November 2005 Entries
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 System.Query.Sequence; instead, in a way that is analogous to the...
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 one or two more sentences, pausing, saying one or two more sentences, listening to the reply...
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!
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!)
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 who don’t have their picture on their blog fall into the unfortunate black hole of memory that I...
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…
(Funny side note: To deal with the persistent annoyance of comment spam, I instituted some extra filters in the...
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… Maybe next time!
…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…
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, some of which are summarized by MiniMSFT.
So, is...
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…
I was reading secretGeek’s “Five Ways to Play Nice with ‘Live.Com’” and tip #3 (“Specify an icon for your feed”) reminded me of the fact that, while I would love to have an icon for my feed, I have yet to actually find one. What I’d love to have is a web-suitable icon of a small TARDIS (or, an old English Police Box, if you prefer), but I have been totally unable to locate one. Anyone have any idea of where I might score one that would be free to use on my website? If not, I guess, I’ll stick...
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 functionality — but rest assured we’re also working on an updated release with more features in the...