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8/2/2010 3:02:40 AM
A long time ago, my family took a trip to Expo ‘86 in Vancouver, with stop offs in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In LA, we went on the Universal studio tour, something which I basically have no memory of. I did get a memento, though—a poster entitled “Murphy’s Computer Law” with a bunch of humorous computing “laws” on it. This poster went up in my room, accompanied me to college and has been in most of my offices at Microsoft. However, a few years ago, a corner ripped off in a move. Then while ... [ read more ]
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7/22/2010 5:39:01 PM
In my “ Learning and Teaching ” post last week, I talked about the different stages of learning, from “unconscious incompetence” up to “unconscious competence.” It occurred to me today, though, that there really are different levels within those levels and, in particular, there are some very distinct levels of incompetence that I’ve encountered in my nearly (yikes!) two decades of working in the industry. The reason why the levels of incompetence are somewhat more important than the various lev ... [ read more ]
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6/22/2010 9:56:55 PM
..and they are: Programmers who want to write an operating system Programmers who want to write a compiler Programmers who want to write a database It’s not that every programmer ever actually works on one of these, just that every programmer seems to dream of doing one of these things. It’s the primary reason why things like Linux exist. Yes, open source, blah, blah, blah, OS choices, blah, blah, blah, evil Microsoft, blah, blah, blah. But I would bet my bottom dolla ... [ read more ]
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6/7/2010 5:43:01 PM
For reasons that are too deathly boring to go into here, I’ve changed my name on Twitter. Because I ended up creating a new profile instead of changing the name (again, for reasons not worth talking about), you’ll need to re-follow if you’re interested in what I might have to say there. New location: http://twitter.com/panopticoncntrl . Hope to see you there!
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6/3/2010 5:45:43 PM
In a comment to my previous post, Rich asked Does this mean you're the person to fix T-SQL programmability? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question because, coming from the outside, I’m not sure about everything that’s wrong with T-SQL. I’d love to hear more from anyone who’s got an opinion (and any pointers to complaints around the web would be welcome as well). You can also feel free to use my contact form to talk to me directly. I can’t promise I can do anything at th ... [ read more ]
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5/27/2010 5:56:48 PM
After spending a year and a half working on “M”, I’ve decided to make another change in what I’m doing and and move over to the SQL Server Programmability team. That’s the team responsible for things like the T-SQL language and runtime in SQL Server. Working on “M” was a lot of fun and the team was great, but after spending a good, long while down in the bowels of a GLR parser, I decided that that was enough and that it was time to do something else. Working on SQL Server programmability is, in ... [ read more ]
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5/29/2009 5:11:04 PM
In case you missed it, we pushed out a new CTP this week of “Oslo”. You can get it at the Oslo Developer Center . New stuff includes: The "Quadrant" modeling tool. Use Quadrant to browse and edit models in a repository database. Domain models for the UML 2.1 specification encompassing Use Case, Activity, Class, Sequence, Component diagrams, profiles and templates. An XMI importer supporting the 2.1 specifications, and covering the diagrams identified above. A domain mo ... [ read more ]
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3/31/2009 5:59:58 PM
My post a few months ago entitled “ DSLs: Definitely a bad idea! ” certainly seemed to touch a nerve for some people. What was intended to be a sort of lighthearted throwaway entry engendered a lot stronger reactions than I’d expected. So I thought it might be worthwhile to back up for a second and revisit the issue, address some (though not all) of the comments, and talk about how they connect to how I see M. To start with, yes, of course, I was engaging in a bit of hyperbole by saying that ... [ read more ]
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3/9/2009 11:14:56 PM
Maybe. Dare had a pointer today to a programming.reddit story that talks about competing versions of a dustup between Joel and Greg Whitten back when Joel used to work for Excel. I could care less who’s right, but the interesting implication of the story is that Joel was the one who came up with the application interface for VBA. I’m not sure that’s entirely true—a lot people worked on VBA—but if it is, he might be responsible for nearly driving a former co-worker insane. When I start ... [ read more ]
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2/17/2009 12:35:02 AM
Another “in case you missed it,” there’ll be some new information about “M” revealed at Mix09 . More details on Doug’s blog …
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2/12/2009 7:30:08 PM
I want to talk in more detail about how the MGrammar parser works, but before I delve too deeply in to that I wanted to talk a little bit about some basic parsing concepts so we can be sure we’re on the same page. This may be a bit basic for some, so you can just skip ahead if you already know all this.
A language grammar is actually made up of two different grammars: a lexical grammar and a syntatic grammar. Although a grammar may not distinguish between the two in its specification (as ... [ read more ]
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1/26/2009 11:34:27 PM
Last Friday Rocky posted an entry on his weblog entitled “ DSLs – fun, cool, but maybe a bad idea? ” and my reaction was: Maybe a bad idea? Maybe a bad idea? Of course they’re a bad idea! This may seem strange coming from someone who’s working on the heart of Oslo/M’s DSL capabilities, but stick with me here… To begin with, writing a new language, domain-specific or not, is a lot like opening a restaurant: everyone thinks they can do it because they’ve eaten at one and it lo ... [ read more ]
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12/13/2008 12:22:58 AM
One of the major reasons that I decided to come to work on the Oslo team was the experience I had with what was going to become MGrammar. I was interested in prototyping some language and compiler design ideas, and I knew that the Oslo team had some technologies that might help me out, specifically a parser generator. They helpfully pointed me to their source code, I enlisted, built and started to play around. I’d been building some parser technology by hand, but I quickly discarded it once I s ... [ read more ]
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12/12/2008 10:43:01 PM
As some readers have noticed, I’ve been conspicuously silent since I moved over to the Oslo team . Some of this had to do with getting onto a new blogging engine, some of it had to do with various distractions like jury duty, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that Visual Basic 10.0 has gotten to a pretty stable state (so there isn’t so much for me to say any more) and I am just getting off the ground with Oslo. Not having much useful to say, I figured I’d be better off saying nothing at ... [ read more ]
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12/10/2008 7:20:28 PM
Things have been quiet around here for a number of reasons. One of the more important was that I really, really, really wanted to get off of the ancient .Text blog engine I’ve been on forever and I was loath to add a lot more content until I could get moved over. I decided to move to Subtext since it was very compatible with .Text (although its migration code for .Text appears to be completely untested as it contained at least one blocking bug and I had to do some of it by hand), but was bloc ... [ read more ]
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10/31/2008 8:11:00 PM
Now that we’re past the PDC, there are a bunch of video resources coming out on VB 10.0 and Oslo. Here’s a roundup of what’s available so far: Channel9 has a video that I did with Don and Chris on M called, “ Don Box, Paul Vick, and Chris Anderson: Introducing M ” Channel9 also has a video Don and Chris did on their own covering Oslo, “ Don and Chris explain Oslo in 5 minutes ” The Pearson folks also recorded some vidcasts they call OnMicrosoft . If you go to the previous link, you can ... [ read more ]
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10/31/2008 1:11:00 PM
Now that we’re past the PDC, there are a bunch of video resources coming out on VB 10.0 and Oslo. Here’s a roundup of what’s available so far: Channel9 has a video that I did with Don and Chris on M called, “ Don Box, Paul Vick, and Chris Anderson: Introducing M ” Channel9 also has a video Don and Chris did on their own covering Oslo, “ Don and Chris explain Oslo in 5 minutes ” The Pearson folks also recorded some vidcasts they call OnMicrosoft . If you go to the previous link, you can ... [ read more ]
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10/29/2008 5:23:00 PM
Yesterday I gave my valedictory address on Visual Basic at the PDC. I think the talk went well and it was a lot of fun, if not a little sad that it’s one of the last times I’ll be giving a talk about Visual Basic. We covered a lot of exciting stuff, some of which should be familiar to readers of the blog. I’ll let people know when the video is up on the Channel9 page for the talk , should be some time today. For those of you who don’t want to sit through the talk it went something like this: ... [ read more ]
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10/29/2008 10:23:00 AM
Yesterday I gave my valedictory address on Visual Basic at the PDC. I think the talk went well and it was a lot of fun, if not a little sad that it’s one of the last times I’ll be giving a talk about Visual Basic. We covered a lot of exciting stuff, some of which should be familiar to readers of the blog. I’ll let people know when the video is up on the Channel9 page for the talk , should be some time today. For those of you who don’t want to sit through the talk it went something like this: ... [ read more ]
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10/28/2008 1:38:00 AM
As difficult as it is to say, I wanted to let my loyal readers know that after a decade spent working on Visual Basic, I’ve made the decision to change jobs at Microsoft. It's somewhat hard for even me to imagine just how long I've worked on Visual Basic. I joined the Developer Division (VB's home) over 11.5 years ago to work on OLE Automation. A year and a half after that, I moved over to the VB team proper to work on the compiler's code generator just as we started the move to what wo ... [ read more ]
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10/28/2008 1:38:00 AM
The Oslo dev center on MSDN is now up, and the Oslo CTP is available. You can also check out Models Remixed for even more information and keep your eye on the M language blog . More to be revealed tomorrow…
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10/28/2008 1:32:00 AM
While I was hanging out at the Addison-Wesley booth, I picked up a copy of two updated editions that I’d been eyeing. One is the updated C# Programming Language specification that includes a lot of hard work by Mads : And the other is the updated Framework Design Guidelines: Both look just awesome. I think they’re also supposed to be giving out this sooner or later: So I can hopefully pick up one of those too!
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10/27/2008 6:38:00 PM
The Oslo dev center on MSDN is now up, and the Oslo CTP is available. You can also check out Models Remixed for even more information and keep your eye on the M language blog . More to be revealed tomorrow…
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10/27/2008 6:32:00 PM
While I was hanging out at the Addison-Wesley booth, I picked up a copy of two updated editions that I’d been eyeing. One is the updated C# Programming Language specification that includes a lot of hard work by Mads : And the other is the updated Framework Design Guidelines: Both look just awesome. I think they’re also supposed to be giving out this sooner or later: So I can hopefully pick up one of those too!
