017Aug 28, 201708/28/17This post was authored by guest blogger André Obelink, a Visual Basic MVP, and published by the VBTeam on his behalf.
In this first blog post of a series of two, I explain what dependency injection (DI) is and why you might want to use this design principle in your software.
August 14, 2017Aug 14, 201708/14/17Visual Studio 2017 15.3 Preview 1 included templates for VB class libraries targeting .NET Standard class libraries and for .NET Core console apps. With the release of .NET Core 2.0 today those templates go-live.
The .NET Standard
You can use the built-in templates to create cross-platform command-line apps,
June 13, 2017Jun 13, 201706/13/17How would you like it if you could create a Console App in Visual Basic and run it on Linux? Or running the same Xamarin.Forms-App written in Visual Basic on an iPhone, and Android and a Windows Tablet? Welcome to the world of cross-platform development,
May 21, 2017May 21, 201705/21/17…and Why My Grandma Invented the Concept!
Meet late Grandma Grete Schindler. I’d like to introduce you to my grandma, because this post will be about the essence and purpose of unit testing in Visual Basic, and Granny Grete basically invented the concept of unit testing.
April 10, 2017Apr 10, 201704/10/17…letting your code do absolutely nothing!
We’ve all been there, one way or the other. Either as users of an app or as the developer to whom users complained to: When a typical Win32 app is waiting for an operation to complete,
April 6, 2017Apr 6, 201704/6/17Hi VBers,
Last week Klaus wrote an amazing post detailing a number of improvements made to the Visual Basic IDE and language in Visual Studio 2017 (and he even forgot one, stay tuned for awesome). Regarding the new ref-return feature Jonathan Allen inquired as to why the design was so different from the one in C#.
Announcements
November 12, 2018Nov 12, 201811/12/18Visual Basic in .NET Core 3
Update: Oct 8, 2019
.NET Core 3.0 contains portions of the Visual Basic.NET Runtime (microsoft.visualbasic.dll) that do not depend on WinForms.
Visual Basic.NET support for WinForms, WPF, and other application types in .NET Core 3.0 is similar to C#.
August 14, 2017Aug 14, 201708/14/17Visual Studio 2017 15.3 Preview 1 included templates for VB class libraries targeting .NET Standard class libraries and for .NET Core console apps. With the release of .NET Core 2.0 today those templates go-live.
The .NET Standard
You can use the built-in templates to create cross-platform command-line apps,
February 1, 2017Feb 1, 201702/1/17Today Mads made an excellent post about our overall .NET Language Strategy. As I know this will raise a lot of questions in the VB community I wanted to take an entire post on the VB team blog to dive deeper into how VB fits into that strategy and why and what that means in practical terms for us as a community.
January 31, 2017Jan 31, 201701/31/17Last year we decided to retire this blog and consolidate content on the .NET team blog instead. The thinking at the time was that we weren’t really posting a lot of content to it and that there was so much overlap in content between the VB team blog and the C# FAQ that it would be simpler to just focus on the .NET blog.
May 1, 2015May 1, 201505/1/15For the last six years you’ve heard us go on and on about this Roslyn thing and how it’s the platform for the future and would change everything and that we were all-in on it and “it’s going to be great just wait and see”.
April 6, 2015Apr 6, 201504/6/15“I am looking for someone to share in an adventure.”
— Gandalf, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
On April 3, 2014, Anders Hejlsberg set us on our open source journey when he made the .NET Compiler Platform (aka “Roslyn”) source code public live on stage in San Francisco.
April 2, 2015Apr 2, 201504/2/15Hey all,
I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s April Fools’ Day post. I thought it was a fun way to kick off an experiment I’d like to conduct and in this post I’ll tell you how you can actually try out lowercase keywords for VB on your machine right now no matter what version of VS you’re using (no joke).
January 10, 2015Jan 10, 201501/10/15It’s official. We’re moving to GitHub!
We are moving the Roslyn OSS code from CodePlex to GitHub. GitHub has a vibrant open source community that we want to actively be a part of and contribute to. We are also going to take this time to modify our pull request process.
November 19, 2014Nov 19, 201411/19/14The 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.
November 12, 2014Nov 12, 201411/12/14Our team has put together a set of short videos to highlight some of our work in Visual Studio 2015 Preview. Check them out to learn more about what’s new in C# and VB, how F# can be good for enterprise,
April Fools' Day
April 2, 2015Apr 2, 201504/2/15Hey all,
I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s April Fools’ Day post. I thought it was a fun way to kick off an experiment I’d like to conduct and in this post I’ll tell you how you can actually try out lowercase keywords for VB on your machine right now no matter what version of VS you’re using (no joke).
April 1, 2015Apr 1, 201504/1/15UPDATE 2015-04-02: After reading this post be sure to read the follow-up post!
