Monthly Archives: March 2007

Yes, it’s been quiet around here…

It’s amazing how many viruses babies manage to bring into the house. I think we’ve been down with something pretty much continuously since we got back. Fortunately, we haven’t been all sick at once, but this is starting to get a bit old…

Things have also been extremely busy around work. I’ve been working on something that I’m hoping we’ll have at least a mention of at MIX07 and will probably have more to say about later in the year. I realize there are some threads that have been left hanging, so I’m going to try and tie them up in the coming weeks.

And, finally, the mail on my webserver is now working again, so if you’ve wanted to send me feedback on the Contact form and haven’t been able, you’re back in business. Sorry about that!

Demonstration of XML in VB9

For those of you who might be curious about how the XML integration features in VB9 work, there’s now a great screencast up on Channel 9 that walks you through them while building a sample application:

The next version of VB .Net adds Xml as a built in data type using the new LINQ to XML API. As a built in data type, VB 9.0 provides the ability to create XML using XML Literals and to query XML documents using XML properties. This webcast contains a demo by David Schach, the lead developer in this project, of creating a program to share pictures over the internet.

Check it out!

March 2007 Orcas CTP, now with cool VB features!

Maybe you’ve seen this elsewhere, but the big news of the week (VB-wise, at least) is that the March 2007 Orcas CTP is now out. Those of you who’ve been following along with the previous Orcas CTPs will have noticed the paucity of new VB features relative to some of the other VS languages. This has been largely due to the different implementation strategies of the languages–since the Visual Basic compiler is so closely tied to the IDE services, we needed to really plumb the features all the way through before we could consider them “complete.” Anyway, many of these features are now on-line and available to be tried out. They include a bunch of features we’ve discussed before:

  • Query expressions
  • Object initializers
  • Extension methods
  • Type inference
  • Anonymous types
  • XML literals
  • XML access members

And the CTP also includes some pretty nice Intellisense enhancements that have not been discussed previously. I encourage everyone to give the CTP a whirl and let us know what you think!