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10/24/2008 7:13:00 PM
I just wanted to give a shout out to my fellow Oslo employee Vijaye Raji whose Small BASIC project just launched on the new DevLabs site . It’s a version of BASIC targeted at truly beginning programmers, and I think it’s a great example of how BASIC can be utilized to make things very simple and easy to use. I got the chance to see Small BASIC in action being taught to high schoolers and it was wonderful to see the kids start to make the connection between what they were doing and what the ... [ read more ]
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10/24/2008 12:13:00 PM
I just wanted to give a shout out to my fellow Oslo employee Vijaye Raji whose Small BASIC project just launched on the new DevLabs site . It’s a version of BASIC targeted at truly beginning programmers, and I think it’s a great example of how BASIC can be utilized to make things very simple and easy to use. I got the chance to see Small BASIC in action being taught to high schoolers and it was wonderful to see the kids start to make the connection between what they were doing and what the ... [ read more ]
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10/22/2008 8:39:00 PM
I didn’t realize I’ve been so silent about the PDC! I’ve been struggling to get off of .Text and on to Subtext for my blogging engine, and so I’ve been avoiding posting because “I’ll wait until I get moved over to the new engine.” Pffffft! Anyway, I’m going to be doing a number of things at the PDC, so if you’re going to be in LA next week, stop by and say hi! I am co-presenting “Future Directions for Visual Basic” with Lucian on Tuesday at 5:15pm in room 406A. Do stop by and let’s chat a ... [ read more ]
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10/22/2008 1:39:00 PM
I didn’t realize I’ve been so silent about the PDC! I’ve been struggling to get off of .Text and on to Subtext for my blogging engine, and so I’ve been avoiding posting because “I’ll wait until I get moved over to the new engine.” Pffffft! Anyway, I’m going to be doing a number of things at the PDC, so if you’re going to be in LA next week, stop by and say hi! I am co-presenting “Future Directions for Visual Basic” with Lucian on Tuesday at 5:15pm in room 406A. Do stop by and let’s chat a ... [ read more ]
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10/9/2008 6:57:00 PM
Hi all, I wanted to take a moment to introduce the new specification lead for Visual Basic, Lucian Wischik. Lucian has been getting to know the user community over the past few months, and now you’ll have even more contact with him as he’ll be taking over my responsibilities in terms of owning the language spec! He’s already been an enormous help in ironing out some of the trickier aspects of the Dev10 spec, and I feel very confident that the specification will be in good hands. Here’s a short ... [ read more ]
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10/9/2008 11:57:00 AM
Hi all, I wanted to take a moment to introduce the new specification lead for Visual Basic, Lucian Wischik. Lucian has been getting to know the user community over the past few months, and now you’ll have even more contact with him as he’ll be taking over my responsibilities in terms of owning the language spec! He’s already been an enormous help in ironing out some of the trickier aspects of the Dev10 spec, and I feel very confident that the specification will be in good hands. Here’s a short ... [ read more ]
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9/29/2008 8:14:00 PM
As difficult as it is to say, I wanted to let my loyal readers know that after a decade spent working on Visual Basic, I’ve made the decision to change jobs at Microsoft. It's somewhat hard for even me to imagine just how long I've worked on Visual Basic. I joined the Developer Division (VB's home) over 11.5 years ago to work on OLE Automation. A year and a half after that, I moved over to the VB team proper to work on the compiler's code generator just as we started the move to what would be ... [ read more ]
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9/29/2008 1:14:00 PM
As difficult as it is to say, I wanted to let my loyal readers know that after a decade spent working on Visual Basic, I’ve made the decision to change jobs at Microsoft. It's somewhat hard for even me to imagine just how long I've worked on Visual Basic. I joined the Developer Division (VB's home) over 11.5 years ago to work on OLE Automation. A year and a half after that, I moved over to the VB team proper to work on the compiler's code generator just as we started the move to what wo ... [ read more ]
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8/8/2008 9:35:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. Actually, in this case I don't thing the above warning is strong enough. This is a super speculative post, because I believe the chance of it appearing in the next version of the language is not extremely high, not because it's not a worthy feature but because it's more than a little work and we've got a lot of other very worthy features we're considering. However, since it's something that's valuable and something we keep getting requ ... [ read more ]
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8/8/2008 2:35:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. Actually, in this case I don't thing the above warning is strong enough. This is a super speculative post, because I believe the chance of it appearing in the next version of the language is not extremely high, not because it's not a worthy feature but because it's more than a little work and we've got a lot of other very worthy features we're considering. However, since it's something that's valuable and something we keep getting requ ... [ read more ]
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7/30/2008 12:59:00 AM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. I haven't finished reading through all the comments from my previous post yet, but I did think it was worth stating that we are considering improvements to lambda expressions in the next version. Specifically, we're looking at allowing single-line lambdas that don't actually return anything, something like: Dim x = Sub () Console.WriteLine(10)
This was something we wanted to support in 2008, but just ran out of time for. We're al ... [ read more ]
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7/29/2008 5:59:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. I haven't finished reading through all the comments from my previous post yet, but I did think it was worth stating that we are considering improvements to lambda expressions in the next version. Specifically, we're looking at allowing single-line lambdas that don't actually return anything, something like: Dim x = Sub () Console.WriteLine(10)
This was something we wanted to support in 2008, but just ran out of time for. We're al ... [ read more ]
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7/28/2008 8:17:00 PM
While I was out on vacation last week, Beth posted a video that she did at one of our language design meetings on Channel9. Check it out. If you get confused about the joke about the gray shirt, Beth also explains that on her blog . I had a little more to say in this video than I did in the one of the design meeting that I go to as a guest ...
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7/28/2008 1:17:00 PM
While I was out on vacation last week, Beth posted a video that she did at one of our language design meetings on Channel9. Check it out. If you get confused about the joke about the gray shirt, Beth also explains that on her blog . I had a little more to say in this video than I did in the one of the design meeting that I go to as a guest ...
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7/18/2008 11:12:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. It's been a while since I've had much of anything to say about our thinking about VB10 (well, it's been a while since I've had much of anything to say) and I wanted to give a quick update on our thinking: Implicit line continuations : we're still considering it. Automatically implemented properties : we're still considering it . Implicitly implemented interfaces : we've put this on the back burner . The feedback we got on ... [ read more ]
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7/18/2008 4:12:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. It's been a while since I've had much of anything to say about our thinking about VB10 (well, it's been a while since I've had much of anything to say) and I wanted to give a quick update on our thinking: Implicit line continuations : we're still considering it. Automatically implemented properties : we're still considering it . Implicitly implemented interfaces : we've put this on the back burner . The feedback we got on ... [ read more ]
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7/1/2008 12:38:00 AM
No, not really, just going through another dry spell on the blog. But I have been playing with Twitter, so you can try me there as well: http://twitter.com/paulvick . No promises that I'll keep it up, but...
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6/30/2008 5:38:00 PM
No, not really, just going through another dry spell on the blog. But I have been playing with Twitter, so you can try me there as well: http://twitter.com/paulvick . No promises that I'll keep it up, but...
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5/14/2008 7:08:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. When we last left collection initializers , we were discussing default types for collection initializers. Since then we've thought further about the feature and are considering changing the design. The problem is that as nice as type inference is, as we started to dig into what that practically meant it started to become more and more difficult to figure out what a particular collection initializer might mean. Because the meaning of the ... [ read more ]
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5/14/2008 12:08:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. When we last left collection initializers , we were discussing default types for collection initializers. Since then we've thought further about the feature and are considering changing the design. The problem is that as nice as type inference is, as we started to dig into what that practically meant it started to become more and more difficult to figure out what a particular collection initializer might mean. Because the meaning of the ... [ read more ]
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5/8/2008 12:01:00 PM
Random musing for the day: I was thinking about reserved words in programming languages and whether they're really necessary at a lexical level. As you know, most programming languages define in their lexical grammar a set of words that cannot be used anywhere in the language except when explicitly specified in the grammar. For example, VB reserves the word "Object". So you can't just say: ' Error: Keyword is not valid as an identifier.
Sub Object ()
End Sub
Many langua ... [ read more ]
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5/5/2008 6:23:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. Well, I appear to be on a rhythm of about once a month posts, which seems OK for the moment. Moving on to another "future" topic, one of the most annoying things that we cut (at least, from my perspective) from VB 2008 was collection initializers. Collection initializers were a little different than the corresponding C# feature, because our plan was to introduce stand-alone initializers that didn't have any intrinsic type. Instead the in ... [ read more ]
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4/7/2008 3:59:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. This one is a little more speculative than the others, but it’s something that we’d like to get some feedback on. One complaint that we get from time to time has to do with interface implementation. A lot of people like the fact that there’s a nice explicit interface implementation syntax in VB, but sometimes it starts to feel, well, a little verbose . Even if you let the IDE create all the interface implementations for you, there’s stil ... [ read more ]
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3/27/2008 3:30:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. I apologize for the long silence, things have been a little busy around Panopticon Central these days! Anyway, I wanted to go back to talking about some of the things that we’re thinking about for the next version, and I thought I’d go over a small one: automatically implemented properties. As the name implies, these would be basically the same thing you get in C# 3.0’s auto-implemented properties . What we’re talking about is allowin ... [ read more ]
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2/27/2008 4:55:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. One of the things that we'd like to address in the next version is line continuations. We know that they tend to annoy many developers who want to break their logical lines across multiple physical lines, and we've gotten many requests to get rid of them altogether. Unfortunately, there's a reason we haven't just dropped them--they actually are needed in certain scenarios. For example, take the following contrived example: Sub M ... [ read more ]
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2/20/2008 5:02:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. Several weeks ago, I gave a presentation entitled Bringing Scripting (Back) to Visual Basic at the Lang .NET 2008 conference. A video of the presentation has now been posted, so you can check it out for yourself. (The presentation was also covered by EWeek in an article entitled Bringing Sexy Back to Visual Basic .) The main theme of the presentation is the same one I've been talking about on and off over the past year or two: mov ... [ read more ]
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2/18/2008 8:11:00 PM
Just a quick note for those who might care--I haven't given up blogging just yet, even though January was the first time in the history of this blog that I went without saying anything for a month. My wife, kids and I went on a big vacation to the Dominican Republic in January, with a swing by the East Coast for a baptism for good measure, and that took up most of the month! Then, just as I was starting to dig myself out of the hole from that trip, I was off for another week. So needless to s ... [ read more ]
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12/27/2007 4:07:00 PM
A month or two ago, Paul Yuknewicz and I sat down to record a Hansselminutes podcast with Scott Hanselman , talking about the past, present and future of Visual Basic. It was a lot of fun, check it out !
