Monthly Archives: October 2004

Hello, world?

This is a test blog post to see what’s going on with the .Text tracking system. I’m not sure if my method of using BlogJet is causing problems with people getting posts or whether .Text’s tracking system is broken. Anyway, please ignore.

VB Parser Beta 2 released.

I’ve updated the GotDotNet workspaces for VBParser [07/12/2014: The sources are now on GitHub.] with what I’m calling “Beta 2” of the parser source. This fixes all the reported bugs as well as includes a small “conformance” application that I wrote to test the parser and allow some ad hoc testing. Probably the biggest change in this release was changing the way comments were parsed to make them actually work (I hope). I’m still trying to find some time to write an interesting sample using the parser… (And, of course, I need to start updating it for VB2005…)

Let me just add something that many people seem to already know: GotDotNet workspaces are, uh, not that wonderful. I’ve had a lot of trouble with it, so I’m considering alternatives. Given that the model so far has been people report bugs and I fix them, I may just go to distributing the sources and binaries as zip files on my website. Anyone care?

Technical difficulties

It appears that my blog has been stricken with the .Text threading bug, so while the front page seems to be working, everything else is giving .Text errors. For some reason I can’t seem to log in to my hosting provider to fix this from work, so it’ll have to wait until tonight when I get home. So please bear with us…

Free VB (and a book)!

(For those Aussies among my readers, this is not about free beer. Sorry.)

Someone pointed out to me a new promotion we’re running – if you attend three live or on-demand webcasts at http://www.aspnetwebcasts.com, you can get a free copy of VB Standard edition and an ASP.NET development book. What a deal! This only runs through November 30th, 2004, so hurry and learn something about ASP.NET, quick!

Drafting Edit and Continue

As I think the entire blog universe knows by now, C# is going to be adding Edit and Continue in their 2005 version. As I’ve said many times before, I think Edit and Continue is a great feature, so I’m happy to see another language on board with it. Of course, there’s a selfish part of me that would have liked to see the C# team continue to ignore such a great feature and leave it completely to us, but what’s good for the goose…

What’s interesting about this, though, is that it points up one of the practical reasons why having three .NET languages at Microsoft is a Good Thing(tm). As evidenced by the fact that the C# team didn’t originally plan to do Edit and Continue, if there had only ever been C# at Microsoft, Edit and Continue would probably never have happened. The CLR team only added the underlying support for Edit and Continue because VB insisted on it and then sat down with them and worked out how it was going to happen. Similarly, I don’t know if generics would have ever happened if there had only ever been VB at Microsoft, even though I think it’s going to be an excellent feature for our customers. Lacking the C++ history, it’s something that we probably never would have pushed the CLR team to implement the way the C# team did.

It occurs to me that this is an extension of Rocky’s excellent rant on programming languages, just flipped around. His point is that programmers who limit themselves to knowing just one language limit their ability to think about programming. I think the same goes for the Microsoft.

What I find really interesting is the way that the language teams end up drafting one another as we go forward. Drafting is the phenomenon mostly commonly used in cycling where a cyclist can maintain a higher speed with less energy when following in the backdraft of the cyclist ahead of him. (A better explanation can be found here.) A lot of cycling strategy involves members of the team riding ahead of other team members (say, Lance Armstrong) so that the following rider can conserve energy for the final push at the end of the race. Interestingly, drafting can also help the lead cyclist as well, although I lack sufficient physics knowledge to really explain that.

Anyway, the point of this whole digression is that a very similar thing happens inside of Microsoft as well. When the C# team decided to implement Edit and Continue, it was easier for them to do so than it had been for the VB team because the VB team had already worked out a lot of the details (and a lot of the kinks in the system) beforehand. Similarly, the C# team started implementing generics before VB did, so they ended up working out a lot of details for us ahead of time. In the end, each team takes advantage of the work the other team is doing to advance their own language more rapidly. It’s a very virtuous cycle.

