Visual Basic Orcas Programmer's Reference is a language tutorial and a reference guide to the upcoming Orcas release of Visual Basic. The tutorial provides basic material suitable for beginners but also includes in-depth content for more advanced developers.

The second part of the book is a reference that quickly allows programmers to locate information for specific language features. The entries in these appendices allow the reader to quickly review the details of important programming, objects, properties, methods, and events.

Visual Basic Orcas Programmer's Reference will be fully revised (30%) to cover the latest features of the Orcas release, including:

• Changes to variable declaration and initialization
• XLinq support for XML data types; query comprehensions for using SQL-like syntax to extract data from arrays and other data structures
• Extension methods for adding new features to existing classes
• Nested subroutines and functions
• Anonymous subroutines and functions ("lambda expressions")
• Nullable types
• Relaxed delegates
• Dynamic interfaces
• Dynamic identifiers

The author expects about 100 new pages of new examples covering these features; he will also extensively revise and retest all code to ensure compliance with the Orcas release.