I was chatting with an old Microsoftie a while ago and he let me in on the real story behind Visual Basic’s at times aggressive reformatting of code.
Community Contribution
June 5, 2018Jun 5, 201806/5/18Visual Basic supports .NET Core starting in Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 (15.3). This opens new possibilities for new applications and modernizing existing applications. Preserving domain-specific code when modernizing applications allows step-wise conversions, decreases cost, and avoids disruptions.
This post covers using Visual Basic ASP.NET Core WebAPI for the back end,
September 7, 2017Sep 7, 201709/7/17This post was authored by guest blogger André Obelink, a Visual Basic MVP, and published by the VBTeam on his behalf.
In my previous post, I wrote about the basics of dependency injection. I explained the technique to define an interface and injecting the dependencies to a client object.
August 28, 2017Aug 28, 201708/28/17This post was authored by guest blogger André Obelink, a Visual Basic MVP, and published by the VBTeam on his behalf.
In this first blog post of a series of two, I explain what dependency injection (DI) is and why you might want to use this design principle in your software.
Converting SQL to LINQ
May 7, 2008May 7, 200805/7/08This post assumes you’ve read my previous Converting SQL to LINQ posts.
I haven’t had much in the way of specific requests for more LINQ posts, so I’d still welcome any suggestions that people want to offer. I did get one request about how to mimic the LIKE keyword functionality in VB LINQ.
February 12, 2008Feb 12, 200802/12/08This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series. It makes the same assumptions as Part 8, and I will pick up where I left off, covering Full Outer Join. Once again, I recognize this isn’t an ideal situation,
January 31, 2008Jan 31, 200801/31/08This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series.
After my post on joins, I’ve had some questions about outer joins. As you can see in part 6, VB9 doesn’t have smooth support for Left or Right join.
January 8, 2008Jan 8, 200801/8/08This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series:
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators
Converting SQL to LINQ,
December 31, 2007Dec 31, 200712/31/07This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series:
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators
Converting SQL to LINQ,
December 18, 2007Dec 18, 200712/18/07This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series:
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators
Converting SQL to LINQ,
December 12, 2007Dec 12, 200712/12/07This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series:
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 3: DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY and Operators
This post will discuss scalar and aggregate functions.
December 4, 2007Dec 4, 200712/4/07This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series:
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics
Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 2: FROM and SELECT
Continuing with specific query clauses, I will cover topics related to DISTINCT, WHERE and ORDER BY.
November 28, 2007Nov 28, 200711/28/07This post assumes you’ve read Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 1: The Basics.
I’ve made the following name changes since the last post, which I hope will make the code examples clearer:
· Customers -> CustomerTable
· Orders -> OrderTable
· cust ->
November 19, 2007Nov 19, 200711/19/07As you may already know, VB LINQ statements enable SQL-like syntax for queries in the VB language. LINQ syntax doesn’t match SQL syntax exactly, so if you are already working with SQL or familiar with SQL queries, you may find yourself wanting to convert an existing SQL query to LINQ.
Discussion
October 2, 2017Oct 2, 201710/2/17So, you’ve heard that VB (and C#) are open source now and you want to dive in and contribute. If you haven’t spent your life building compilers, you probably don’t know where to start. No worries, I’ll walk you through it.
June 13, 2017Jun 13, 201706/13/17How would you like it if you could create a Console App in Visual Basic and run it on Linux? Or running the same Xamarin.Forms-App written in Visual Basic on an iPhone, and Android and a Windows Tablet? Welcome to the world of cross-platform development,
May 21, 2017May 21, 201705/21/17…and Why My Grandma Invented the Concept!
Meet late Grandma Grete Schindler. I’d like to introduce you to my grandma, because this post will be about the essence and purpose of unit testing in Visual Basic, and Granny Grete basically invented the concept of unit testing.
April 10, 2017Apr 10, 201704/10/17…letting your code do absolutely nothing!
We’ve all been there, one way or the other. Either as users of an app or as the developer to whom users complained to: When a typical Win32 app is waiting for an operation to complete,
April 6, 2017Apr 6, 201704/6/17Hi VBers,
Last week Klaus wrote an amazing post detailing a number of improvements made to the Visual Basic IDE and language in Visual Studio 2017 (and he even forgot one, stay tuned for awesome). Regarding the new ref-return feature Jonathan Allen inquired as to why the design was so different from the one in C#.
March 30, 2017Mar 30, 201703/30/17Visual Studio 2017 just shipped, and with it shipped a new version of Visual Basic. With the new language strategy of the .NET Languages, the focus is again on Visual Basic’s original virtue: Provide editor, debugging and refactoring tools as well as language feature to ease complex tasks and boost every VB’s developer productivity without distracting them from their domain specific excellence.
