InfoQ Homepage Visual Basic.NET Content on InfoQ
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Wrapping Stored Procedures in .NET Languages
Creating wrapper functions for pre-existing stored procedures is surprisingly difficult in .NET. Stored procedures have certain calling conventions that aren’t generally used in the .NET Framework and many of them are not supported at all. For example, C# doesn’t support optional parameters and neither .NET language supports optional parameters on nullable types.
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Pattern Matching in .NET 4
Pattern matching may seem like an alien concept to developers who focus on C# and VB style languages, but it shouldn’t be. Ultimately it is just a refinement of the case statement, which itself is a refinement of if-else-if blocks. This piece takes a brief look at that transition and how F#’s pattern matching can be applied to VB and C#.
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Gizmox Releases Visual WebGui 6.4 Preview Version
Gizmox announces the release of a free preview version of its Visual WebGui, version 6.4, product. VWG promises a point-and-click tool for RIA development (DHTML or Silverlight) that requires no HTML, CSS, or XAML coding; and that can be integrated with Photoshop, Expression Blend, and Flash CS.
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C#/VB Parity in .NET 4
At the 2008 PDC, Microsoft promised language parity between Visual Basic and C#. What that means for .NET 4 was enumerated during the Lang.NET keynote. Briefly, this is what you can expect to see.
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No More Underscores in VB 10
Visual Basic 10 will have an improved compiler that makes underscores optional for most line continuations. This represents a significant change for VB, traditionally a line-terminated language.
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Concurrent Basic – A Declarative Language for Message-Based Concurrency.
Concurrent Basic represents a possible future for Visual Basic. Though based on work done in C# research languages such as Polyphonic C# and C-Omega, Visual Basic was chosen for its inherent predisposition towards declarative programming. The syntax is even inspired by VB’s declarative event handlers.
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SharpDevelop Hit the 3.0 Milestone
The SharpDevelop community has released version 3.0 of the free open source .NET IDE. SharpDevelop (#Develop) features support for .NET 3.5, C#, VB.NET, F#, Code Completion, Auto Code Insert, Refactoring and others.
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Visual Basic 6.0 Still Widely Used
A recent Microsoft UK survey found that 87% of Windows developers work for companies that are actively maintaining applications written in Visual Basic 6.0. The survey asks a variety of follow-up questions to gain insight into why companies are still using VB6 eight full years after the release the .NET Framework.
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VB May Get a Big Push from ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET MVC Microsoft developers back to the main steam world of website development. Along with it is a chance for Visual Basic to regain its dominance as the language of choice for .NET web developers. The key is how VB’s XML Literals can be used as an alternative to aspx-code for MVC Views.
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Visual Basic 10: Rounding the Edges
Like C# 4, VB 10 isn't going to see a lot of ground breaking features. Everything so far was already available, just not in a convenient form. So this release is very much just rounding off the rough edges.
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.NET 4 Feature Focus: Type Embedding and Equivalence
In .NET 4 types will no longer be restricted to a single assembly. A single type, or part of a type, can be extracted from one assembly and placed into another. Why would you do this? Well first off all, to reduce the cost of including the Office Primary Interopt Assemblies from several megabytes to about 2KB by only including what you actually need.
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Using Closures to Improve API Design and Usage
Some APIs such as those that perform complex parsing often expose intermediate results via events. As Eric White demonstrates, closures can be used to greatly simplify calling these APIs.
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Iterators for VB
Visual Basic's Paul Vick recently revealed a proposal to add iterators in a yet named version. While meant to address the same use cases as C#'s yield return statement, the proposal looks more like something out of a function programmer's playbook.
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Covariance and Contravariance in .NET Generics
Currently .NET languages such as VB and C# do not support covariance and contravariance for generics. While this is not likely to chance in the near future, people at Microsoft are talking about it.
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Lambda Expression Improvements for VB
For VB developers it is a toss-up for the most frustrating thing about anonymous functions. Paul Vick is currently discussing two of them, anonymous subroutines and multi-line anonymous functions.