A couple of weeks ago a friend was chatting to me in IM and asked me about a problem he was having with generics constraints.  I told him he was trying to solve the lack of an INumeric interface issue. Then last week I watched Brian Beckman go through the same thing with generics, again […]

Visual Studio magazine’s January On VB column, by your’s truly, has a quick reference guide to what’s new in VB 2008.  The guide includes links to earlier articles that provide more in depth information on specific features.   Errata for my January column: The web site fails to display & properly instead showing &.  The […]

On Monday night I was walking along the streets in Melbourne heading out to give a presentation on VB 2008.  while waiting for some pedestrian lights I noticed this guy standing outside St George’s bank with signs all over him. He had newspaper clippings, and what looked like stories scribbled over backboards plastered to himself.  […]

Kathleen left it for others to discuss what dynamic programming means, so I thought I’d utter my thoughts on it here. Some of the things I consider to be dynamic and of importance are: – runtime expressions.  In days of old for VB/VBScript this was often considered the role of Eval, allowing the user to […]

Sara Ford writes about inserting snippets in VB and C#.  Unfortunately, Sara hasn’t got it quite right.  In VB 2008 the statement completion window does NOT show snippet shortcuts.  It only shows namespaces, types, members and keywords.  It just happens that many of VB’s keywords are also snippet shortcuts. In VB 2005 you could type […]

Well I’m not sure about duck hunting season, but I am sure there’s a family of ducks that’s been hanging around for a while now as they raised the chicks (or is that ducklings?).  They’re really shy. I see them from out the windows often but can never manage to get a shot at them […]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about XML Namespace issues in VB: one in particular was to do with namespace declarations being repeated in the output XML.  In those cases we only looked at common namespaces for the entire document. However the example of creating a word document I posted earlier today raises a […]

I was catching up on reading some msdn blogs and stumbled across an entry from Yves Dolce. Yves was showing how to create a word document part including a graphic.  Thing was, he was using C#, not VB.  Here’s an example : var graphic = new XElement(dm.GetName(“graphic”),                            new XAttribute(XNamespace.Xmlns + “dm”, dm.NamespaceName),                            new […]

Some where, some time, the dark side managed to take hold of the MSDN documentation.  In 1.0 and 1.1 the documentation was pretty much language agnostic.  Constructors, where listed as Foo Constructor.  Now it seems the dark side has taken hold and they are listed in C# syntax, e.g: Foo .  For those who don’t […]

  RJ posted an interesting entry about LINQ to XSD. The early LINQ to XSD bits that surfaced back in Orcas Beta 1 or thereabouts were basically an object layer of the underlying xml data.  It was better than *just* an object model in that much of the XElement capabilities remained, but it was still […]