Also, here's a little holiday love for VB from some Microsofties you might recognize:
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12/27/2007 4:02:00 PM
I wanted to let people know that an (almost) final VB 9.0 language specification has been posted on the download center . The spec is missing some copy-edits from the documentation folks, but is otherwise complete. Since I'm not going to get a chance to incorporate the copy-edits until I am back from vacation in January, I wanted to get the spec out there for anyone interested in documentation of the XML features that weren't present in the previous version of the spec. (I apologize for the la ... [ read more ]
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12/12/2007 8:10:00 PM
Just a little shout out to the latest project by that crazy language pimp, Erik Meijer. (He's the guy you have to thank for much of LINQ and especially for XML literals in VB.) In its own words, Volta is... [...] a developer toolset that enables you to build multi-tier web applications by applying familiar techniques and patterns. First, design and build your application as a .NET client application, then assign the portions of the application to run on the server and the client tiers lat ... [ read more ]
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11/20/2007 12:29:00 AM
Oh, yeah, that's right. We shipped . Hard to believe we've finally reached the finish line...
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11/14/2007 5:30:00 PM
Most everyone who's steeped deeply enough in the culture of Visual Studio has probably run across some mention of Mort. Mort is one of a triumvirate of personas that the Visual Studio team uses to describe the developers that they are targeting. The other two members of this group are Elvis and Einstein. (I got complaints from internal people the last time I mentioned the personas, so let me take a moment to say that they are open knowledge .) Love them or hate them , the personas have be ... [ read more ]
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11/1/2007 10:41:00 AM
One piece of conventional wisdom that I hear now and again is that "nobody uses Visual Basic." When someone's giving a talk and asks people to raise their hands if they use VB, they say VB'ers are in the minority. In the buzz-o-sphere, Visual Basic seems to be only discussed when debating whether some other language is the "new" Visual Basic. Even Microsoft has been accused on occasion of seeming to favor C# over VB in things like samples or documentation. We were having a discussion intern ... [ read more ]
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10/23/2007 7:25:00 PM
While I was visiting MSR Cambridge this week with some other people from Redmond, Beth put up the Beta 2 version of the Visual Basic Language specification on our developer center--so she got to beat me to the announcement! This updated language specification corresponds to Visual Studio 2008 and covers the following major new features: Friend assemblies (InternalsVisibleTo) Relaxed delegates Local type inferencing Anonymous types Extension methods Nullable types Ternary operat ... [ read more ]
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10/16/2007 2:58:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. I know that I'm running a great risk of touching the third rail of the VB community by even speculating about this, but it seems like the right time to have a bit of a conversation about the big "D"-word. That is, deprecation. Yes, deprecation. Now before anyone starts freaking out, foaming at the mouth or writing a petition , let me emphasize that my thinking along these lines is entirely within the guidelines discussed in the ... [ read more ]
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10/5/2007 4:38:00 PM
WARNING: This is a speculative post . Caveat emptor. Last week, one of the VB MVPs asked on a private alias what our thinking was about VB10. As I kind of indicated in my previous entry , I don’t think we have a clear idea yet of what’s going to be on the table for the next rev—VB 2008 was kind of an aberration in that LINQ was in gestation long before VB 2005 even shipped. But I can say what’s at least on my mind: Hosting or, more generally, opening up the compiler services to the ... [ read more ]
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10/3/2007 2:09:00 PM
Things have been pretty quiet around Panopticon Central since I did a bit of talking about "VBx" back in May. Partially this has reflected the fact that we're at a pretty early stage of thinking about the post-VS 2008 world, so there isn't a lot solid to talk about. Partially this has reflected the usual shifts in emphasis and strategy that occur around the end of a major product cycle as more and more people start to get freed up to think beyond what they're delivering next month. And partia ... [ read more ]
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9/20/2007 2:29:00 PM
For all you VB programmers who'd like to extend VS, check out the newly announced Visual Basic Pack for Visual Studio 2005 SDK . This adds the missing functionality that makes working with VS really easy with VB. You can also check out a video discussing the support for now and in the future.
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9/18/2007 1:00:00 PM
It's been a little quiet around here lately, I realize, but if you're reading my blog because you're a fan of VB, let me just say you really need to be reading The Visual Basic Team blog and Beth Massi's blog . There's lots of good VB stuff there, too much for me to even consider reposting it here. So subscribe!
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8/10/2007 2:12:00 PM
I'm back from vacation and finally got a chance to wade through the 47 comments on my previous entry on lowercase keywords. Anything that touches on lexical or syntatic issues usually provokes a pretty strong response, and I was glad (?) to see that this still held true. Reading through the comments, I think there are a few things that I should add to my previous entry: I was only musing about changing the appearance of keywords and was saying nothing about changing case insensitivity. I ... [ read more ]
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7/20/2007 6:49:00 PM
One of the raps that VB sometimes gets is that we're too "verbose." There are a few things that we think might contribute to this perception that we're looking at for the future, but I had an interesting flash the other day. I wonder how much the fact that we uppercase our keywords affects our perception? So I built a bootleg of the compiler and tried it out on some code of mine. Before: Private Function ParseSimpleNameExpression() As SimpleNameExpression
Dim start ... [ read more ]
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7/17/2007 1:38:00 PM
From eWEEK : Another big hit with SL 7 is the fact that it's the first suite in the Dynamics pantheon to be rewritten in .Net. "We cheated a little bit. It was in Visual Basic, so using Microsoft tools we moved from Visual Basic to Visual Basic .Net," said Jon Pratt, senior director of Microsoft's Dynamics GP, Dynamics SL and Dynamics Retail Management System. The .Net rationale is that it "extremely improves the enhancement of the developer environment," said Pratt. It also paves the w ... [ read more ]
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7/12/2007 1:53:00 PM
As you may remember, a while back I solicited questions for MSDN Japan's "Ask the Experts!" page. Well, now the video I shot answering some of those questions is up. Check it out!
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6/29/2007 6:03:00 PM
In a context completely unrelated to computers or my work, someone gave me a copy of one of those "word a day" calendar entries for the word "mortmain". You can see the fuller definition here , but one definition is: The oppressive influence of past events or decisions. Only after I tacked it up in my office did people start pointing out to me the irony .
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6/27/2007 1:08:00 PM
As a medium of communication, blogs have their strengths and weaknesses. The informal nature of the communication makes it incredibly easy to communicate information on an ongoing basis. The down side, of course, is that the very informality of blogs can also trip you up if you don't pay enough attention to follow up. I've certainly been guilty of that on this blog (there are still some loose ends I think haven't really been tied up), and we've been guilty of that as a team. One thing we have ... [ read more ]
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6/21/2007 1:12:00 PM
It's hard to believe it, but 6/21/2007 marks the 15th anniversary of my permanent arrival in Seattle. I'd spent the summer before in Redmond interning, but in June of 1992, I graduated from college, bought a car, packed up my stuff, and headed out to Seattle. When people would ask me how long I expected to work at Microsoft, I said, "I don't know... I guess I'll stay three to five years and then figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life." Tomorrow, of course, marks the 15th anniv ... [ read more ]
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5/31/2007 2:18:00 PM
One of the problems that we've run into when trying to get new platforms such as the Compact Frameworks or Silverlight to support Visual Basic is getting the VB runtime supported on the new platform. The VB runtime, besides having a bunch of user functions such as Left and MsgBox and such, contains a number of language helper functions that are required for the correct functioning of the language. For example, when you convert an Integer value into a String value, we emit a call to a helper tha ... [ read more ]
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5/29/2007 3:09:00 PM
As many people know by now, Microsoft has decided to reschedule the PDC that was planned for later this year. This was very disappointing for me personally, since I was looking forward to seeing a bunch of the people that I usually see there and was one of the consolations I had for myself for not being able to go to MIX. It also means that our plan to talk more about VBx at the PDC is going to have to be shifted around. Not clear where/when our focus is going to move to, but stay tuned, we ... [ read more ]
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5/25/2007 7:13:00 PM
As is always the case in a major release, there are a number of smaller features that don't get very publicized because they're not as big or sexy as the major features. One that someone asked me about privately in email was partial methods . VB will support them in pretty much the same way that C# does. In fact, rather than writing a big, long entry about it, you could just check out Scott Wisniewski's excellent entry on them . You can also check out Wes Dyer's excellent entry on them for C ... [ read more ]
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5/24/2007 1:24:00 PM
Yes, it's true, as Miguel found out at the compiler lab : Another interesting detail: the new Javascript compiler is written in Visual Basic.NET. The compiler he's talking about is the Silverlight-based Javascript compiler that we released in Silverlight 1.1 . Of course, we're also writing VBx in VB as well, so...
