March 2007 Entries
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...
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...
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...