Category Archives: Silverlight - Page 2

Microsoft to push Silverlight to business users this week

Posted by on January 22, 2008 No comments

logo Microsoft to push Silverlight to business users this weekThis is BIG! This was about to happen sooner or later – Microsoft puts his Silverlight plug-in into the updates section as ‘optional’ update. Mary Jo Foley writes more about that here. Here is a part of her post:

But this week — specifically on January 22 — Microsoft will make its Adobe-Flash-alternative Silverlight available via WSUS, as well as via Microsoft Update (MU). In order to have Silverlight 1.0 pushed to users, admins will need to select it; it will be an optional, not automatic, download.

The Silverlight product family will include installers and updates for the Silverlight browser plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, according to the Microsoft Update Product Team blog.

Read the whole post here

Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008

Posted by on November 27, 2007 1 comment

This afternoon from Microsoft released an updated version of the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha that works with the final release of Visual Studio 2008. You can download it for free here.
silverlight Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008
The tools alpha refresh released today has the same feature-set as the Silverlight Tools Alpha add-on which was previously available for Visual Studio 2008 Beta2 (it has simply been updated to work with the final VS 2008 release). This feature-set includes basic Silverlight 1.1 project system support, XAML markup editing and intellisense support, debugging support, Expression Blend project compatibility, and VB and C# code-behind intellisense. You can find quickstart tutorials that detail how to use these features here.

The next public preview of Silverlight will include a ton of new runtime features, as well as a significantly enhanced VS 2008 tooling support. Scott Guthrie will be blogging more details about this shortly.

250+ Tools and Resources For Coding the Web

Posted by on October 16, 2007 1 comment

We’re all living on the web, and we all seem to be starting our own websites, so it’s time we all learned the languages that make it run. The guys at Mashable.com have gathered over 250 resources to help you get going.

This list is aggregated from previous Mashable posts.

250+ Tools and Resources For Coding the Web

The list is quite extensive and features many ajax libraries, loading indicators etc so its best to be viewed at the original place.

Silverlight в ASP.NET уеб сайт

Posted by on September 20, 2007 4 comments

Въведение

Silverlight е нова технология от Майкрософт предназначена за разработването на RIA. Тя се вгражда във всеки браузър като плъг-ин и е платформено независима. В тази статия ще покажа как се вграждат Silverlight проект в ASP.NET сайт.

Какво е необходимо

Като за начало изтеглете и инсталирайте новата версия на VS 2008 бета 2 от тук. Повече за новостите във Visual Studio 2008 бета 2. За да разработвате Silverlight приложения, също така ви е необходимо и Silverlight Tools Alpha. След като ги инсталирате, опцията за Silverlight проект ще стане активна в VS.
За да виждаме резултата в браузър ни е необходимо Silverlight runtime/plugin 1.1 Alpha

Идеята

Silverlight е базиран на Xaml, което е XML базиран език за UI елементи. С помоща на Xaml е възможно разграничаването на визуалните елементи от програмната част. Това се реализира чрез ‘code-behind’ концепция позната ни от ASP.NET. На всеки Xaml файл съществува C# файл, който съдържа програмната логика за управлението на графичните елементи.
Когато създаваме Silverlight проект използвайки темплейт от VS 2008, някои файлове се генерират автоматично с образователна цел. Xaml файлът е интегриран в примерена HTML страница. В тази статия ще ви покажа как да извадите Xaml от HTML страницата и да го интегрирате в ASP.NET страница.

Проектите

1. Silverlight проекта
Ако сте инсталирали всичко правилно трябва да видите следният екран когато изберете от менюто File -> New Project:

1 Silverlight в ASP.NET уеб сайт

Проекта ще бъде създаден след като натиснете OK. Следните страници са създадени по подразбиране:
- Page.xaml: това е страницата в която описвате UI елементите
- Page.xaml.cs: тук пишете програмната логика. Обикновен C# код
- Silverlight.js: това е javascript файл с който създавате Silverlight контрола в HTML/ASPX страницата за да показвате Xaml съдържанието.
- TestPage.html: HTML страницата която съдържа Silverlight контрола

2. ASP.NET сайтът
Трябва да добавим и асп проектът към общия solution. Add -> New Web Site.

3. Добавяме Silverlight към уеб сайта
Натискаме с десния бутон на прокта на уеб сайта и от падащото меню избираме Add Silverlight Link.

