The release of Visual Studio 2008 updates Visual Basic to version 9.0, with several key language enhancements and LINQ support. Part one of this series will walk you through using nullable types, type inference, the If operator, and other time-saving enhancements.
by Wei-Meng Lee
March 4, 2008
ith the release of Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft has also updated the VB language to its latest version, 9.0. In VB 9.0, there are several key language enhancements that have been made to support the new Language Integrated Query (LINQ) feature announced earlier by Microsoft. This article will walk you through each of these new language enhancements and provide a couple of code examples to illustrate their uses.
Nullable Type
As you are no doubt aware, all un-initialized value types in VB have a default value when they are declared. For example, the following declaration declares a Boolean variable:
Dim married As Boolean
Because it has not been initialized, married now contains the default value of False. However, there are times where you do not know the marital status of a person and hence the variable should neither be True nor False. In VB 9.0, you can now declare value types to be nullable, i.e., they do not yet have a value.
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ith the release of Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft has also updated the VB language to its latest version, 9.0. In VB 9.0, there are several key language enhancements that have been made to support the new Language Integrated Query (LINQ) feature announced earlier by Microsoft. This article will walk you through each of these new language enhancements and provide a couple of code examples to illustrate their uses.
