I have a very difficult task ahead of me with the EF4 version of my book. The book is already over 800 pages and will only get longer with all of the new features in Entity Framework 4. However O’Reilly has tasked me to keep the book to 800 pages. Something has to give. I am very proud of the fact...

I know so little about C++, but will always remember Kate Gregory touting "no more double underscores" as a big benefit of C++ in VS2005. I don't even know where they are used. But I've had my own underscores to contend with for many years - the line continuation notation for Visual Basic. Finally, they...

Earlier this month I blogged about the Silverlight Toolkit and it pained me to show a screenshot that only had XAML and C#. Happily, the March version of the Toolkit now has VB samples as well! Read more here! [A New DevLife post]...

The Silverlight Toolkit folks at Microsoft are prioritizing their "Honey Do" list and one of the items on it is to be sure that more of their examples are in VB, not just C#. Of course, the toolkit should have originally had both C# and VB examples, but that's a different issue. In order for that item...

I got myself pretty confused when I was debugging C# and VB code at the same time in a recent DevConnections session. For a good laugh (at my expense...again) click here ! [A new DevLife post]...

Why oh why did I check out Instant VB after I spent 45 minutes trying to translate one line of code from C# to VB? Read more... [A New DevLife post]...

In the past few weeks, I have received an number of different VB2008 books for distribution at the VTdotNET User Group. I thought authors/publishers were cutting back on VB books but this is great to see. I wonder why the change, though? Read more here... [A New DevLife post]...

Michale de la Maza follows up his popular C# day events with a VB.NET day at the Microsoft office on Tuesday May 27th. Join us for a relaxed, no cost introduction to VB.NET programming. By engaging in participatory activities, you will learn some of the most common and powerful features of the VB.NET...

Bill Burrows has created a series of videos on MVC and is now working on a new series based on Scott Guthrie's MVC tutorial posts (which are all in C#) but using VB instead. I was surprised to find a pointer to my recent MVC post as a "rare example" of MVC with VB (and it's only one little post so I...

While I will always promote the value of being able to read C# and mentally convert it to VB and being able to read VB and mentally convert it to C# is a skill I think all VB and C# developers should try to have, admittedly, having to do it with a whole book does sometimes get tiresome. If you are a...

I followed the great walkthrough on Brad's blog showing how to use MVC together with Entity Framework . But I did it my own way - in VB, using a different database and trying to write more effective EF queries. I have a simple solution that renders these views from the AdventureWorksLT database: Start...

Bill McCarthy explained this to me in an email. He wrote about it in this excellent article in Visual Studio Magazine " Drill Down on Anonymous Types ". But it still bit me in the ass! So I am stamping this into my memory: in a query results in ...select cust.CustomerID.cust.CompanyName... Immutable...

While there are lots of awesome new features in VB9 and C#3.0, everything has taken a back seat to LINQ. I am, however, growing more and more fond of extension methods. Read more... [A new DevLife post]...

Last spring, I ran into Don Box in the hallways at MIX07. I hadn't seen him in quite a while and asked what he had been up to lately in his wizard's tower. Though he couldn't really talk about what he was doing, he did say that he was working on some cool new stuff and having fun. I had a quick fantasy...

There is a lot of potential for using nullables incorrectly in VS2008 in Visual Basic without even realizing there's a problem, or encountering a problem that makes no sense. Check Bill McCarthy's article in the October issue of visual Studio Magazing (not online yet but watch this space ) is really...

Boy am I excited about this. Timothy Ng is on the VB team and wrote the recent MSDN Magazine article on Lambda Expressions for VB developers . I understood lambdas better than ever after reading the article ... finally something from the VB perspective. His two talks are: LINQ-ing your data In this session...

While there are many great LINQ resources for VB, I happened to read/watch/see these and wanted to be sure to point them out. 1) Lisa Feigenbaum's LINQ Best Practices webcast . Lisa is on the VB team. This webcast is full of great insights and tips. 2) Timothy Ng's Basic Instincts: Lambda Expressions...

I watched part 2 of Jim Wooley's ASP.NET Podcast show on LINQ and was really impressed with the creativity of his examples. Having dug deeply in order to write LINQ in Action along with Fabrice Marguerie and Steve Eichert, he's way past the how-to basics and able to see the bigger picture of leveraging...

A million years ago, when Windows 2000 came out, many VB6 developers got calls from users that the scroll wheel stopped working in their VB6 applications. It didn't take long for the fix (Install Intellimouse v4.0) to get shared on newsgroups and forums. (This was pre-blog days; do you even remember...

It took me a while to figure out what caused this problem, so I thought I'd share it here. I was trying to write a query in VB to grab customers who have orders placed after July 1, 2007. The query looks like this: Dim q = From cust In nwentities.Customers _ Where (cust.Orders.Any(Function(o) _ o.OrderDate...

Well, sonny is me, actually. I spent quite a long time trying to understand why my LINQ average function wasn't working. Paring down to a simple example, I wanted to check the average of a filtered subset of data. Say my data is an array if integers: int[] nums = { 84, 123, 101, 94, 238 }; I can get...

I was looking at a LINQ Query that I wrote when I was first exploring LINQ in depth at the beginning of the year. This example was to see how to create a named anonymous type like this: Dim query= From s In nw.Suppliers _ Order By s.CompanyName _ Select Supp = New With {s.CompanyName, s.Country, s.Products...

At first glance, the new ImpliciltyTyped Local Variables in C#3.0 and VB9 might look familiar to VB programmers. Earlier (that would be "current" as well) versions of VB can do a lot of implicit stuff. This has been a point of aggravation to many non-VB programmers, but I guess they have a new perspective...

I wanted to see some of the new Beta2 (in the June CTP bits) functionality of Entity Framework so I've been poking around. You can see a nice list of what to look for on Danny Simmons' blog . One thing that was a huge source of frustration was the inability to support database constraints where a column...

My first MVP award was on July 1, 2003. I received an email this morning that I have been awarded an MVP (Developer Visual Basic) again. This is my 5th. I am always a little surprised since I never really know year to year what the criteria is. I just do what I do and if that makes Microsoft happy, I...

I recently whipped together a small tool for a client and because it was so small (and for only one person to use), I used some simple drag n' drop wizardry for the form. I created a datasource pointing to a table in the SQL Server 2005 database on my develpment machine then dragged that datasource onto...