2 Silverlight в ASP.NET уеб сайт

Това беше първата стъпка. Следващата е да разгледаме HTML страницата за да разберем кой код е отговорен за генерирането на Silverlight контрола в testpage.html:

<head>
    <title>Silverlight Project Test Page </title>
 
    <script type="text/javascript" src="Silverlight.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="TestPage.html.js"></script>
 
</head>
 
<body>
    <div id="SilverlightControlHost">
        <script type="text/javascript">
            createSilverlight();
        </script>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Както се вижда, контрола е създаден с javascript функция, която се съдържа в Silverlight.js. Това което трябва да направим е да добавим този файл към асп сайта. После създаваме нов javascript файл, който ще съдържа в себе си кода от testpage.html.js

// JScript source code
 
//contains calls to silverlight.js, example below loads Page.xaml
function createSilverlight( xamlPage )
{
    Silverlight.createObjectEx({
        source: xamlPage,
        parentElement: document.getElementById("SilverlightControlHost"),
        id: "SilverlightControl",
        properties: {
            width: "100%",
            height: "100%",
            version: "1.1",
            enableHtmlAccess: "true"
        },
        events: {}
    });
 
    // Give the keyboard focus to the Silverlight control by default
    document.body.onload = function() {
      var silverlightControl = document.getElementById('SilverlightControl');
      if (silverlightControl)
      silverlightControl.focus();
    }
 
}

С малка промяна(добавен параметър) кодът изглежда по следния начин:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title>Integrating Silverlight in aspx</title>
 
    <script type="text/javascript" src="Silverlight.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="XamlPageCreation.js"></script>
 
</head>
<body>
    <form id="frmMain" runat="server">
    <div id="SilverlightControlHost" >
        <script type="text/javascript">
            createSilverlight( 'Page.xaml' );
        </script>
    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

Какво ще показваме?

Засега имаме работещ ASP.NET/Silverlight пример който не показва нищо. Нека направим TextBlock със съобщение потребителя да избира файлове. При кликване на TextBlock-а се отваря FileBrowse диалог и след селекция на няколко файла, техните имена се показват в TextBlock контрола.

<Canvas x:Name="parentCanvas"
        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007" 
        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 
        Loaded="Page_Loaded" 
        x:Class="SilverlightSamplePrj.Page;assembly=ClientBin/SilverlightSamplePrj.dll"
        Width="400"
        Height="400"
        Background="#EEEEEE"
        >
 
  <TextBlock x:Name="txtFileName"
             Canvas.Top="5" Canvas.Left="5" 
             Foreground="Black"
             Text="Click for OpenFileDialog"
             MouseLeftButtonDown="OnClick"/>
 
</Canvas>

Ето и кода в C# файла:

using System;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Ink;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
 
namespace SilverlightSamplePrj
{
    public partial class Page : Canvas
    {
        public void Page_Loaded(object o, EventArgs e)
        {
            // Required to initialize variables
            InitializeComponent();
        }
 
        public void OnClick(object o, MouseEventArgs e)
        {
            txtFileName.Text = "";
            string NL = Environment.NewLine;
            OpenFileDialog ofDlg = new OpenFileDialog();
            ofDlg.EnableMultipleSelection = true;
            if (ofDlg.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
            {
                foreach (FileDialogFileInfo fdFileInfo in ofDlg.SelectedFiles)
                {
                    txtFileName.Text += fdFileInfo.Name + NL;
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Заключение

Това е достатъчно за начало, очакваме следващите версии на Silverlight където се надяваме да има предефинирани контроли плюс куп други възможности който да утвърдят Silverlight като Технологията за RIA.