February 1, 2017Feb 1, 201702/1/17Today Mads made an excellent post about our overall .NET Language Strategy. As I know this will raise a lot of questions in the VB community I wanted to take an entire post on the VB team blog to dive deeper into how VB fits into that strategy and why and what that means in practical terms for us as a community.
May 21, 2015May 21, 201505/21/15[Update: You can get these cool T-Shirts @ the .NET Swag Store – get yours today!]
Mads and Dustin showed off their cool VB and C# team t-shirts at BUILD and tons of people liked them and asked where they could get one.
February 23, 2015Feb 23, 201502/23/15It’s the beginning of a new year! According to Back to the Future Part II, everyone will be riding hoverboards in a couple months (and, let’s be honest, Doc would love the HoloLens). In the meantime, let’s explore the enhancements we’ve made to the Visual Studio debugging experience.
December 11, 2014Dec 11, 201412/11/14“Lambdas! Lambdas! Lambdas! Lambdas! …”
If you hadn’t heard, Visual Studio 2015 will support the use of lambda expressions in the debugger windows.
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 data.
Feature Focus
March 30, 2017Mar 30, 201703/30/17Visual Studio 2017 just shipped, and with it shipped a new version of Visual Basic. With the new language strategy of the .NET Languages, the focus is again on Visual Basic’s original virtue: Provide editor, debugging and refactoring tools as well as language feature to ease complex tasks and boost every VB’s developer productivity without distracting them from their domain specific excellence.
February 23, 2015Feb 23, 201502/23/15It’s the beginning of a new year! According to Back to the Future Part II, everyone will be riding hoverboards in a couple months (and, let’s be honest, Doc would love the HoloLens). In the meantime, let’s explore the enhancements we’ve made to the Visual Studio debugging experience.
December 11, 2014Dec 11, 201412/11/14“Lambdas! Lambdas! Lambdas! Lambdas! …”
If you hadn’t heard, Visual Studio 2015 will support the use of lambda expressions in the debugger windows.
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 data.
December 9, 2014Dec 9, 201412/9/14“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).
November 26, 2014Nov 26, 201411/26/14“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).
Featured
October 2, 2017Oct 2, 201710/2/17So, you’ve heard that VB (and C#) are open source now and you want to dive in and contribute. If you haven’t spent your life building compilers, you probably don’t know where to start. No worries, I’ll walk you through it.
April 10, 2017Apr 10, 201704/10/17…letting your code do absolutely nothing!
We’ve all been there, one way or the other. Either as users of an app or as the developer to whom users complained to: When a typical Win32 app is waiting for an operation to complete,
March 30, 2017Mar 30, 201703/30/17Visual Studio 2017 just shipped, and with it shipped a new version of Visual Basic. With the new language strategy of the .NET Languages, the focus is again on Visual Basic’s original virtue: Provide editor, debugging and refactoring tools as well as language feature to ease complex tasks and boost every VB’s developer productivity without distracting them from their domain specific excellence.
How-To
June 13, 2017Jun 13, 201706/13/17How would you like it if you could create a Console App in Visual Basic and run it on Linux? Or running the same Xamarin.Forms-App written in Visual Basic on an iPhone, and Android and a Windows Tablet? Welcome to the world of cross-platform development,
May 21, 2017May 21, 201705/21/17…and Why My Grandma Invented the Concept!
Meet late Grandma Grete Schindler. I’d like to introduce you to my grandma, because this post will be about the essence and purpose of unit testing in Visual Basic, and Granny Grete basically invented the concept of unit testing.
April 10, 2017Apr 10, 201704/10/17…letting your code do absolutely nothing!
We’ve all been there, one way or the other. Either as users of an app or as the developer to whom users complained to: When a typical Win32 app is waiting for an operation to complete,
April 17, 2014Apr 17, 201404/17/14Hello everyone! I hope you had a chance to catch the recent announcements around the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”). If not, I encourage you to view Anders’s presentation at Build 2014 (skip to 1:10:28). If you haven’t already, download the previews and take them for a spin!
April 3, 2014Apr 3, 201404/3/14It’s a big day for us on the Managed Languages team! As announced at the //BUILD conference earlier today, and as posted by Soma on his blog, we are not just delivering a new preview of Roslyn to all of you,
I'M A VB
June 15, 2014Jun 15, 201406/15/14This is Part 4 of the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal Windows app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
Part 3: Local and Roaming settings,
June 15, 2014Jun 15, 201406/15/14This is Part 3 of the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal Windows app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
> Part 3: Local and Roaming settings,
October 17, 2009Oct 17, 200910/17/09
Website: http://geeks.ms/blogs/lfranco
· How long have you been using VB?