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5/11/2007 12:13:00 PM
About a month ago, the C# team announced that they were making anonymous types immutable in C# 9.0. The issues with mutable anonymous types are pretty well described in Sree's blog entry, but what it boils down to is this: in several places in LINQ, anonymous types are used as keys for things like grouping and filtering. For example, if you group customers by state and country, then the grouping is done on a composite key made up of the State field and the Country field in an anonymous type. ... [ read more ]
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5/8/2007 1:42:00 PM
Many months ago, I discussed the fact that we were finally planning to come up with a true ternary conditional operator that would allow short-circuited conditional expressions. (Just as a quick recap: the current problem with the IIF function is that it evaluates all the arguments since it is just a regular method call. So "IIF(x Is Nothing, "Empty", x.Name)" will throw an exception if x is Nothing, because we still evaluate x.Name.) At the time, we were considering taking the IIF function ... [ read more ]
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5/3/2007 2:21:00 PM
One of the other announcements from MIX was "Project Jasper," which is (in the words of the guys who wrote it): [...] a set of components aimed at fulfilling the need for a rapid and iterative development experience for data. With Jasper, you are able to just point at a database and immediately begin coding against its data using intuitive, domain-specific data classes. No configuration and no source code generation are required. Jasper works with existing application frameworks (including ... [ read more ]
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5/2/2007 2:34:00 PM
One. Just one. VBx is the next version of Visual Basic, not a new version of Visual Basic. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that there are TWO ways you can use Visual Basic in Silverlight, and one uses Orcas and one uses VBx. So let me see if I can clarify a little bit... As everyone should be aware now, Silverlight is a cross-platform version of the CLR. This means that Silverlight, with some limitations, can run any compiled IL application or library that the desktop CLR ca ... [ read more ]
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5/1/2007 6:34:00 PM
There was a semi-announcement as a part of the Silverlight 1.1 discussion at MIX07 yesterday that people might be wondering about. If you check out the Silverlight poster that Brad posted a pointer to , you'll see that on the right hand side under the box that says Framework Languages , there are TWO listings for Visual Basic. First, there's "Visual Basic" and then down at the bottom there's a "VBx" with a little icon "Soon." Then, if you look at Jim Hugunin's blog entry on the Dynam ... [ read more ]
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4/21/2007 1:17:00 AM
My +1 link postings are always the last ones in to the pool, but in case you haven't seen it elsewhere, Beta 1 of Visual Studio Orcas is now available for download ! This has a large majority of the Orcas features for VB in it, although there are still some features that will be coming in post-Beta1 (lambdas, nullable types, etc.) because of the way the schedule came together. (You can find more details about new features in Beta1, such as "Intellisense everywhere" on our team blog .) I've ... [ read more ]
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4/7/2007 9:10:00 PM
In my " five things you might not know about me " blog entry, I mentioned that one of the things that I missed about no longer being in the South was the absence of Cheerwine from my life. What is Cheerwine, you ask? Well, it's a soda somewhat akin to cherry Coke, although with quite a distinctive flavor. The story I had always heard about it was that it was invented at a time (WWI, I believe) when there was rationing of sugar. The soda company was looking for a sweetener, and found that the o ... [ read more ]
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4/4/2007 3:52:00 PM
...to Beth Massi, who's transitioning from an MVP and blog writer to full-time content person and blog writer for the Visual Basic Developer Center . Beth's been a great member of the VB and FoxPro communities, and it'll be great having her as a devoted resource to the developer center!
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4/4/2007 3:45:00 PM
Back in December, when discussing my bout of writer's block , I said that I should probably write an entry "What the Hell I Do [at Microsoft]," since I think that the question is sometimes a little murky (even to me). Most of my career I was just a "developer" or "manager," but now that I am an "architect," things are a little more complicated. As far as I can tell, "architect" is such a general title at Microsoft that it's practically meaningless. It can mean totally different thi ... [ read more ]
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3/30/2007 12:15:00 PM
It's amazing how many viruses babies manage to bring into the house. I think we've been down with something pretty much continuously since we got back. Fortunately, we haven't been all sick at once, but this is starting to get a bit old... Things have also been extremely busy around work. I've been working on something that I'm hoping we'll have at least a mention of at MIX07 and will probably have more to say about later in the year. I realize there are some threads that have been left han ... [ read more ]
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3/11/2007 8:37:00 PM
For those of you who might be curious about how the XML integration features in VB9 work, there's now a great screencast up on Channel 9 that walks you through them while building a sample application: The next version of VB .Net adds Xml as a built in data type using the new LINQ to XML API. As a built in data type, VB 9.0 provides the ability to create XML using XML Literals and to query XML documents using XML properties. This webcast contains a demo by David Schach, the lead developer ... [ read more ]
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3/1/2007 4:10:00 PM
Maybe you've seen this elsewhere, but the big news of the week (VB-wise, at least) is that the March 2007 Orcas CTP is now out . Those of you who've been following along with the previous Orcas CTPs will have noticed the paucity of new VB features relative to some of the other VS languages. This has been largely due to the different implementation strategies of the languages--since the Visual Basic compiler is so closely tied to the IDE services, we needed to really plumb the features a ... [ read more ]
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2/23/2007 11:17:00 AM
I thought I'd done this when Bill was kind enough to tag me , but I just found this post tucked away in my "drafts" folder... I know this is well beyond the life of the original meme, but I went through the trouble of writing it, so here are five things you probably don't know about me: I wrote my senior thesis in college on the role of etiquette in Tom Sawyer and Little Women . (I actually double majored in college and graduated with a Bachelors of Science in American Studies and Compu ... [ read more ]
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2/13/2007 4:22:00 PM
Well, I have to say that in some ways it's great to be back at work, and in some ways, not so much. Everything's going great at home, and now it's time to get back into the swing of things. Two links for people who might have missed them (but I doubt many people did): A series by Scott Wisniewski on extension methods in VB9 A post by Avner Aharoni on XML changes in the Feb CTP of VB9 More as I dig through my email!
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1/3/2007 1:53:00 PM
It's hard to believe, but it's been ten whole years since I joined the Visual Basic team. Back in January of 1997 I moved from Access over to OLE Automation with the thought that automation was going to be the central place to be for development tools at Microsoft. A month or two after I'd made the switch, I had a meeting with some random guy named Brian Harry and some other people talking about this great metadata engine they were working on that was going to totally replace OLE Automat ... [ read more ]
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12/29/2006 5:50:00 PM
One of the things we've been discussing for VB 9.0 is adding a true ternary operator to the language. It's been a persistent source of annoyance for myself (and many others, to judge from suggestions and complaints we've gotten over the years) that there is no short-circuiting conditional expression operator in the language. True, there's the IIF method which does most of what you want, but it doesn't short-circuit. If you evaluate "IIF(x Is Nothing, 10, x.Foo())" and x is Nothing, then you'll ... [ read more ]
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12/19/2006 4:30:00 PM
In case you missed the announcement , VS 2005 SP1 is released. You can get it here . Beta support for Vista coming soon!
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12/19/2006 2:41:00 PM
Random question for people: how many people out there actually ever look at the VB language specification? The original purpose of writing the language specification was purely for internal use, done so we'd have a reasonably authoritative explanation of the language aside from "whatever the compiler does" and "whatever MSDN happens to say." And to have a place where historical thinking could be preserved for future generations of VB team members, so there'd be some chance in hell that we could ... [ read more ]
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12/19/2006 1:55:00 PM
Well, I'm glad to see that even with my writer's block , people still seem to be reading the blog! Although there is definitely a diversity of opinion, the majority of people seem to prefer the "Function" syntax of the choices I laid out , which is not exactly what we expected. (We were wagering people would go for the more cryptic, compact syntax. Shows what we know...) That's the syntax you should expect to see in the beta, and if public opinion shifts over time in the beta, we'll deal with ... [ read more ]
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12/8/2006 1:45:00 AM
As I alluded to in my earlier entry, one of the features we're working on for LINQ/Orcas is lambda expressions . Now, I might be tempted to say "You know, we should really call them 'inline functions' instead of 'lambda expressions,' because I think 'inline function' is a little clearer and less of a computer science-y term." but you can rest assured that I learned my lesson . Lambda expressions they are. (Do you detect a trace of bitter sarcasm there? Perhaps just a little.) For those not ... [ read more ]
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12/7/2006 3:35:00 PM
One of the teams I've been spending a lot of time talking to lately is the folks over in the CLR who bring you IronPython. Overall, it's been a very enjoyable experience, as they're a smart bunch of guys who have a lot of experience with building dynamic languages and libraries and such. One of the unexpected benefits, though, has been psychological. After spending the past nine years interacting mostly with languages that were derived from C, it's amazingly refreshing to ta ... [ read more ]
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11/21/2006 12:03:00 PM
In response to my entry on VB hotfixes being made more available, Paul L brought up a point that's worth addressing: While this is great (and long overdue), the truth of the matter is that most companies do not have the time and resources to download these hotfixes, test them, and then propogate them to other teams. Indeed, after installing *all* of the hotfixes that you list we still had envrionment issues that remain unresolved. Sure, we can contact PSS every time we run into something, ... [ read more ]
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11/16/2006 1:58:00 AM
I discussed a little while back that we've made a few hotfixes available to address some performance issues people have seen with VB. There's now a program that makes these hotfixes available as a regular download, rather than forcing you to call support. I'd recommend anyone running into performance problems give them a try ...
