See what Visual Studio 2008 Shell has to offer and how it can help you.

Windows PowerShell not only offers a powerful shell and scripting language, but also an easily extensible interface. Here, you will learn that it is relatively simple to extend the shell and language by creating custom cmdlets.

Windows PowerShell replaces the outdated batch files and Windows Scripting Host with a brand new object-oriented shell and scripting language. Learn how to retrieve directory and filenames from a specific drive.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition provides relational database functionality for mobile and desktop applications through a lightweight and easily distributable engine. Take a look under the hood.

Visual Basic 9 (codename: Orcas) promises exciting new features to make developers' lives easier, especially in the areas of data access and management. Get a feature preview of a few standouts.

Think console applications are old news? Then you haven't tried the cool new console application features available in VB 2005. Check out some of this author's favorites.

Although the .NET Framework provides many standard exceptions, you also can create, throw, and catch your own custom exceptions. In fact, custom exception types are a powerful feature of the VB .NET language.

Explore the IntelliSense code snippet format, and then learn how to build your own snippets and package them for distribution.

Displaying RSS feeds or channels is very easy using Visual Basic 2005. In no time, you can build a simple RSS viewer that takes a user-entered RSS feed URL and retrieves the title, description, and link for that channel.