Visual Basic 2010
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...
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...
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 requests for, we have decided to at least generally sketch out what iterators would look like...
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 also thinking about multi-line lambdas that contain statements instead of just a single expression. So something along the lines of:Dim y = Function(x)
...
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 my post was helpful in identifying problems with the idea and it seems like we have bigger fish to fry. Collection...
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 initializer in the original design depends on the context, it's meaning could change dramatically in different contexts. Of particular difficulty...
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 initializers "snap to" a particular type when they're converted to it, just like lambdas and AddressOf expressions. For...
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 still a lot of extra characters with all those “Implements IFoo.Bar”s, especially when the implementing...
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 allowing you to have a simple property declaration like so:Public Property x() As Integer
This would generally expand under the...
Full Visual Basic 2010 Archive