About the author

Like personal ads and job application cover letters, a weblog introduction entry is bound to be awkward, a bit stilted and vaguely self-aggrandizing. So let’s get it over with as quickly as possible, shall we?

I am the author of this weblog, and my name is Paul Vick. Since this weblog will most likely be more oriented towards the technical than the personal, I’ll start with the professional side of my life: my current job is Technical Lead on the Visual Basic .NET product at Microsoft, although I’ve been around Microsoft long enough now (11 years and counting) to have done a variety of things. I’ve been on the Visual Basic team for 6 years now, most of it closely associated with the core Visual Basic compiler (as opposed to, say, the data access components, debugger or IDE). For a long while, my primary responsibility has been overseeing the development of the compiler (I’m a programmer), but recently I’ve been focusing more on the design aspects of the language and the broader product. Oh, and I’m the author of the Visual Basic .NET Language Specification, which I add because it’s probably the most tangible result of my work of the past several years. (I’m also working on a Visual Basic language reference book, but believe that when you see it…)

On the personal front, I live in Seattle, WA with my wife and two cats. I do have a life outside of work, but I think I’ll let those details come into the weblog naturally rather than making this entry really start sounding like a personal ad…

3 thoughts on “About the author

  1. Anita Rowland

    Hi, Paul! Good luck with the weblog!

    seems odd that the TITLE element becomes "CommentView" or "Permalink" when I’m viewing a weblog post. is this by design?

    Reply
    1. paulvick

      Not really… It’s more of a bug in the software I’m using for the blog. I’m in the process of rewriting the software extensively, so I’ve noted it to be fixed! (Of course, I’m sure I’ll break other stuff in the process…).

      Reply
  2. Daniel

    Hi, Paul

    I’m currently listening in to your talk toghether with Amanda Silver at the .NET rocks show.
    The talk is great and since you are my only possible entrypoint into the vb.net team i have a small
    and REALLY annoying bug for you 🙂
    (It only appears from within the studio, VS2003/VS2002, and mixed large solutions)

    Description:
    We get an internal compiler error during build or load of solution. It seems to
    appear more often during rebuilds then during builds, but it might also appear
    during solution load. (probably not for project load, but I haven’t tried it)
    The issue is REALLY hard to reproduce and we have not been able to do it,
    in any separate solution)
    There are however some leads that might help you:
    – during a restructuring of some projects we removed two projects from our
    most cumbersome solution and then the error seemed to disapear.
    – solutions without a setup project doesn’t seem to get the error.
    – it seems to more frequent if the LOC count is large.
    – We mix all kinds of projects in our solutions.

    The projects that where moved from the solution where one setup project
    and a C# classlib project. The setup project was a standard setup project
    for windows applications. The C# project was a helper project for the setup project.
    It contained some attributes that where applied in almost all assemblyinfo.*
    file in the solution. (the solution contains a mix of vb.net and C# project, ONLY
    windows project though, services, winapps, consoleapps and classlibs)
    It also contained some code for a custom build step that used the attribute
    to determine what actions should be taken for every assmebly during install.

    Development env:
    VisualStudio .NET 2003 enterprise architecht.

    Reproduction:
    – in short, we can’t! We have had the error in several of our solutions but I can’t
    create a simple solution that encapsulates the problem…

    Hardware and OS:
    I run my development on a W2K, Dell dimensson portable 800Mhz with 256 MB of RAM
    but I’m quite certain that it doesn’t depend on the machine since we can reproduce the
    error on our build server that is a W2K3 with a P4 processor and a Gig of RAM.

    Please send me an email if this is interesting for you, as I mentioned, we was able to
    remove the error in our solutions so it is not a big issue for us anymore.
    We have some old solutionfiles stacked away so I could use them to reproduce the
    errors on my machine and send you the error code. It seems like the error code is
    a HRESULT from the compiler. (But I won’t do this if it isn’t of your interest to fix the error)

    Best regards,
    Daniel

    Reply

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