Silverlight 1.0 Released and Silverlight for Linux Announced

Posted by on September 5, 2007 No comments

Today Microsoft announced the release of Silverlight 1.0, the fully supported version of its cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media and rich experiences on the Web. Over here you can get started with it.
Also always is good to hear from the core developers so here is what Scott Guthrie says about that:

Silverlight 1.0 and Expression Encoder 1.0 Released

Today we shipped the Silverlight 1.0 release for Mac and Windows. Silverlight 1.0 is focused on enabling rich media scenarios in a browser. Some of its features include:

  • Built-in codec support for playing VC-1 and WMV video, and MP3 and WMA audio within a browser. The VC-1 codec is a big step forward for incorporating media within a web experience – since it supports very efficiently playing high-quality, high definition video in the browser. It is a standards-based media format that is implemented in all HD-DVD and Blueray DVD players, and is supported by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, XBOX 360s, PlayStation 3s, and Windows Media Centers (enabling you to encode content once and run it on all of these devices + Silverlight unmodified). It enables you to use a huge library of existing video content and provides access to the broad ecosystem of existing Windows Media tools, components, vendors and hardware.
  • Silverlight also optionally supports built-in media streaming. This enables you to use a streaming server like Windows Media Server on the backend to efficiently stream video/audio (note: Windows Media Server is a free product that runs on Windows Server). Streaming brings some significant benefits in that: 1) it can improve the end-user’s experience when they seek around in a large video stream, and 2) it can dramatically lower your bandwidth costs.
  • Silverlight enables you to create rich UI and animations, and blend vector graphics with HTML to create compelling content experiences. It supports a Javascript programming model to develop these. One benefit of this is that it makes it really easy to integrate these experiences within AJAX web-pages (since you can write Javascript code to update both the HTML and XAML elements together).
  • Silverlight makes it easy to build rich video player interactive experiences. You can blend together its media capabilities with the vector graphic support to create any type of media playing experience you want. Silverlight includes the ability to “go full screen” to create a completely immersive experience, as well as to overlay menus/content/controls/text directly on top of running video content (allowing you to enable DVD like experiences). Silverlight also provides the ability to resize running video on the fly without requiring the video stream to be stopped or restarted.

Silverlight for Linux Support

Over the last few months we’ve been working to enable Silverlight support on Linux, and today we are announcing a formal partnership with Novell to provide a great Silverlight implementation for Linux. Microsoft will be delivering Silverlight Media Codecs for Linux, and Novell will be building a 100% compatible Silverlight runtime implementation called “Moonlight”.

Moonlight will run on all Linux distributions, and support FireFox, Konqueror, and Opera browsers. Moonlight will support both the JavaScript programming model available in Silverlight 1.0, as well as the full .NET programming model we will enable in Silverlight 1.1.

Link to Soctt’s article

VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense for Silverlight

Posted by on August 3, 2007 No comments

Thats an interesting post from Scott Guthrie’s blog about JavaScript Intellisense for Silverlight:

In addition to shipping VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 last week, my team also shipped the first release candidate of Silverlight 1.0 (it was a busy week at the office!). You can download the Silverlight 1.0 RC here.

I blogged about our Silverlight plans and roadmap a few months ago. This first Silverlight 1.0 release is focused on enabling rich media scenarios, and delivers high quality video and audio streaming and XAML based vector graphics and animation support in the browser. Silverlight is cross browser and cross platform, and can be easily added to any HTML page. Silverlight 1.0 supports a JavaScript programming model that makes it easy to integrate into an AJAX based page experience (note: Silverlight 1.1 will then add a cross-platform .NET framework programming model and enable RIA support).

JavaScript Intellisense for Silverlight 1.0

Over the last few weeks I’ve blogged about the new VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense and VS 2008 JavaScript Debugging features in Beta 2. In addition to using these JavaScript tooling features when building pure HTML AJAX solutions, you can also now take advantage of them when targeting Silverlight 1.0.

Justin-Josef Angel earlier today released an awesome Silverlight 1.0 JavaScript Intellisense CodePlex Project that helps dramatically with this. It includes some nice annotated JavaScript helper methods that provide the ability to work with any XAML element in Silverlight with full intellisense in VS 2008.

To use it, simply add his JavaScript library to the top of your page:

step1 VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense for Silverlight

You can then use Justin’s helper functions to take late-bound objects and indicate their JavaScript type:

step2 VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense for Silverlight

This will then cause the VS 2008 JavaScript intellisense engine to automatically provide intellisense and syntax checking for you:

step3 VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense for Silverlight

You can learn all about Justin’s library via his excellent tutorial post here. You can then download and participate in the codeplex project here.


