October 2008 Entries
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 see all the videos posted, but the...
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...
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…
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 become .NET. In...
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!
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 they could do. It’s a great project,...
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 about where Visual...
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 bio: Lucian Wischik is the Visual Basic specification lead....