Visual Basic? Since VB 3.0, but I have been using other Basic in the 80’s 😉
· What industry do you work in?
Currently I work in a Financial company
October 17, 2009Oct 17, 200910/17/09
Website: http://geeks.ms/blogs/jorge/
· How long have you been using VB?
In the University had the opportunity of use VB 1 (one floppy disk of 3 1/2 1.44 Mb). It was a little bit odd in a first moment, but a few time later I used VB 3 (7 or 8 floppy disks,
October 17, 2009Oct 17, 200910/17/09
· How long have you been using VB?
9 years, hah saying it makes it look like it was yesterday. started with Basic on my father’s massive … well you cant really call something that big a ‘PC’. was introduced to Visual basic 6 by a friend and was addicted to it.
October 17, 2009Oct 17, 200910/17/09
· How long have you been using VB?
12 years
· How big is your development team?
4
· Please tell us about an app that you’re working on at the moment.
App used to track REO property services
October 17, 2009Oct 17, 200910/17/09
· How long have you been using VB?
Since 1998 (VB6), its the first language I learnt. I took a free ‘learn VB in 24 hours’ course online during my free time in highschool
· What industry do you work in?
October 17, 2009Oct 17, 200910/17/09
Website: http://www.abbass.tk
· How long have you been using VB?
I have been using VB for 7 years. I started with Visual Basic 6, and 3 years later I learnt VB.net.
· What industry do you work in?
-Computer hardware and software maintenance.
October 17, 2009Oct 17, 200910/17/09Website: http://www.abiro.com
· How long have you been using VB?
Since 1998 I think (starting with VB6).
· What industry do you work in?
None in particular
· How big is your development team?
1
· What kind of apps do you most commonly build?
October 17, 2009Oct 17, 200910/17/09Website: http://www.tunisia-sat.com
· How long have you been using VB?
2 years
· What industry do you work in?
electronics
· How big is your development team?
6 devs
· What kind of apps do you most commonly build?
telecommunication monitoring
Language Design
April 6, 2017Apr 6, 201704/6/17Hi VBers,
Last week Klaus wrote an amazing post detailing a number of improvements made to the Visual Basic IDE and language in Visual Studio 2017 (and he even forgot one, stay tuned for awesome). Regarding the new ref-return feature Jonathan Allen inquired as to why the design was so different from the one in C#.
Matt Gertz
April 29, 2011Apr 29, 201104/29/11Hi, all!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog, and a lot has happened in my world since then. Though I’ve been pretty busy on our engineering systems team, I took a little time off last summer to do some traveling and,
February 26, 2010Feb 26, 201002/26/10One of the really fun things about being associated with the Visual Basic team is getting to see all of the varied usages to which our customers put it. From enterprise software to games, our customer base covers a wide range.
December 18, 2009Dec 18, 200912/18/09“Oh, no!” I hear you cry, “not another blog about Euchre!”
Well, I do like the game, to be sure. But, more importantly, the Euchre scenario enables me to try out any new technologies on a reasonably complex problem (using Visual Basic,
November 7, 2009Nov 7, 200911/7/09In this post, I’ll continue on with coding the new playlist shuffler. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, I highly recommend it so that this post will make more sense. J
Code for the controls (continued)
The Title TextBox
When the title changes,
November 6, 2009Nov 6, 200911/6/09Way back in October 2007, I wrote up a few posts (here and here) on my experiments with the Windows Media Player object model. The problem I was trying to solve was that, when I had a playlist set to “shuffle,”
October 7, 2009Oct 7, 200910/7/09In my last post, I talked about the hidden costs that can occur whenever you call out to methods, particularly in loops. In looking at my examples, reader KG2V commented that another thing that folks need to be aware of is avoiding the assumption that the world (or,
October 6, 2009Oct 6, 200910/6/09(Note: there was a grievous error in this post based on a bad assumption on my art regarding VB. Not feeling the need to hide my ignorance :-), I have instead made a number of edits in this post to bring it back to some semblance of reality.)
One thing that gets me annoyed with myself is realizing that the product or service I’ve just bought has some hidden costs that I didn’t anticipate.
August 5, 2009Aug 5, 200908/5/09In my previous post, we fixed up a C# GPS library to provide more support, and wrote all of the UI for a VB GPS application, all based on (but modified from) a Mobile GPS sample in the Windows Mobile 6.0 SDK.
August 4, 2009Aug 4, 200908/4/09The title of this blog post has sort of a triple meaning for me. First of all, I just got back from a long (and wonderful!) cruise in the Caribbean, followed by a stop at Disney World. And of course, if you go to Disney World with kids,
June 25, 2009Jun 25, 200906/25/09By now, many of you will have downloaded the recent beta that we posted to the net, and (hopefully) are getting excited about the features that we’ve been developing. Recently, Beth Massi interviewed me about some of the work that I’ve been doing as a part of that effort.