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ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, Silverlight and IIS7

Posted by on July 6, 2007 No comments

This is last list published by Scott, in which he presents latest articles and posts relating ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, Silverlight and IIS7. Check it out here, at the bottom is a link to the original:

ASP.NET

  • ASP.NET RSSToolkit 2.0 Released: One of the cool projects for ASP.NET 2.0 that was released last year was this free RSS Toolkit – which makes consuming and exposing RSS feeds in ASP.NET super easy (you can even databind any ASP.NET control against them). The team working on the CodePlex project has recently released V2 of the RSSToolkit. You can learn all about it and download it here.

  • Building a Custom Database Driven Site Map Provider: Scott Mitchell has written a great article on how to implement your own site map provider for ASP.NET that is populated from a database (instead of statically from an XML file). You can learn more about the ASP.NET 2.0 SiteMap system from this older blog post of mine here.

  • .NET DateTime and Number Format String Cheat Sheet: If you are like me, you might have trouble remembering all of the standard format strings you can pass to the String.Format() method and/or the Eval() databinding method in ASP.NET to generate the appropriate string output from a DateTime or Numeric datatype. This PDF cheatsheet is a useful one to download and save to quickly look these format strings up. John has some other really useful .NET PDF cheatsheets he has also created that you might like to download here.

  • Profile Support for ASP.NET Web Application Projects: VS 2005 Web Application Projects can’t directly access the strongly-typed ASP.NET “Profile” object that web site projects support. This VS add-in supports the ability to generate a strongly typed profile class to accomplish this. You can read this great series of posts to learn more about how to use the ASP.NET 2.0 Profile system. I have it on my list of tips/tricks posts to-do to cover using this VS add-on as well.

  • ASP.NET Photo Handler: Bertrand has posted a cool photo album HttpHandler for ASP.NET that allows you to easily drop images into a web directory and automatically generate a nice photo album of them (complete with EXIF information, stack sorting icons, etc). Might be very useful for people enjoying holidays this summer. Download the code here.

  • BlogEngine.NET: This is a new open source blog engine for ASP.NET that Mads Kristensen has helped start up, and which I’ve heard a lot of good things about. You can read about its features here, and download it here.


ASP.NET AJAX

  • ScriptDoc 1.0 Available: Bertrand Le Roy has published a cool ScriptDoc utility that extracts documentation from JavaScript files and packages it into XML that can be consumed by documentation building tools. A very useful tool as you start to build up your own JavaScript libraries.


Visual Studio

  • GhostDoc 2.1.1 Released: GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio 2005 (and now 2008) that automatically generates default XML documentation comments for code you write in C# or VB. It can automatically re-use existing documentation inherited from base classes or implemented interfaces, or generate initial documentation by deducing comments from the name and type of the member signature. You can learn more about it and download it for free here.


Silverlight

  • Silverlight Tutorials: Michael Schwarz has a great blog where he writes regularly about Silverlight. This tutorials link points to a bunch of great Silverlight content.


IIS 7

  • IIS 7.0 is now running all of Microsoft.com: One of the things we push at Microsoft is to “dogfood” our products on our high volume sites when they enter the beta cycle. As of a few weeks ago, all of the web servers running www.microsoft.com are now running on IIS7 and Windows 2008 Server Beta3. These servers host 500+ virtual roots and 350 ASP.NET applications, and handle 300,000 concurrent connections. IIS7 is going to be an awesome release.

  • IIS 7.0 on Server Core: Bill Staples blogs about some of the new IIS7 enhancements that appear with the June CTP of Windows 2008 Server. One of the big features that is now supported is the ability to install IIS7 on “server core” – which is a low footprint installation of Windows 2008 Server that lays down just the minimal footprint needed to boot (meaning no GUI shell). This lowers the resources required on servers, and even more importantly means that servers don’t need to be updated if a patch is released for a component not installed on the server (which lowers the downtime of servers). ASP.NET and the .NET Framework aren’t supported yet in server core configurations – but will be in the future.