Of course, a lot of the people who don’t like Edit and Continue are the same people who don’t think that Microsoft shouldn’t bother to have more than one language (read: C# is the “one true language”). So instead of drafting, they probably think of pollution instead. Ah well, to each their own…

Form constructors and DTEE

Some people were curious what I was getting at with my quick question yesterday, so now that I’ve got a little more time to explain, let me…

The problem that we’re looking at right now has to do with some subtle interactions between several new debugging features in VB 2005. One of the features is what we call Design Time Expression Evalutation (abbreviated to “DTEE”), which is just a fancy way of saying “you can evaluate expressions and call functions from the Immediate window even when your application isn’t running.” This was a nice feature from past versions of VB that we lost in VB 2002 and we’re happy to bring back in VB 2005.

The way DTEE works is that it actually starts up a copy of your application in the background when you try to evaluate something at design time. This background copy of your application is called the vshost process, and what the debugger does is set a breakpoint at the very beginning of the program to prevent the vshost application from actually running and doing things like putting up UI, etc. The vshost process then sits there in a debug break state, waiting for the user to ask to debug the application or do DTEE.

Another feature that I think we introduced in VB 2003 but are extending in VB 2005 is something called “Just My Code.” This is a debugger feature that filters out all the non-user code from places like the callstack window and prevents the application from breaking in non-user code. This means that if you call a .NET Framework API that throws an exception, you’re going to break in your code that called the API rather than way down in the Framework (since you likely don’t have any source code for the Framework). You can always turn off JMC in the options dialog if you want to see non-user code, BTW.

Now, let’s think about a new WinForms project for a moment. A new WinForms project contains no actual user code, because all the code in the hidden partial form class is marked as non-user code. So… can you see the problem? Right. You can’t do DTEE on a new WinForms project because the vshost process tries to put the breakpoint at the beginning of the program, but since the beginning of the program is not user code, JMC prevents the breakpoint from getting hit.

This isn’t a huge, huge deal – there are a couple of ways we can attack this problem. One proposed way would be to make changes to the debugger to recognize this kind of situation and handle it in a different way. Another proposed way was to change the way that we handle Sub New in the hidden partial class, perhaps making it compiler generated (and thus allowing us to fiddle with the way the debugger sees it). This would mean automatically generating the call to InitializeComponent as well, but what happens if the user specifies their own Sub New? Should we still automatically generate the call to InitializeComponent? If so, should it be before or after the user code in Sub New?

So the purpose of my request for feedback was to get a general feel for how we might have to proceed if we went down that path. The most important thing, of course, is to First, do no harm (to mis-quote the Hippocratic Oath). In solving one problem, we don’t want to create more problems for people.

I’ll let you know what we end up doing in the comments here… Thanks for all the quick feedback!

Feedback request: Form constructors?

A quick request for feedback… How often do you:

  • Use Sub New in a form instead of handling the form’s Load event?
  • When you do use Sub New, are there things that you have to do before the call to InitializeComponent, or do things generally go after the call to InitializeComponent?

We’re thinking about how to solve some issues that we’ve uncovered in the beta and this feedback might help in deciding how to deal with them. Thanks!

I’m rich, I’m rich!

Well, not really. However, I did get my first royalty check for The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language this week, which was exciting. Since this was my first book, I had no idea at all: a) how many books I might sell and b) how much that might mean in royalties. I was just hoping that it might bring in enough to, you know, go to McDonalds for a dinner or two.

I still have no idea if the book is selling “well,” since I have no idea what to compare the numbers to, but the royalties were quite a bit more than I had imagined. (Which may be more of a testament to my pessimistic expectations than to the size of the check.) I mean, it’s not like it’s a huge amount of money and I’m certainly not quitting my day job yet to write full time – I’ll leave that to the Petzolds of the world – but it ain’t nothin’. I still haven’t done the calculation yet, though, to figure out what the current “per hour” rate would have been for writing the book. That might still be a bit depressing…

Now just go out there and buy, buy, buy the book! Buy a second, third, fourth copy! Perish the thought that sales should fall off and I’d have to go back to buying lottery tickets to fuel my dreams of vast wealth…