Looks like Carl just posted the latest installment of the .NET Rocks! online interview program, featuring yours truly and my fellow VBer Amanda Silver. I haven’t yet had the guts to listen to it… First, because I’m sure I’m going to have the usual “Oh my God, I don’t really sound like that, do I?” reaction, and second, because I’m afraid that somewhere in there I blurted out some super-secret thing that I shouldn’t have talked about and that’s going to get me fired or something. How’s that for a lure to listen? (I’m sure that I didn’t say anything like that, but then again my mouth does sometimes get ahead of my brain, which is why I like blogging. Plenty of time to review before you post.)
Assuming I didn’t spill any trade secrets, it was a lot of fun talking with Carl and Mark and it’d be happy to do again sometime in the future. But I think Amanda and I need to get better pictures. The quality of DataGrid Girl’s picture just put ours to shame…
I liked the show; there is one comment I would like to make re VB.
One of the things that makes me so productive with VB is the V part i.e. the ability to design things visually. E.g. I like the ability to drag a dataadapter from the toolbox, change the properties in the property sheet and VB generates the necessary code to implement it.
Unfortunately, some of the ways it is done at present in VB causes me a problem. The data adapter code is inserted in the same class as the code for the windows forms. There is no seperation between the presentation layer and data access layer. Which means that the code is fine for a prototype, but not for production code.
It would be useful if the code generated in this manner followed at least some basic design patterns.
More and more people are thinking in terms of design patterns. An improvement in VB would be some help with this.
Separating the UI from the business logic is done by putting business logic in a component, which you can access from the windows form. So, it’s up to you to make the separation. It doesn’t happen by default, nor should it.
Just my 2c.
Carl