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10/10/2006 8:04:00 PM
I could have sworn that I'd answered this before, but a Live search on "bootstrap" didn't turn up anything, so I guess not. Anthony asked : Do you think you'll ever get VB to the point where it's compiler is written in VB? Isn't that like the ultimate programming language Right of Passage? I'm not sure whether every major language has gone to the length of compiling itself in itself, but it's something that would be nice to achieve one of these days with VB. There's no technical reas ... [ read more ]
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9/30/2006 12:26:00 PM
Lots of code has been flowing out of Redmond recently: Two Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs have been released . The Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 and Microsoft PrintForm Component 1.0 are both targeted at people who use COM and VB6 and should make migration of code easier in many cases. You can get them here , and more are likely to come. Beta 1 of VS 2005 Service Pack 1 has been released . This service pack includes a significant amount of work on the part of the Visual ... [ read more ]
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9/22/2006 11:34:00 AM
Interesting how random things sometimes come together. I was checking out Chris William's pre-beta rogue-like game Heroic Adventure! on CodePlex and noticed that although most of the game is written in VB, he had included some C# code in there. The motivation was the fact that the pseudo-random number generators that VB and the .NET platform provide (i.e. VB's Rnd function and .NET's System.Random) are not strong enough to satisfy the random number needs of his game. So he borrowed some C# ... [ read more ]
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9/13/2006 3:01:00 PM
If you are curious about my talk at the Lang .NET symposium that I talked about a while ago, you can now download the video of the talk here . As is usual, I can't bear to watch the damn thing since I think my voice sounds just awful--it's so much nicer sounding in my head. Oh well. Overall, I think the talk was only OK. I kind of switched around what I was going to talk about late in the game and so I don't think it was as interesting as I was hoping to be. It talks some about some ... [ read more ]
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9/12/2006 1:00:00 PM
Omer van Kloten 's entry on Internationalization of Programming reminded me of a (possibly apocryphal) story that I was told when I started working on OLE Automation. I asked why IDispatch::GetIDsOfNames takes an LCID and was told that once-upon-a-time, the VBA team conducted an experiment in localization with VBA in Excel (which was the first application to host VBA). Apparently, they attempted to localize the entire language--keywords, function names, etc.--into French, and possibly o ... [ read more ]
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9/8/2006 6:00:00 PM
As I intimated a few posts ago, I'm going to be back on the East Coast at the end of the month. Part of the reason is to visit family (my family this time), but part of it is to give a talk at the Capital Area .NET Users group. You can find their website at http://www.caparea.net/ , and here's the blurb: Visual Basic 9.0: Language Integrated Query (LINQ), XML integration and beyond... Tuesday, September 26, 2006 at 7:00 PM With its second version on the .NET Framework, Visual Basic ... [ read more ]
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9/7/2006 3:19:00 PM
Normally, I don't promote videos and stuff that I haven't actually watched, but since I'm still buried under vacation emails, and I know that it's just got to be good stuff, I recommend checking out: Erik Meijer: Democratizing the Cloud and Brian Beckman: Monads, Monoids, and Mort Erik and Brian are just two crazy guys with lots of crazy ideas who've been a lot of fun to interact with over the past couple of years... Without Erik, there'd be no XML support coming in VB and he's ad ... [ read more ]
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8/3/2006 6:41:00 PM
Despite the fact that we made what I still feel is a solid release , we've been clearly seeing some customers having problems with the performance of the VB 2005 compiler when used on large VB projects. In response to a number of problems that we've isolated, we've released a QFE that addresses many of the major problems people are having. To quote the announcement in the forums : We've received feedback, both directly from developers and in the forums, regarding slow performance of ... [ read more ]
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7/16/2006 12:32:00 PM
Interested in working for Microsoft? Want to build a compiler? Want to work on the coolest programming language ever? (Note for the humor-impaired: that last statement includes an implicit self-deprecating wink and a smile.) Don’t want to mange managers ? We’ve also opened a new position on the compiler team that involves working directly on the compiler/language and doesn’t require managing people:
Want to help chart the future of one of the most popular programmin ... [ read more ]
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6/25/2006 4:42:00 PM
Sometimes a useless Microsoft story crosses my mind and I think “gee, that might be mildly amusing to post on my blog.” But the story’s small enough that I don’t really have a good hook, which means that it’s hard for me to justify posting it. Well, Adam’s given me a good enough hook to hang a few stories on:
One that I hadn’t thought of is the fact that I’ve been around long enough (14 years last week!) to be an and-1, with the alias paulv ... [ read more ]
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6/19/2006 12:28:00 PM
Back in April, I mentioned that we’re going to have a compiler/languages symposium here in Redmond in August called Lang .NET 2006 . Erik just announced that registrations are open, so sign up! As it turns out, I’m going to be giving a talk at the symposium. Ignore the title currently on the site (“Visual Basic 9”), here’s my current proposed title and abstract:
Visual Basic: Where are we going, where have we been?
With its third version on the .NET ... [ read more ]
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6/7/2006 11:33:00 AM
Interested in working for Microsoft? Want to build a compiler? Want to work on the coolest programming language ever? The Visual Basic compiler development lead position is open and we’re looking for someone with the right stuff to fill it:
Microsoft Visual Basic is used by millions of developers worldwide, and is widely acclaimed for both its power and ease-of-use. As the next Development Lead of the Visual Basic Compiler and Editor team, you will be the guiding hand behind the develop ... [ read more ]
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6/7/2006 11:18:00 AM
For those readers who also read French, Grégory Renard (a.k.a. Rédo ), one of our MVPs, just published a book (along with others) called “ Visual Basic 2005: Le Guide Complet ”:
And I don’t think I mentioned this before, but my book has also been translated into French, so check it out:
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5/24/2006 12:46:00 PM
Wow, where does the time go? I can remember when VB was just this tall . Soon it’ll be driving!
Microsoft Announces Visual Basic at Windows World '91 General-Purpose, High-Productivity Programming System for Microsoft Windows
ATLANTA -- May 20, 1991 -- Microsoft today announced MicrosoftR Visual BasicTM programming system at the Windows World '91 industry trade show. Visual Basic is a graphical application development system for Microsoft WindowsTM graphical environment versi ... [ read more ]
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5/10/2006 3:56:00 PM
FYI, we just released an updated community preview of our LINQ support for both VB and C#, entitled “ Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Language-Integrated Query, May 2006 Community Technology Preview .” Or you could just call it “the May CTP.” Anyway, this new CTP has a lot of new goodies for VB programmers, as our LINQ support is greatly expanded. To crib straight from the readme, here’s some of the stuff we did:
Enhanced DLinq Support: ... [ read more ]
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5/10/2006 10:55:00 AM
John Montgomery’s entry on “ Express “Orcas” Principles ” got me thinking about the whole “principles” thing. Just like you should always be able to give an elevator pitch for your product, I think you should always have a clear idea of your product’s principles. I particularly liked Bjarne Stroustrup’s description of C++’s principles in “ A Brief Look at C++0x ”:
C++ is a general-purpose programming language with ... [ read more ]
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5/8/2006 4:33:00 PM
As the eagle-eyed may have noticed, I recently added a new post category called “VB/Script.” In it I have collected a number of posts that I’ve written over the years concerning VB, scripting, dynamism and so on. Specifically, I’ve pulled together (in chronological order from earliest to latest):
Why do hobbyists matter?
Simpler IDE + more permissive VB language = script magic?
Boo to you, too!
Time ever marches on...
Dynamic languages/dynamic e ... [ read more ]
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5/5/2006 2:51:00 PM
We’ve been hard at work on an updated CTP of the LINQ work, and when you get it (no comment on dates at this point), you’ll notice several new things about the VB LINQ support. One the biggest is going to be the fact that, after trying all the Intellisense tricks we could think of, we’re throwing in the towel on Select/From and adopting the “Yoda style” From/Select syntax. As in:
Dim WACusts = _
&nb ... [ read more ]
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5/5/2006 2:38:00 PM
As you may remember, I asked last year whether C# programmers are masochists for using C# to program against the Office model since VB deals with COM much better in a number of cases. My comment was prompted by the publication of Eric Lippert’s and Eric Carter’s book “ Visual Studio Tools For Office Using C# with Word, Excel, Outlook and InfoPath .” Well, now you don’t have to be a masochist any more! You can read “ Visual Studio Tools For Office ... [ read more ]
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4/26/2006 7:36:00 PM
For a long time, I’ve been trying to write an entry entitled “I Hate Mort” that captures everything that I think is wrong with the current “Mort, Elvis, Einstein” taxonomy of developers that Visual Studio uses. And, for a long time, I’ve been failing miserably. I think it’s that I tend to want to be very fair-minded on the subject—by and large, people are extremely well-meaning when they talk about Mort and Visual Basic, and I feel bad bad-mouthin ... [ read more ]
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4/25/2006 4:25:00 PM
At the end of his entry on the concatenation operator , Bill observes some strange behavior around types that have a user-defined conversion to String but can’t be used with the concatenation operator. This is actually a design bug in our operator overloading resolution logic that we’re planning on fixing, since it won’t impact compatibility at all. To quote almost verbatim from the preliminary spec I wrote on it:
Consider the following program:
Module Module1
... [ read more ]
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4/20/2006 7:10:00 PM
Erik Meijer has posted an announcement for Lang .NET 2006 , a Microsoft-sponsored language conference, over on Lambda the Ultimate that I thought I would point out to any readers who might be interested. A bit of the announcement:
Lang .NET 2006 is a forum for discussion of programming languages, managed execution environments, compilers, multi-language libraries, and integrated development environments. It provides an excellent opportunity for programming language implementers and resea ... [ read more ]
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4/15/2006 11:59:00 AM
Because it’s much less likely that some a**hole is going to come in to your office and steal your ShipIt awards. So far I’ve recieved eight product boxes, and four of them have been stolen out of my office. Three of them (VB 6.0, VB 2002 and VB 2003) disappeared out of my office sometime in the last week. What possible benefit anyone could get from old product boxes is beyond me…
(More context on this entry can be found here .)
