InfoQ Homepage Visual Basic.NET Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Do Language Specific Libraries Belong in .NET?
There is a lot of basic functionality the .NET platform does not provide. For example, there is no built-in way to read CSV files, copy directories, or work with zip files. Well actually there is, but only if you dig deep enough.
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New version of .NET Disguised as a "Service Pack"
The beta for Service Pack 1 of .NET 3.5/VS 2008 brings with is a host of new features and libraries including the ADO.NET Entity Framework and Data Services, a client-only version of the Framework, and changes to most of the 3.0 and 3.5 libraries. Despite its name, to many developers this release is as significant as 3.5 itself.
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Collection Initializers in VB
Collection initializers were supposed to be released along with LINQ in C# 3 and VB 9. While C# did get them, they were cut from the VB release. Part of the reason was the Visual Basic team wanted to make VB's version more powerful. We present the leading options for the new syntax.
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Presentation: Beth Massi on Conquering XML with LINQ in VB9
Beth Massi, the Visual Basic content manager on Microsoft's MSDN, presents on how to work with XML and LINQ in Visual Basic 9.
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APIFinder - Your Guide to APIs
Developers today are constantly creating applications that consume services of other web sites. Consuming these services requires figuring out and understanding the sometimes complex Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
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C# and VB .NET Libraries to Google, YouTube, Facebook, and other Web 2.0 APIs
In a recent post on his blog, Scott Hanselman has compiled a list of .NET libraries useful to interface with some of the Web 2.0 APIs that have proliferated all over the web.
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Performance Problems Continue for VS 2008
Like its predecessors, Visual Studio 2008 continues to have performance issues. Unlike VS 2003 and 2005, Microsoft is actively working on performance patches, if only you know where to look.
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The End of XSLT for .NET Programmers?
Microsoft's VB team is starting a series of articles on how to use XML Literals. Many of these articles will demonstrate how to replace XSLT code with VB by making direct comparisons between the two languages.
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Implicit line continuations in Visual Basic
Line continuation characters have always been a wart on the VB syntax. Unlike languages in the Pascal and C families, Visual Basic does not require a trailing semi-colon to denote the end of a statement. The trade-off for this is that it does need a character to indicate when the statement does not end. Paul Vic is proposing to eliminate continuation characters in most common cases.
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VB 6 to VB.NET Migration Proceeds Ever So Slowly
Six years after VB.NET was released, Microsoft is still slowly working towards a true migration path for VB 6 applications. Recently Microsoft released "Visual Basic Power Packs 3.0". This release adds the Data Repeater, an important control for layouts.