Threading with Visual Basic .NET

Posted August 10, 2003

Chat Date: July 22, 2003

Please note: Portions of this transcript have been edited for clarity

Chat Participants:

• Jason Cooke, Programmer/writer for Visual Basic User Education
• Amanda Silver, Program manager on the Visual Basic .NET team
• Glenn Hackney, Technical writer
• John Rivard, Visual Basic development team
• Ed Hickey, VB Communities PM

Moderator: Ed (Microsoft)
Welcome to today’s chat on Threading with Visual Basic .NET. We have members of the Visual Basic team here to answer your questions today. I will ask the hosts to introduce themselves.

Host: Amanda (Microsoft)
Hi, my name is Amanda Silver. I am a program manager on the Visual Basic .NET team. Among other things, I work on the language and the compiler.

Moderator: Jason (Microsoft)
Hi! My name is Jason Cooke, and I'm a programmer/writer for Visual Basic User Education.

Host: Johnny (Microsoft)
Hello. I'm John Rivard from the Visual Basic development team. I'm involved with VB language and runtime design.

Host: Glenn (Microsoft)
Glenn Hackney...technical writer, .NET Framework threading docs.

Moderator: Ed (Microsoft)
And I am Ed Hickey, VS Communities PM. Glad you all could make it today!

Let's get started! Fire away with your questions for our hosts.

Host: Amanda (Microsoft)
Q: What is the .NET Compact Framework?

A: The .NET Compact Framework is the smart device development platform for the Microsoft .NET.

Moderator: Ed (Microsoft)
Q: How much does VB program currently cost?

A: You can visit the site below and it will give you all the pricing for the different versions: https://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/buy

Moderator: Ed (Microsoft)
Q: Can I upgrade VB 6.0 to VB .NET 2003 ?

A: Absolutely, the Upgrade Wizard has even been improved from VS.Net.

Host: Amanda (Microsoft)
Q: Visual Basic .NET 2003? What is new with it?

A: There are a number of features in the IDE that make development a lot easier. Intellisense now has a "Most Recently Used" algorithm, the IDE now stubs out interface implementation and Try Catch Finally blocks, etc. etc. In the language bitshift operators were added as well as the ability to declare variables in For loops.

Moderator: Ed (Microsoft)
Q: What are good reasons to upgrade to VB .NET 2003

A: Well, if you have not tried VS.Net 2003, it is an amazing programming tool. The fact that we are talking about threading should give you some idea as to how powerful it now is to use VB.Net.

Host: Johnny (Microsoft)
Q: How do you export Subs and Functions in a .NET dll?

A: By declaring the enclosing Class or Module as Public and declaring the Sub or Function as Public.

Moderator: Ed (Microsoft)
Well folks, we have a special guest - the one, our MVP Michael Giagnocavo!

Moderator: Jason (Microsoft)
Q: What is Visual J# .NET?

A: Visual J# .NET 2003 is a powerful tool for Java-language developers who want to build applications and services on the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Host: Amanda (Microsoft)
Q: I was wondering if I create a .NET Server if I can call the methods I expose from a vb6 client.

A: Absolutely, you just need to expose the interface for the server by marking it for "COM Interop" via the COM Class attribute. Check out the link at: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5dxz80y2.aspx To read about COM wrappers.

Host: Glenn (Microsoft)
Q: When multithreading, do we need to synchronize before changing atomic members?

A: If it's 32 bits, and aligned on a 32-bit boundary, you don't need to do anything special.

Host: Glenn (Microsoft)
Q: So a string is considered atomic , eh?

A: No, a string is most emphatically not atomic. Setting a reference to a string is atomic. However, if you have a string property you want to set, you need to synchronize it. What's your scenario?

Moderator: Jason (Microsoft)
Q: Where can I obtain a VB net decomplier from plz?

A: PreEmptive's Dotfuscator (which comes bundled with Visual Studio .NET 2003) obfuscates compiled VB code. This makes it very difficult to decompile.

Host: Glenn (Microsoft)
Q: Earlier question...easiest way to pass small amounts of data cross-process?

A: Take a look at the quickstart examples for remoting.

Moderator: Ed (Microsoft)
This has been a GREAT chat. Thank you to everyone. Thanks for participating, and we'll see you next time!

Host: Amanda (Microsoft)
Well -- thanks everyone! Hope to see you at another chat in the near future!

Host: Glenn (Microsoft)
Ta!

Moderator: Jason (Microsoft)
Thanks for coming!

For further information on this topic please visit the following:

Newsgroups: microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.vb

VB .NET Transcripts: Read the archive of past VB .NET chats.

Website: Visit the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET site.

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