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4/12/2006 2:14:00 PM
Over on his blog John Montgomery shares how some of Microsoft’s internal research puts the lie to the old canard that VB programmers aren’t as smart as other programmers. A short quote:
If you ask VB developers how much education they have, about the same have college degrees as C/C++ developers (we ask what their primary language is and cross reference by level of education attained), and only negligibly more C/C++ developers have graduate degrees. More than that, more pro deve ... [ read more ]
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4/12/2006 2:10:00 PM
I was on a thread today where a VB MVP asked if VB was ever going to integrate regular expression-type functionality directly into the language to make it easier (and more comprehensible) to work with strings. The immediate reaction in my head was, “Well, it’s in the pipeline, but no telling if it’ll ever come out…” Which bears a little explanation…
The traditional model for software development at Microsoft is something I’d call “pu ... [ read more ]
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4/11/2006 11:53:00 AM
There is a saying that “no one is more zealous than a convert,” and I think Erik is out to prove that in spades… <g> Check out his two new papers: “ XML Support in Visual Basic 9 ” (with Brian Beckman) and “ Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman .”
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3/28/2006 1:27:00 PM
Over a month ago, I asked what a particular chunk of code should do:
Module Module1
Sub Main()
For i As Integer = 0 To 2
Dim x As Integer
Console.WriteLine(x)
x += 1
Next
&nb ... [ read more ]
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3/27/2006 9:50:00 AM
OK, it took a while, but my updated version of the VBParser source code sample is finally up! Since the 7.1 version of VBParser ended up being essentially a read-only project on GotDotNet, I’ve decided to eschew GDN and just go with a straight source download. I’ve added a new set of links on the left hand side of my blog entitled “Samples,” and put both the 7.1 and 8.0 version of VBParser there.
Things that are new or changed in VBParser 8.0:
I’ve updat ... [ read more ]
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3/18/2006 3:42:00 PM
…life just went and got very complicated for a while. In particular:
My wife Andrea has had some strange medical symptoms over the past few months that our neurologist thought indicated pretty strongly she has MS . So the past month has been spent getting MRIs and lumbar punctures to try and narrow down the diagnosis. The good news? It’s pretty unlikely she has MS or any of the related types of diseases (RA, Lupus, etc.). The bad news? Still not sure what’s going on. Sti ... [ read more ]
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3/3/2006 2:47:00 PM
Looks like Jay Roxe is looking for product managers for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Tools for Office . If you’ve got that magic combination of geekiness and marketing-savvy, check ‘em out…
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2/22/2006 1:09:00 PM
Avner has posted some information on updates that we’re planning on making to the XML integration feature in our next VB 9.0 CTP. Check them out and let us know what you think!
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2/15/2006 4:43:00 PM
To join in the chain of reminiscences , I have to say that I fondly remember Almost Live! as an invaluable resource to me when I was a new transplant to Seattle back in 1992 knowing no one and virtually nothing about the city. How else was I to know that Ballard was full of old Norwegians who couldn’t drive? That Freemont was populated almost entirely by hippies? That Aurora Ave. was the place to go to get a hooker? This was all great stuff for someone fresh to the city and without a ... [ read more ]
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2/13/2006 8:04:00 PM
I found Guido van Rossum’s meditation on Language Design Is Not Just Solving Puzzles quite on target and relevant to what we’re going through right now as we consider how to design the myriad of language features that make up LINQ. (Thanks to Lambda the Ultimate for the pointer.) If you look at all the possible kinds of language features that you can stick into a programming language, it often seems like there’s an inexhaustible supply of them and many of them are quite in ... [ read more ]
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2/13/2006 7:42:00 PM
OK, I’ve got a question for y’all. Take a look at the code sample at the end of this entry and leave me a comment on what you think the output of the program should be. Note that I’m looking for people’s opinions here and this isn’t one of those “how well do you know VB” trick questions. Once you’ve put in a comment on what you think the output should be, then feel free to run it and see what it does, but do hold off commenting on the actual beh ... [ read more ]
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2/6/2006 2:28:00 PM
I know this is old news , but I’ll say it anyway: several weeks ago, we released an updated preview of our proposed 9.0 features. The preview is enhanced in four primary ways:
We now support some Intellisense for Select expressions. This is a step forward in our investigation of the Select/From vs. From/Select question, so we’re definitely interested in feedback here.
We now support a lot more LINQ, specifically DLinq and variable capture (so you can now access ... [ read more ]
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1/14/2006 6:35:00 PM
As Raymond says , most development teams face some kind of “tax” in their day-to-day work. Taxes are things that a programmer has to do or take into consideration that are usually: a) not specifically assigned for him to do, b) not specifically accounted for in his schedule, and c) not specifically very much fun. The first example Raymond used was power management — something that pretty much every Windows application should take into account but which a very great many app ... [ read more ]
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1/14/2006 6:13:00 PM
This has been bouncing around a bit on blogs, but I thought it was funny… Billy Hollis, a longtime VBer, has posted some of his historical ruminations on VB and C-style languages:
If you like VB, look at the history of the C family [of languages] first. If you like C#, Java or C++, look at the history of the BASIC family first.
But who’s got the Star Trek game? I loved that game…
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1/8/2006 11:14:00 PM
Just a FYI, I’ve changed the title of the “VBParser” category to “Samples,” in preparation for what I hope are several new samples in the coming months. The main thing I’ve been working on so far is an update of the VBParser sample that I wrote for VB 7.1. Besides updating the parser to parse VB 8.0 language features, I’ve also changed it to use nifty CLR 2.0 features like generics. My hope is to have it out in the next few weeks. Unlike last time, I don ... [ read more ]
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1/6/2006 1:42:00 PM
I’ve been thinking about coining a new verb:
go steveb tr.v. To suddenly escalate an issue to the CEO/President/Senior VP of a company out of frustration when dealing with a low-level employee of a company. (steveb is the email address of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.) As in, “Yeah, we were talking about the fact that we cut that new feature the customer wanted and I said there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so he went all steveb on me and emailed my VP.”
To ... [ read more ]
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1/5/2006 5:54:00 PM
Jeff Atwood’s little entry on cheatsheets sure brought back some memories... I loved Beagle Brothers. As a general measure of comparison, I think Beagle Brothers had more cool in one little tip/trick box than Google has ever had with their cute variations on the Google logo. Definitely one of the things I look back on with fondness…
I’ve also thought about trying to create a VB.NET language cheat sheet one of these days, but it’s on that list of “things to d ... [ read more ]
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12/30/2005 2:49:00 PM
Someone recently sent me a question that comes up every now and again:
C# has been submitted and approved by the ECMA, will Visual Basic ever be submitted?
Well, never say never, but there are no current plans to submit Visual Basic to a standards body. The idea has certainly been discussed internally from time to time, but we’ve usually gotten stuck on several points:
By and large, the demand for this from developers has been very low, at least in terms of the people that we ... [ read more ]
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12/30/2005 2:31:00 PM
I’m catching up on my blog reading and just plowed my way through Joel’s curmudgeonly “old guy” rant about The Perils of JavaSchools . I don’t have a lot to say about the central thesis of his rant — I’ve always been of two minds about the efficacy of the Darwinian theory of weeding the weak out through hazing-type classes — but there was an analogy that caught my eye:
Heck, in 1900, Latin and Greek were required subjects in college, not becaus ... [ read more ]
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12/22/2005 2:05:00 PM
This is a bit of old news, but I did want to point out that we have heard the feedback about the relative dearth of VB samples in the past few releases and now MSDN and Microsoft as a whole has been consciously shifting their focus . Tom makes some interesting observations about the readability of the different languages for different types of developers and there’s some lively discussion in the comments, well worth checking out!
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12/21/2005 5:21:00 PM
On a happier note… Brad McCabe passed along some info about free training that MSDN is offering for VB 2005 and/or ASP.NET 2.0. To quote him:
With the holiday’s coming lots of people have some extra time on their hands, with this in mind MSDN and Microsoft Learning got to together to give you something to do, free training! We were trying to figure out what course to give away and decided to let you pick. That’s right pick one of 6 courses about Visual Basic 20 ... [ read more ]
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12/7/2005 2:32:00 PM
In addition to my interview with the ITPro website, I’ve also got a personal webpage on MSDN Japan. It has links to things like an interview I did with Takashi Tsujigo, an evangelist from MSDN Japan, and an interview with @IT. I believe there are also going to be some webcasts up before long. Unfortunately, I don’t believe there are any English translations available for any of the content, although I don’t think I said anything secret that I haven’t said else ... [ read more ]
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12/7/2005 2:17:00 PM
Not that I usually am burning up the weblogging wires around here this time of a year, but as an FYI, I’m going to be a bit slow blogging for the next couple of weeks. I’ve been selected as a juror in a trial, and the expectation is that it’s going to be going for a while. I can’t say anything about the trial until it’s over, but it’s definitely been an interesting experience so far. On the one hand, it’s a super-inconvenient time both with the holidays ... [ read more ]
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12/5/2005 11:15:00 AM
For my Japanese readers, you can now read an interview that I did with the ITPro website . We had a wide-ranging conversation, so we covered some interesting points…
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12/1/2005 1:26:00 PM
I get the question “Why does Visual Studio target only one version of the .NET Framework?” occasionally, and now John Rivard , a new VB blogger, answers . John is the other Technical Lead on VB, and I’m looking forward to him blogging more in the future!
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11/22/2005 12:05:00 PM
I’m clearing out some old mail and I came across a reference to a blog entry by Jon Skeet about extension methods that I saved a while back. He says:
One of the things I don't like about the proposed extension methods is the way the compiler is made aware of them - on a namespace basis. "Using" directives are very common to add for any namespace used in a class, and quite often I wouldn't want the extension methods within that namespace to be applied. I propose using using static S ... [ read more ]
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11/22/2005 11:32:00 AM
OK, well, now that I’ve had a chance to recover a bit from the jet-lag from flying back and forth from Tokyo in just three days, I thought I’d give a short update on how the launch went there.
Executive summary: Great!