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Building Silverlight Applications using .NET

Posted by on June 20, 2007 No comments

Check that article by Scott, describbing how easily we can build Silverlight applications with dotNet:

I’m just about to hop on the flight back to Seattle after finishing up a 10 day business trip to Europe where I spoke at conferences and user group events in Budapest, Amsterdam and Zurich. Although trips like these are a little exhausting, I find them really valuable as a way to connect with developers from around the world, as well as provide me the opportunity to create and deliver new presentations and samples.

One of the talks I delivered on this trip was a new “Building Silverlight Applications using .NET” talk that people seemed to really like.


Building Silverlight Applications using .NET Talk

I tried to keep the format and samples in this talk simple, and used a model where I used a few slides to explain each programming model concept in Silverlight, and then showed a very simple sample for each concept that helped demonstrate concretely how it worked.

In the talk I covered:

  • XAML
  • Using Shapes and Text
  • Using Controls
  • Layout (Canvas and Layout Managers)
  • Brushes
  • Transforms
  • Handling Events and Writing Code
  • Building Custom UI Controls
  • Reaching out and Programming the HTML of a page from a Silverlight control
  • Handling HTML Events in Managed Code (e.g. html button click handled in C#/VB on the client)
  • Exposing managed APIs to HTML JavaScript in the browser
  • Using the File Open Dialog support
  • Using the HTTP Network APIs
  • Using the Web Service APIs
  • Isolated Storage for local data caching

The slide deck comes to 83 slides – but I think does a good job of explaining everything step by step (it is also an easy deck to read – so even if you don’t want to run the samples locally I’d recommend taking a look through the deck since I think you’ll find it useful). You can download the slides + demos of this talk below:

Included in the .zip download are readme instructions on how to run all of the samples on your own machine.


Quick Answer to a Common Question about .NET with Silverlight

One of the most common questions I received when giving the talk was – “do I need to have the .NET Framework installed in order to use Silverlight?”. The answer to this is no – a cross platform version of the .NET Framework is included in the 4MB Silverlight 1.1 download, which means you do not need to have anything extra installed on the client in order to program Silverlight with a .NET programming model in the browser.

The Silverlight version of the .NET framework includes the same CLR engine (same GC, type-system, JIT engine) that ships with the full .NET Framework, and a subset of the .NET Framework namespace libraries. You can see the full list of all classes/namespaces that are included by opening up the Object Browser when you create a new Silverlight application using Visual Studio (click here for a sample screen-shot of this).

People are usually pretty stunned/confused to hear that it is possible to get this much stuff in so small and quick an install package. Let me just say it wasn’t easy.


Other Silverlight Talks and Blog Posts

For a broader overview talk of Silverlight, as well as some cool (more complete) samples you can download, please check out my previous “Lap Around Silverlight” talk and blog post here. You can learn even more about Silverlight from my summary post here. And you can watch me build a Silverlight application using .NET from scratch in this video here.

The talk above borrowed a number of slides from a few other Silverlight and WPF/E talks that others and I have given (although almost all of the code samples I showed in my talk are new). In particular, my WPF/E talk from earlier in the year, Jamie Cool and Nick Kramer’s Two Talks at MIX, and Stefan Schackow’s Extending the Browser Programming Model with Silverlight talk at MIX. You can watch Jamie, Nick and Stefan’s talks online (along with all of the other MIX talks) for free here.

New Weekly Series: Silverlight Video Tutorials

Posted by on June 14, 2007 No comments

On this page you will find dozens of videos designed for all Silverlight designers and developers, from the novice to the professional.

Video Categories

MIX 2007 Silverlight Sessions

“How Do I?” with Silverlight 1.0

“How Do I?” with Silverlight 1.1

Using Blend with Silverlight 1.0

What is the difference between VB 9, VBx and Silverlight? (Scott Wisniewski)

Posted by on June 8, 2007 No comments

Today I came across that post at Visual Basic Team blog which is quite good. Enjoy it reading!
I recently received an email from a customer asking for clarification as to what the difference was between VB 9, VBx and Sliverlight. In particular, it seems as if we have been releasing so much information about cool new stuff that at least a few people have become confused, making them a bit nervous about the future of VB.