Misc
October 2, 2017Oct 2, 201710/2/17So, you’ve heard that VB (and C#) are open source now and you want to dive in and contribute. If you haven’t spent your life building compilers, you probably don’t know where to start. No worries, I’ll walk you through it.
May 21, 2015May 21, 201505/21/15[Update: You can get these cool T-Shirts @ the .NET Swag Store – get yours today!]
Mads and Dustin showed off their cool VB and C# team t-shirts at BUILD and tons of people liked them and asked where they could get one.
May 20, 2014May 20, 201405/20/14Thanks everybody for all the great feedback!
We’ve received hundreds of replies since last week with detailed information and concrete examples for us to review. We are closing the survey today and have started to process the tons of data you have provided.
The overwhelming majority of you have told us that Edit and Continue is important and you’d like us to make it even better.
May 13, 2014May 13, 201405/13/14UPDATE 2014-05-20: We’ve received enough responses and the survey is now closed. Thanks everyone!
Hey VB developers!
Do you get tired of seeing this box (I know I do)?
Tell us about it!
The Visual Studio team would like your anonymous feedback on improving Edit and Continue (E&C) when developing .NET applications.
May 1, 2014May 1, 201405/1/14UPDATE: QuickVB is now open source!
The Visual Basic team joins Dartmouth and developers worldwide whose lives have been touched by this amazing language in wishing Dartmouth BASIC (and indeed the whole BASIC family of languages) a very happy 50th birthday (and many more) today!
January 15, 2014Jan 15, 201401/15/14(For the next few posts, I’m going to introduce readers to the different feature teams in the Managed Languages org. Today, I’m starting this with a focus on the performance team.)
Back in 2000, I found myself assigned to be the performance lead of the Visual Basic team,
July 17, 2013Jul 17, 201307/17/13As you can see in the VS2013 Preview, we have not added new language features to Visual Basic and C# in the next version of Visual Studio. I’d like to share our thinking on this. There are essentially two main reasons why we chose not to evolve the languages this time around.
Other News
February 1, 2017Feb 1, 201702/1/17Today Mads made an excellent post about our overall .NET Language Strategy. As I know this will raise a lot of questions in the VB community I wanted to take an entire post on the VB team blog to dive deeper into how VB fits into that strategy and why and what that means in practical terms for us as a community.
January 31, 2017Jan 31, 201701/31/17Last year we decided to retire this blog and consolidate content on the .NET team blog instead. The thinking at the time was that we weren’t really posting a lot of content to it and that there was so much overlap in content between the VB team blog and the C# FAQ that it would be simpler to just focus on the .NET blog.
April 6, 2015Apr 6, 201504/6/15“I am looking for someone to share in an adventure.”
— Gandalf, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
On April 3, 2014, Anders Hejlsberg set us on our open source journey when he made the .NET Compiler Platform (aka “Roslyn”) source code public live on stage in San Francisco.
January 10, 2015Jan 10, 201501/10/15It’s official. We’re moving to GitHub!
We are moving the Roslyn OSS code from CodePlex to GitHub. GitHub has a vibrant open source community that we want to actively be a part of and contribute to. We are also going to take this time to modify our pull request process.
November 19, 2014Nov 19, 201411/19/14The 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.
November 12, 2014Nov 12, 201411/12/14Our team has put together a set of short videos to highlight some of our work in Visual Studio 2015 Preview. Check them out to learn more about what’s new in C# and VB, how F# can be good for enterprise,
June 24, 2014Jun 24, 201406/24/14WOW! 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.
May 15, 2014May 15, 201405/15/14If you didn’t get a change to make it to TechEd this year, fret not, we got it all on video for your viewing pleasure.
Join Principal Program Managers Dustin Campbell and Mads Torgersen as they give you the inside scoop on the future of VB and C#.
May 5, 2014May 5, 201405/5/14Hey VB hackers,
Microsoft Virtual Academy recently published a six-part series all about building modern apps for the Windows Store using your favorite language and staring Visual Basic MVP Bill Burrows and yours truly 🙂
Microsoft Virtual Academy is a free service available to anyone to sharpen their skills and learn the latest and greatest technologies.
May 2, 2014May 2, 201405/2/14Yesterday we published a copy of a fun “Roslyn”-powered retro editor for Visual Basic called QuickVB in honor of the 50th birthday of BASIC. We thought this was a neat application to showcase our love of BASIC but since then we’ve realized that it’s also a great example of how to put the power of the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”) APIs to use.
Releases
August 14, 2017Aug 14, 201708/14/17Visual Studio 2017 15.3 Preview 1 included templates for VB class libraries targeting .NET Standard class libraries and for .NET Core console apps. With the release of .NET Core 2.0 today those templates go-live.