This was my first experience presenting outside of the US, and it was very interesting. My main presentation on VB 2005 was simultaneously translated, but everything else was done sequentially. So I spent a lot of time saying one or two sentences, pausing, saying ... [ read more ]
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11/19/2005 5:37:00 PM
While I was at the Japanese launch (more on that soon), one of the questions that came up often was, unsurprisingly, about migration from VB 6. We continue to have the resources available on the VBRun website , but we’ve also had some new migration resources released recently by the MS Patterns and Practices Team (thanks to Jackie Goldstein for the link). Check them out!
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11/17/2005 4:27:00 PM
We’ve now got the final version of the Visual Basic 8.0 Language Specification now up and available on MSDN ! And, as it seems with everything these days, I’ve already gotten several bug reports for the samples. I guess I can go ahead and commit to shipping a service pack for the language specification in the near future…
Updated 11/26/05: Corrected link to language specification. (Thanks Roger!)
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11/17/2005 4:12:00 PM
As a few people have commented, I’ve added a picture of myself to my blog. This was, indeed, prompted by a number of the “how to make your blog better” memes that have been bouncing around lately. I don’t think most people really care that much about what I look like, but I have found blog pictures to be very helpful when attending conferences and meeting people — the people that have pictures on their blogs are immediately recognizable by me, whereas people w ... [ read more ]
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11/11/2005 4:36:00 PM
The VP for the division that VB is a part of, S. Somasegar , recently sat down with Ken Levy for Channel9 and had a chat about VB, the future and other stuff . Ken asks him a lot of the frequently asked questions about VB, like:
How much does Microsoft use VB internally?
How much does Bill Gates care about VB?
Why wasn’t there an unmanaged VB upgrade from VB6?
What are the plans for the future?
And more…
I’d encourage people to check it out…
( Fun ... [ read more ]
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11/11/2005 1:48:00 PM
Just as an FYI for those of you in Japan who read my blog, I’m going to be in Tokyo next week for the Microsoft Conference 2005 , where we’ll be doing the Japanese launch of VB 2005! I’m going to give the VB 2005 launch keynote , which is very exiciting, as well as doing a number of community events. My only regret is that since the conference is the week before Thanksgiving here, I’ll only be in Tokyo (a place I’ve never been before) for only a few days… M ... [ read more ]
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11/9/2005 9:30:00 AM
…I have to say I’m very heartened by Erik Ruker’s discussion of the features in the upcoming Access 12 . My outside perception is that not a lot has been happening with Access in the past few releases (something that I’m sure is not totally true, but there you are), but it looks like they’re definitely getting a lot of traction in Access 12. Lots of interesting stuff coming up! I’m looking forward to the beta…
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11/9/2005 9:26:00 AM
In the comments to my notice that we shipped , karl asks:
I haven't played with VB.Net 2005, but are all of the bugs also causing problems? Most seem CLR related, but with a hint of IDE link, and I know C# and VB.Net don't share all the IDE code. The list of reported issues has put a halt, possibly permenantly, on my push to upgrade the entire team to 2005.
I’m guessing Karl is talking about a lot of the blog entries that came out around the release of VS 2005 to MSDN subscribers, ... [ read more ]
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11/9/2005 8:16:00 AM
In case anyone missed it, we launched Visual Basic 2005 this Monday (along with a couple of other small products like SQL Server and the rest of Visual Studio)! This means everyone can now get their mitts on VB 2005 — you can also get trial downloads and the free-as-in-beer-for-a-year Express version .
We’ve also updated the VB Dev Center , so check it out! Now the fun can begin…
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11/1/2005 5:40:00 PM
Now that VB 2005 has released to manufacturing (RTMed in TLA-speak), we’ve updated our installer for the VB LINQ preview. You can find it here . I think the pages at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/future won’t be updated to point to it until next week because of other changes they’re making to that sub-site after RTM, but for now you can click directly on the link above. Feel free to get the word out! The actual bits are the same as the PDC release — no new function ... [ read more ]
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10/27/2005 12:39:00 PM
Since it’s been a long while since I’ve been really closely involved with VB2005, this seems like a strangely anti-climatic announcement, but: we’ve shipped !
Visual Studio 2005 (Standard, Pro, and Express versions) and SQL Server 20005 are now available for download on MSDN if you’re a subscriber, otherwise you’ll have to wait until after the November 7th launch event.
For a good overview of the new features in Visual Basic 2005&nbs ... [ read more ]
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10/27/2005 12:35:00 PM
You’ve probably seen this elsewhere, but… The PDC05 videos are now online and available to anyone who wants to watch them for (I believe) the next six months. You can catch my sessions there in case you missed the fun the first time around!
TLN308: Visual Basic: Future Directions in Language Innovation
PNL03: Scripting and Dynamic Languages on the CLR
PNL11: .NET Language Integrated Query End-to-End
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10/24/2005 9:01:00 PM
Dan Mabbutt has some very nice things to say about The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language . Keep it up and maybe there'll be a new edition sooner rather than later!
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10/18/2005 11:53:00 AM
I think Rico ’s spot on when he says that the real way you win the performance war is 5% at a time . Actually, I think he’s been overly optimistic — a lot of the time, it seems like you win the performance war 1% at a time. It’s much more like trench warfare than blitzkreig.
There’s also a larger idea at work here. Rico’s point is that in a mature product, you shouldn’t be able to come up with a huge performance win in most cases because, if you c ... [ read more ]
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10/12/2005 1:54:00 PM
Just announced , we’ve got an upcoming chat on the VB 9.0 language enhancements we’ve been talking about:
Visual Basic 9.0 Language Enhancements Description: Have you been hearing and reading about many of the exciting new features being planned for a future version of VB beyond the new version VB 2005? Would you like to get more details on what is planned for VB 9.0 directly from VB team members? Would you like to provide the VB team with feedback based on what you have seen ... [ read more ]
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10/10/2005 6:03:00 PM
I notice that Darryl Taft has a very interesting article today over on eWeek asking “ Will VB 9 Win Over the VB 6 Faithful? ”. I think the headline is a bit off, since the real question is “Will VB 2005 Win Over the VB 6 Faithful?” given VB 9.0’s status as almost-entirely-vaporware at this point. The answer to that question is “yes, definitely, in my opinion,” but time will tell. Only once we know what happens with VB 2005 will we really be able ... [ read more ]
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10/3/2005 10:56:00 AM
I just noticed from Duncan that the announcement for the new vb:feeds site is up, courtesy of vbCity. It’s an aggregated feed of many of the top VB bloggers, screened for content (so you don’t get random entries about the blogger’s dog or something). It’s looking to be a good way to keep up with what’s going on in the VB blogsphere!
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10/3/2005 10:52:00 AM
Over the past several months, I’ve been getting questions as to whether I’m going to be updating my book, The Visual Basic .NET Language , for VB 2005. The unfortunate answer is: not at the moment.
The first problem is that the VB .NET book market has been quite soft over the past year or two. This is not entirely surprising — although uptake on VB .NET has been very good considering the fact that the shift from VB6 to VB 2002 or VB 2003 was significant, it’s b ... [ read more ]
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10/1/2005 2:20:00 PM
I’m glad to see that Brad and Krzysztof’s Framework Design Guidelines book is finally now in stock on Amazon! Not coincidentally, I just received my own copy of it in the mail yesterday and I know it’s going to be one of the books that’s not going to make it to the shelf because I’ll be referring to it all the time… It’s a great resource for anyone who designing .NET libraries that other people have to use (i.e. most of us at one time or another) b ... [ read more ]
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9/29/2005 12:20:00 PM
In one of the comments to the “ Introducing LINQ ” entry that I wrote, Unilynx wrote:
Sounds like what we've been doing for five years already :)
This was a comment that came up several times at the PDC from various sources: “What’s so revolutionary about this stuff? We’ve been doing this kind of thing for years!” On the one hand, what’s unique about LINQ is how it’s built, it’s openness and flexibility, and it’s unification of ... [ read more ]
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9/26/2005 4:28:00 PM
Looks like Carl and Co. have put up a .NET Rocks show that Amanda, Erik and I recorded at the PDC. We had a very interesting discussion, ranging from LINQ to what it was like for Erik to be a “Head in a Box,” definitely something for everyone! Check it out!
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9/24/2005 10:43:00 AM
I’ve been thinking about something Wes said last week about C# 3.0 and VB 9.0. After viewing my PDC presentation slides, he noted:
The difference in focus between the C# and VB team is becoming much more evident: The VB team is opting for greater relevance and convenience in the short term, while the C# team is trying to avoid creating long-term baggage.
I think this succinctly describes what’s going on in regards to VB’s embrace of XML integration into the language ... [ read more ]
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9/21/2005 2:14:00 PM
Over in the LINQ MSDN forums , the question came up : which is better, Select/From (as VB does it) or From/Select (as C# does it)? To quote from the thread, here’s the C# side of it, straight from Anders:
There are a multitude of reasons why select comes at the end and not the beginning of a query in C# 3.0. The more important ones are: (1) Statement completion (Cyrus' blog has a good explanation). (2) Order of execution. The C# query syntax lists operations in the order they are ex ... [ read more ]
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9/20/2005 11:44:00 AM
While at the PDC, I also did a short video interview with F5 DevCentral. Check it out , even though the front image is kind of scary, in my opinion…
Tag: PDC05
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9/19/2005 1:04:00 PM
During the PDC, I got to sit down with Jon Udell and Anders and do a quick podcast about LINQ and other stuff. Check it out.
Tag: PDC05
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9/17/2005 5:06:00 PM
Two new videos, timed to coincide with the PDC are now up:
Paul Vick and Erik Meijer - Dynamic Programming in Visual Basic – This is me and Erik talking about dynamic stuff in VB. We were planning on talking about some of the new XML stuff as well, but didn’t even get to it! Another video, I’m sure…
Paul Vick and Amanda Silver - VB Language Futures – This is me and Amanda talking about a lot of the future stuff we talked about at the PDC. Check it out!
