InfoQ Homepage Visual Basic.NET Content on InfoQ
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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.
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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.