The .NET Standard
You can use the built-in templates to create cross-platform command-line apps,
May 1, 2015May 1, 201505/1/15For the last six years you’ve heard us go on and on about this Roslyn thing and how it’s the platform for the future and would change everything and that we were all-in on it and “it’s going to be great just wait and see”.
November 12, 2014Nov 12, 201411/12/14Download 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,
June 3, 2014Jun 3, 201406/3/14As announced today by Soma, we’ve just released the first CTP (Community Technology Preview) of the next version of Visual Studio. This is doubly-exciting as this is the first public release of a version of Visual Studio powered by “Roslyn” by default.
September 17, 2012Sep 17, 201209/17/12VB Enthusiasts,
Following last Wednesday’s official launch of Visual Studio 2012, we’re excited to announce that the Roslyn September 2012 CTP is now available for download and provides support for VS 2012 RTM. Please note that Visual Studio 2010 is no longer supported by this CTP.
June 5, 2012Jun 5, 201206/5/12Hey, fellow VBs,
Today, we’re excited to announce that the Roslyn June 2012 CTP is now available for download!
Since the first public release of Roslyn, we’ve been hard at work implementing new language features, addressing top customer feedback from the October CTP,
Samples and Downloads
April 2, 2015Apr 2, 201504/2/15Hey all,
I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s April Fools’ Day post. I thought it was a fun way to kick off an experiment I’d like to conduct and in this post I’ll tell you how you can actually try out lowercase keywords for VB on your machine right now no matter what version of VS you’re using (no joke).
May 2, 2014May 2, 201405/2/14Yesterday we published a copy of a fun “Roslyn”-powered retro editor for Visual Basic called QuickVB in honor of the 50th birthday of BASIC. We thought this was a neat application to showcase our love of BASIC but since then we’ve realized that it’s also a great example of how to put the power of the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”) APIs to use.
June 27, 2012Jun 27, 201206/27/12You can use Visual Studio 2012 RC to download and install samples from the MSDN Code Gallery. You can download only the samples you need, or you can download one or more Sample Packs, which group several samples that relate to a technology or topic.
June 5, 2012Jun 5, 201206/5/12With the recent release of the Windows 8 Release Preview and the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate we also have more of the Metro samples available for VB developers.
Although not all the samples are available for VB, there is a good selection of samples showing you how utilize much of the important functionality now available.
May 25, 2012May 25, 201205/25/12As developers start to realize the full potential of Microsoft Kinect and new hardware is made available for the PC it’s really great to see the Kinect team provide some sample support for VB developers.
For a while the Compilers team (who handle both VB and C# compilers) have been hearing VB developers asking for content on new technologies and have been working with other product teams to ensure VB developers get some content in a timely manner.
December 12, 2011Dec 12, 201112/12/11For all those who have started venturing into developing windows phone applications, there are quite a few samples utilizing Silverlight, but the XNA content has been a little bit light. (We are working on getting some more XNA VB samples online).
August 26, 2011Aug 26, 201108/26/11For those VB developers who are developing (or keen to start developing) for WIndows Phone 7. The samples have been updated and as you’ll notice virtually all of them are in both C# and VB.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431744(VS.92).aspx
June 16, 2011Jun 16, 201106/16/11Today, Microsoft announced the Kinect SDK for PC
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/download.aspx
VB Samples are there at launch and available for downloading
http://files.ch9.ms/coding4fun/KinectSDKSamplesVB.zip
June 19, 2009Jun 19, 200906/19/09There are a lot of great Entity Framework samples on Code Gallery that you can now find available in Visual Basic .NET. This was recently announced on the ADO.NET team blog. Browse through the list below and start downloading!
ADO.NET Entity Framework Query Samples (Download)
ADO.NET Entity Framework Query Samples is a small Windows Forms program which contains several basic Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities queries against that NorthwindEF Entity Data Model (a modified version of Northwind).
March 26, 2009Mar 26, 200903/26/09The Silverlight Toolkit March 2009 release is enhanced with Visual Basic source code. Please follow the links to view these samples for both Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3.
Silverlight 2: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html Silverlight 3: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl3/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html
The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of controls,
Series
June 5, 2018Jun 5, 201806/5/18Visual Basic supports .NET Core starting in Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 (15.3). This opens new possibilities for new applications and modernizing existing applications. Preserving domain-specific code when modernizing applications allows step-wise conversions, decreases cost, and avoids disruptions.
This post covers using Visual Basic ASP.NET Core WebAPI for the back end,
September 7, 2017Sep 7, 201709/7/17This post was authored by guest blogger André Obelink, a Visual Basic MVP, and published by the VBTeam on his behalf.