The customer had also expressed some concerns about upgrading from VS 2005 to Orcas (VS 2008), particularly because he was considering making an upgrade from VB 6 to VS 2005 and wanted to make sure he would be able to take advantage of Orcas when it was released.

I figured there may be other customers that have similar concerns, and so thought this would make a good blog post, particularly because it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything (J).

As a result I’ve included a few of the questions he asked (paraphrased) below, along with my answers.

I hope this helps.

What is the difference between VB 9 and VBx? Which one is the next version of Visual Studio?

Visual Basic 9 is the next version of Visual Basic. Visual Basic 10, or VBx as it’s sometimes called, is the version of Visual Basic that will follow VB 9. Currently VBx is in very early stages, and is a long way off from production. In fact, most of our development team is actively working on VB 9.

Why on earth would you start talking about VB 10 before you’ve even released VB 9? This is confusing.

The product cycle for VB 9 is starting to wind down. We recently released Beta 1 of Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas”, and are currently working on releasing Beta 2. As the product cycle starts to wind down, our language design team is starting to think about what the “next next” version of the product will look like. They do this mainly as a way to “keep the pipeline moving”. If they had to wait until VB 9 was 100% complete before they started thinking about VB 10, then there would end up being a significant delay from when we finished VB 9 until we could start working on VB 10. This is because designing a product, and coming up with a plan to develop it can be extremely time consuming. It requires us to come up with a design, create a schedule, make any necessary organizational changes, and ensure we have the right staffing levels, all before we start coding. By “overlapping” the early design work for VB 10 with the “end game” work for VB 9 we are able to better “bootstrap” the whole process, thus making the transition from one project to the next as smooth as possible.

As our design team comes up with designs they like to release information about them as early as possible. The earlier we can get information out to our customers, the earlier we can get feedback about the things we are doing. This helps us to build the products that actually meet our customers’ needs. One thing we’ve managed to learn over the years is that the best possible way we can learn what it is that our customers want is to engage with them early and often.

As a result, near the end of a product cycle we will release information about our plans for the version of the product to follow the one we are currently working on. This gives our customers the chance to comment on it and let us know what they think. We then take that feedback and use it to develop a more complete plan for what we want to do.

What is VB 10 going to be like? What is this Silverlight Thing I keep hearing about? Is Silverlight a replacement for Visual Studio?

Our plans for VBx and Silverlight are still very rough and are nowhere near complete. As our customers start to use VB 9 and provide us with feedback that data will drive exactly what we end up doing in VB 10. That being said, however, we do have some rough ideas of the things we would like to do.

Silverlight 1.1 is a new light weight version of the .NET Framework that will allow you to develop rich applications that run in a web browser using .NET languages. The basic idea is to allow you to replace client side java script with .NET enabled languages, allowing you to write both the client side and sever side portions of your web applications in the same language. It also allows you to use WPF (windows presentation foundation) and WCF (windows communication foundation) to create extremely rich and interactive web applications in a way that is much easier than what is possible using HTML, Ajax, Java Script, or Flash.

VB 10 is going to be the version of Visual Basic that will follow VB 9 (the “next next version”). It will include new features designed to make VB a really great language for developing SilverLight apps, as well as enhancements to many of the new feature we are delivering in VB 9, such as Linq. You should still be able to do all the things with VB 10 that you could do with both VB 9 and VB 8.

The migration from VB 6 to VS 2005 is non-trivial. If I upgrade to VS 2005 will I able to use VB 9 when it comes out, or will I have to scrap all my work? What about VB 10? Should I be worried about the future of VB?

The transition from VB 8.0 to VB 9.0 should be smooth and relatively painless. We have gone to great lengths to ensure this.

Our plan is to also make the migration from VB 9 to VB 10 equally painless.

Although the migration from VB 6 to VB.NET is a bit tough, we are actively working on making that easier as well. We have been releasing a “VB Interoperability Toolkit” that allows an application to be gradually migrated from VB 6 to VS 2005, rather than requiring the whole thing to be migrated at once.

You can get more information about it here:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/aa701257.aspx

As far as the future of VB, you should definitely not be worried.

Microsoft is committed to VB, and making it a great language for developing applications for our various platforms. The future of VB should be a bright one!
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