H ... [ read more ]
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9/17/2005 2:06:00 PM
FYI, Scott Swigart was nice enough to do an interview with myself, Amanda, Erik, Rob Copeland, Alan Griver and Jay Roxe about VB 9.0 for Dr. Dobb’s Journal. We even made the front (web)page! Check it out .
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9/17/2005 2:00:00 PM
Now that I’m back, safe and sound, in Seattle, I can start to catch up on some of my blog backlog! So let’s start with the highlight of the trip, my talk. I was a little nervous about it , but the worried turned out to be for naught — the session went really well! Lots of people showed up and we had a good time talking about all the ideas we’ve been working on for VB 9.0.
I’m not sure what the plans are in terms of making slides available outside of the PDC. Y ... [ read more ]
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9/15/2005 9:30:00 PM
Still not at a point to post more about how the session went (long story, short: very good), but I had a funny moment just a second ago. I was looking at the internal website that has speaker evaluation information to see how people liked the session. Pulled up the data and sorted it in Excel. Then I was thinking, “You know, I really want to filter out sessions that didn't get a lot of feedback reports because they might skew the data.” Since I'm not an Excel expert, the thought occ ... [ read more ]
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9/13/2005 10:09:00 AM
Throughout this week and beyond, we’re going to be doing a lot of talking about Project LINQ, so I wanted to start with a relatively brief overview of what the project is, what its goals are, and how they apply to VB.
To start with, LINQ stands for “Language Integrated QUery.” LINQ fundamentally is about integrating query operations into the .NET platform in a comprehensive and open manner. It’s also about providing a unified way for you to query acros ... [ read more ]
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9/13/2005 9:51:00 AM
Today at the PDC, we’re launching “Project LINQ,” and it’s big. Really big. I mean, really, I wish I had the money to hire those guys who do the movie trailer voiceovers (and you know who I’m talking about):
In a world torn apart by incompatible conflicting and incompatible data domains, one company dared to stand up to the status quo. (Shots of scowling programmers looking at computer screens. One desperate programmer exclaims “We just can’t make i ... [ read more ]
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9/13/2005 8:35:00 AM
Today marks the beginning of one of the bigger experiments that I’ve been a part of during my 13 years at Microsoft. No, I don’t mean any of the new technologies that we’re going to start talking about today and through the week. The grand experiment that we’re beginning at this PDC is radically opening up the development process within the Visual Basic group (and the rest of our division) in ways that we’ve never attempted before. I’ve been through a bunch o ... [ read more ]
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9/13/2005 1:27:00 AM
I've made it to the PDC and managed to dodge, so far, the power outages. Hooked up with a bunch of other VB'ers for dinner and now I'm trying to figure out when I'm going to get everything I've got to get done done in the next four days... Dinner, though, was good - good food, good conversation. It occurs to me that one of the real reasons we have conferences is to get everyone out of the office so we can mix outside of the little groups that we tend to move within at work. Lots of good cross-t ... [ read more ]
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9/11/2005 9:05:00 AM
See, normally, someone who’s not a developer and is presenting at the PDC takes the technology they’re going to demo, works with it, figures out what works and what doesn’t work, and then writes their demo around that. But since I’ve been actually building a bunch of the technology that I’m going to show, as I work through my demo I keep getting ideas along the lines of “hey, it’s be really cool if this worked.” So here I am, Su ... [ read more ]
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9/7/2005 10:51:00 AM
Update: I’ll also be at the Tools and Languages track lounge on Tuesday and Wednesday @ 6:30pm for the “Meet the VB team” events. Hope to see you there!
Well, folks, we’re getting close… Did my second session dry run yesterday and we’re headed in to the home stretch! Looking forward to seeing everyone at the PDC. For those of you who’d like to chat about VB, I’m definitely going to be in the Tools and Languages lounge Thursday aftern ... [ read more ]
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9/2/2005 9:20:00 AM
Apropos of the previous entry, I should add that I agree wholeheartedly with Eric’s contention that parameterless default properties were almost entirely evil . They did make working with some objects much easier, but they came at such a cost of understandability that I don’t believe that, in the end, they were worth it. When I started working on the VB compiler as we were porting to .NET, I tried to get a coherent explanation of exactly how parameterless default properties worked, ... [ read more ]
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9/2/2005 9:13:00 AM
Eric Lippert recently talked about some of the fun and exciting things that go on when you use parameterless default properties in VBScript. He notes that the fact that VBScript is always late-bound means that the behavior of code in VBScript is often different than early-bound code in VB6. He goes on to say:
I hear you exclaiming "The fact that a difference in available type information leads to a difference in run-time behaviour violates a basic principle of programming language ... [ read more ]
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8/25/2005 5:22:00 PM
Infoworld doesn’t have much more than what’s in the abstracts themselves (nice to see the punching up worked), but I did particuarly like the “hail” part. I sort of have images of Roman legionaires marching into the PDC bearing VB banners… At least we’ll be a long way from the Ides of March…
Tag: PDC05
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8/25/2005 5:17:00 PM
Yes, Jeff, yes indeed… That’s a pretty cool idea, isn’t it? I mean, I’m just sayin’…
(This was an ironic thing to show up in my aggregator given the demo that I’m working on today for the PDC. Assuming the demo comes together the way it should, you’ll see why in LA…)
Tag: PDC05
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8/15/2005 2:47:00 PM
Something random the other day make me think of an old email I’ve kept stuck in the archive folder, and I thought people might find it amusing. Many years ago, a coworker sent around an entirely tongue-in-cheek email on “How to be a PM” in which he covered the many underhanded ways that a Program Manager could get a developer to do their bidding (not surprisingly, the author was a PM). So I crafted a response on how, as a developer, to deal with the ... [ read more ]
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8/3/2005 2:13:00 PM
Despite my name making an appearance in the session title (it appears to be gone now), several people have observed that our current session abstract for our PDC05 talk is a bit, uh, bland, especially when compared to some of the other sessions. Here’s what we originally submitted:
Visual Basic is designed to be the most productive language for writing data-centric, solution-focused applications. Meet with the designers of VB and learn about upcoming language features that will improve ... [ read more ]
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8/2/2005 11:27:00 AM
As with last year , my recognition of my second anniversary of blogging is a bit belated. And, as with last year, it’s hard to believe where all the time has gone. The whole blogging phenomenon seems to have transitioned from adolescence to early adulthood and is rapidly growing up (as much as it ever can). Wonder what year three will bring?
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8/2/2005 11:22:00 AM
Larry Osterman blogged yesterday about the funky name assigned to some new expansion pack that we’re shipping, which jogged my memory about a funny naming story that’s probably old enough to be repeatable. In fact, it’s been so long that the story may be incorrect or apocryphal, so take it all with a grain of salt…
Before I worked on Visual Basic, I spent most of my time working on Microsoft Access. In fact, I interned on Access about a year before it actually shipp ... [ read more ]
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7/28/2005 11:16:00 AM
Some of the early session preferences are rolling in for the PDC and, as expected , I’m getting spanked by Anders and Raymond. I guess that’s just what you get when you go up against a Distinguished Engineer and the most popular Microsoft blogger…
Seriously, though, if you’re going to the PDC, do take a moment and respond to the Session Preference Survey and help us make good planning decisions for the conference. After all, when you show up to my session and find th ... [ read more ]
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7/21/2005 2:56:00 PM
In my recent entry on dynamism , I noted that one person we’ve been working a lot with lately is Erik Meijer, late of C? . Although Erik appears to be retaining a healthy dose of language agnosticism, it appears that we’ve started to turn him over to the dark side as he’s become quite enthusiastic about VB… In fact, he’s going to be giving a talk at JAOO this year on some of the stuff we’re going to be discussing at the PDC ... [ read more ]
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7/18/2005 5:35:00 PM
As longtime readers may remember, I suggested a long time ago that if/when VB added refactoring we might not call it “refactoring.” This immediately raised a hue and cry about how I was saying that VB users were “dumb,” how I was turning my back on an industry term that “everybody knows,” how this was just another example of how out of touch we were. I tried to turn in a good defense , but in the end it didn’t really matter, since first refactoring w ... [ read more ]
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7/18/2005 9:06:00 AM
So with tongue firmly in cheek, I complain about how some people get their names in their session titles and some don’t and then Brad has to go call my (fake) bluff and put my name in my abstract. So now I get to see just how little name recognition I really have out there compared to Anders and Raymond…
Well, I’ll show him! I now command each and every loyal reader of the blog and all their friends to sign up for the PDC and register for my session! Bwahahaha! That ... [ read more ]
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7/15/2005 1:12:00 AM
Now that I know that Brad added Anders and Raymond's names to their talk titles to pique people's interest in their talks, I am shocked, shocked , that he didn't do the same to my session. Doesn't he know who I am?!? Doesn't he know that the mere mention of my name would cause thousands of people to flock to the PDC to hear whatever I might have to say about VB? I mean, c'mon -- I'm sure that Don Box would also have rearranged his schedule to make sure that he can attend my talk, ... [ read more ]
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7/15/2005 12:44:00 AM
More information about the PDC continues to drip out drop by agonizing drop. As Brad notes , most of the PDC session abstracts are online , including:
Visual Basic: Future Directions in Language Innovation Visual Basic is designed to be the most productive language for writing data-centric, solution-focused applications. Meet with the designers of VB and learn about upcoming language features that will improve developer productivity, including new features that enable optimized queries ov ... [ read more ]
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7/8/2005 8:09:00 AM
Joel Pobar has posted an excellent start of what should be an interesting set of blog entries on how dynamic/scripting languages work on the CLR. When listing out the dynamic languages available on the CLR he includes among them VB, which may come as a surprise to some people. In many places the cult of Option Strict may have convinced people that VB is an entirely statically typed language like C# is, but they’d be wrong. In fact, a decent chunk of our Whidbey time was spent rewri ... [ read more ]
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