In my previous post, I wrote about the basics of dependency injection. I explained the technique to define an interface and injecting the dependencies to a client object.
August 28, 2017Aug 28, 201708/28/17This post was authored by guest blogger André Obelink, a Visual Basic MVP, and published by the VBTeam on his behalf.
In this first blog post of a series of two, I explain what dependency injection (DI) is and why you might want to use this design principle in your software.
April 2, 2015Apr 2, 201504/2/15Hey all,
I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s April Fools’ Day post. I thought it was a fun way to kick off an experiment I’d like to conduct and in this post I’ll tell you how you can actually try out lowercase keywords for VB on your machine right now no matter what version of VS you’re using (no joke).
April 1, 2015Apr 1, 201504/1/15UPDATE 2015-04-02: After reading this post be sure to read the follow-up post!
I was chatting with an old Microsoftie a while ago and he let me in on the real story behind Visual Basic’s at times aggressive reformatting of code.
June 21, 2014Jun 21, 201406/21/14Here are download links for the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
Part 3: Local and Roaming settings, and In-App purchases
Part 4: Sound effects with SharpDX
Part 5: How to call platform-specific APIs from common code
>
June 20, 2014Jun 20, 201406/20/14This is Part 5 of the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal Windows app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
Part 3: Local and Roaming settings,
June 15, 2014Jun 15, 201406/15/14This is Part 4 of the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal Windows app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
Part 3: Local and Roaming settings,
June 15, 2014Jun 15, 201406/15/14This is Part 3 of the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal Windows app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
> Part 3: Local and Roaming settings,
June 15, 2014Jun 15, 201406/15/14This is Part 2 of the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal Windows app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
> Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
Part 3: Local and Roaming settings,
Team Member Interviews
June 22, 2010Jun 22, 201006/22/10I’m back with Spotty Bowles, a tester on the VB compiler team, shows us the ins and outs of how multi-targeting works in Visual Basic projects in Visual Studio 2010 in this Channel 9 interview:
Channel 9 Interview: Multi-Targeting Deep Dive with Visual Basic 2010
What’s tricky in Visual Studio 2010 is that there are now two supported versions of the CLR.
May 3, 2010May 3, 201005/3/10I’ve written about collection initializers on my blog before, but I thought I’d catch up with the VB Team to tell me more about how they really work.
In this interview Spotty Bowles, a tester on the VB Compiler team, shows us a couple of new language features: Array and Collection Initializers.
May 22, 2009May 22, 200905/22/09Ever wonder how we build Visual Studio and the .NET Framework? I mean literally. You know, the build process that spits out a product at the other end? Well I sure did and it’s not just hitting F5 people ;-).
In this interview I sit down with Matt Gertz,
May 19, 2009May 19, 200905/19/09There was a great Channel9 video posted last week on the future directions of VB.NET and C# and how they are related. Charles Torre interviewed Luca Bolognese, who is currently the Group Program Manager for VB.NET, C#, and F#. Please see below for more details.
May 7, 2009May 7, 200905/7/09Code Cast Episode 20: Interview with Beth Massi
This show’s interview is Ken interviewing Beth Massi, Microsoft, program manager on Microsoft’s BizApps team in the VS group. Beth discusses her work over the past two years at Microsoft on the VB team and now on the BizApps team,
May 1, 2009May 1, 200905/1/09Beth Massi shot a couple of great episodes last month on dnrTV! If you are interested in learning more about the Open XML SDK, and how to easily access it using VB.NET XML Literals, be sure to check them out.
dnrTV Show #137: Beth Massi on the Open XML SDK Our good friend Beth Massi returns to dnrTV to introduce us to the Open XML SDK,
March 27, 2009Mar 27, 200903/27/09I just posted a new Channel 9 interview. This time it’s with Tyler Whitney, a developer on the Visual Basic compiler team. Here he demonstrates how line termination has changed in the Visual Basic 10 compiler making underscores unnecessary as line continuation indicators.
March 24, 2009Mar 24, 200903/24/09Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on WPF Improvements in Visual Studio 2010 for Building Business Apps.
At the MVP Summit a few weeks ago, Italian MVP Alessandro del Sole was so excited about the new WPF features in Visual Studio 2010 that he asked me if he could interview Milind Lele himself to get the low-down —
March 20, 2009Mar 20, 200903/20/09Today I posted a new interview on Channel 9 on using the Touchless SDK.
The Touchless SDK enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. “Touch without touching.” It’s actually pretty cool! In this interview I meet up with Touchless SDK creator,
February 16, 2009Feb 16, 200902/16/09Today I posted an interview on Channel 9 with Dmitry Robsman, the Product Unit Manager for ASP.NET. In this interview he shows us how he implemented ASP.NET MVC views using Visual Basic’s XML Literals instead of .aspx pages. Dmitry shows us how this makes coding the views much cleaner using standard OOP principals.
