Surface your VB... Coding the Microsoft Surface with VB

The Visual Basic Team - VB Support for Microsoft Surface 2.0

"...Version 2.0 introduces new functionality and support for more compact hardware. A glance at the Microsoft Surface team web site reveals some incredibly interesting uses for the technology.

The samples provided are a great introduction to writing code for the platform. VB versions of all the samples have been created and they provide a introduction to what is possible.

To develop Surface applications using VB requires installation of a few prerequisites:

• VS2010 SP1 (Required because VB is using VB Core feature)
• WP7 SDK Tools (Installs the XNA components )
• Surface 2.0 Runtime and SDK (The important surface tools)
• VB Surface 2.0 Samples

And for those who feel inspired to create new surface projects from scratch we have included the project templates. To install these project templates after installing the above prerequisites – you can find then in the Visual Studio Gallery (Tools > Extension Manager) searching on the “VB_Surface” and install the new project templates.

You can now start up Visual Studio and the two surface templates should appear for Visual Basic as well as the existing two C# surface templates. This is another technology that is now targetable by VB developers and that utilizes the VB Core functionality." [GD:Post Leach Level 90%]

Microsoft Developer Network - Visual Basic Surface 2.0 SDK Samples

" The Visual Basic Surface 2.0 SDK Samples includes translations of the all the Surface 2.0 SDK samples used for developers targeting the Surface 2.0 platform. The Surface 2.0 SDK contains the C# equivalent samples.

This sample includes example applications and library functionality that demonstrate concepts used for writing surface applications. This sample is a single .zip containing a single Visual Studio .sln file, which then contains multiple Visual Studio projects. To try each sample, change the startup project in Visual Studio and then debug/execute the sample application.

The sample include the following

Samples using XNA

• Cloth
• Finger Fountain
• Raw Image Visualizer

Samples using WPF

• Controls Box
• Data Visualizer
• Grand Piano
• Item Compare
• Photo Paint
• Scatter Puzzle
• Shopping Cart

..."

Good to see the VB support push continue. Would like to see it earlier, at time of launch (baked in the SDK/initial samples/etc/etc) but it's still good to see it come out soon than later... (Though I hope the "translations" doesn't just mean they were machine converted from C# to VB. I'm guessing not, but... :|  )