Tips and Tricks
May 21, 2017May 21, 201705/21/17…and Why My Grandma Invented the Concept!
Meet late Grandma Grete Schindler. I’d like to introduce you to my grandma, because this post will be about the essence and purpose of unit testing in Visual Basic, and Granny Grete basically invented the concept of unit testing.
April 10, 2017Apr 10, 201704/10/17…letting your code do absolutely nothing!
We’ve all been there, one way or the other. Either as users of an app or as the developer to whom users complained to: When a typical Win32 app is waiting for an operation to complete,
Uncategorized2
April 26, 2012Apr 26, 201204/26/12If you’ve held off trying Visual Studio 11 Beta because your .NET 4 or Silverlight 5 app uses the Async CTP, your wait is over!
Today we’ve published the Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11, a NuGet package that lets your Visual Studio 11 projects target .NET 4 and Silverlight 5 while taking advantage of VB11’s new Await keyword.
February 28, 2012Feb 28, 201202/28/12As you may have read in Jason’s announcement, today we announced that Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download. This is a huge release for Visual Basic as it provides full platform support for building Windows 8 Metro style apps,
November 21, 2011Nov 21, 201111/21/11Touch screen are great and we’ve seen their use on phone and slates but sometimes these screens still just are not big enough. For those who desire bigger touch screens, Microsoft surface may be the answer. Microsoft surface has been around a while and there have been significant changes with version 2.0.
November 18, 2011Nov 18, 201111/18/11Hi All! A few weeks ago, we announced the Microsoft “Roslyn” CTP. I hope many of you have had a chance to download the CTP and take it for a spin 🙂 If you haven’t, do give it a try.
To recap –
November 9, 2011Nov 9, 201111/9/11For development of windows phone applications a new feature was added to the Visual Basic compiler known as VB Core. This is a reduced version of the runtime designed to allow development for a broader variety of platforms without incurring the larger penalty of having a full VB runtime containing non-supported or older VB6 legacy functionality which are now implemented as part of the framework itself.
October 31, 2011Oct 31, 201110/31/11Imagine this. It’s Halloween. You’ve got a costume party to go to at 7 but there’s one small hiccup – you’ve got no costume. As a VB programmer you’re used to coming up with nick-of-time solutions to all manner of complex business problems but all your coding skills won’t help you now.
October 19, 2011Oct 19, 201110/19/11(Begin dramatic movie trailer music, slow PowerPoint slide show with cliché sound effects)
October 2006 –VB Architect-emeritus Paul Vick responds via his blog to question by some completely random VB customer named Anthony about bootstrapping the VB compiler (rewriting it in VB), admits no definite plans yet but says that “one thing that would be nice about a managed compiler would be opening up the services to other tools…”
September 27, 2011Sep 27, 201109/27/11There’s a new feature coming to VB, and already included in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. The feature is called Namespace Global and it’ll make your life easier…
if you part of your code belongs in a different namespace from the rest of your project,
September 20, 2011Sep 20, 201109/20/11By Zain Naboulsi (Blog)
Default: CTRL + ALT + K
Menu: View | Call Hierarchy
Command: View.CallHierarchy; EditorContextMenus.CodeWindow.ViewCallHierarchy
Versions: Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview
Languages: VB
With the announcement of the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview it’s time to take a look at some of the features you can start using with our latest version of the IDE right away.
September 8, 2011Sep 8, 201109/8/11An update to the training kit has been made providing Visual Basic developers with sample code for the development features of Dynamics CRM and help them build applications using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and CRM Online.
Download available at
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=23416
VB Universal Windows Apps
June 21, 2014Jun 21, 201406/21/14Here are download links for the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
Part 3: Local and Roaming settings, and In-App purchases
Part 4: Sound effects with SharpDX
Part 5: How to call platform-specific APIs from common code
>
June 20, 2014Jun 20, 201406/20/14This is Part 5 of the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal Windows app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
Part 3: Local and Roaming settings,
June 15, 2014Jun 15, 201406/15/14This is Part 4 of the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal Windows app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
Part 3: Local and Roaming settings,
June 15, 2014Jun 15, 201406/15/14This is Part 3 of the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal Windows app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
> Part 3: Local and Roaming settings,
June 15, 2014Jun 15, 201406/15/14This is Part 2 of the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
Part 1: Setting up the universal Windows app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
> Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
Part 3: Local and Roaming settings,
June 15, 2014Jun 15, 201406/15/14This is Part 1 of the “VB Universal Windows App” series:
> Part 1: Setting up the universal Windows app in the Dev Centers, and in VS Solution Explorer
Part 2: Sharing XAML, Assets and Code
Part 3: Local and Roaming settings,
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