November 2004 Entries
To leave aside patents for a moment, if you're having problems with large (>100K lines of code) projects in VB, this KB article might help. The problem is fixed in VB 2005, but if you're using VB 2002/2003, there is a hotfix for it. Thanks to Eric Harrison for publicizing the problem!
In the wake of the IsNot patent brouhaha, aside from the "you are scum" comments, people have had several reasonable questions about my own feelings about the situation. So let me pause and talk about software patents for a moment. Lest there be any question about this, what follows are my own personal feelings about the matter and have nothing to do with official Micorosoft policy.Personally, I don't believe software patents are a good idea. I realize that algorithms lie in that grey area between a mechanical process (which is patentable) and an abstract idea (which is not), but at a...
So every time someone whose blog I read would get Slashdotted, I would wonder to myself, "I wonder if this will ever happen to me?" And then I would start speculating, "Hmmm... If so, I wonder what kind of thing I'd have to do to get myself Slashdotted..." Well, now I know: have Microsoft submit a patent for the IsNot operator, listing me as the principal inventor. Wonderful. Glad to see it's over something that I can be really, really proud of...
(It's not a full Slashdotting I suspect, because the blog is only mentioned in the comments, not the main entry, but even a tertiary flood is...
Another common comment around refactoring has been: why do we have to wait for a whole other release to get refactoring? Why can't you just do the features and then ship them when they're ready?The answer, for the moment, is that we are subject to the "tyranny of the suite." Which is to say, we are so tightly bound to the rest of the suite of products that we ship with (C#, C++, J#, debugger, IDE, SQL Server, CLR, etc.) that it is extremely difficult for us to ship separately from the rest of them. In effect, it's like we're...
In response to my entry on refactoring in VB 2005, some have asked why VB couldn't take advantage of C#'s work on refactoring the same way that C# took advantage of VB's work on Edit and Continue. I anticipated this would come up, and the answer is that some features are subject to drafting at the current time and some aren't.Edit and Continue is a feature that spans the compiler, the debugger and the CLR. As such, work done in the latter two areas can be applied across all the languages that want to take advantage of Edit and Continue....
Yes, everyone should get out and vote for the big kahunas today, but also take a moment to pop by http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/visualbasicsurvey/ and let us know how you use VB! This information will help us with future planning as well as planning for VB 2005...
The problem with making confident predictions about the future is that time has a way of making a liar out of you despite your best intentions. As Steven posted Friday, VB will not have any refactoring features beyond "rename symbol" in VB 2005. This was an extremely painful cut and one that we tried to move heaven and earth to avoid, but in the end we didn't feel we could get the features into the product in a high-quality way without causing serious risk to our shipping goals. Balacing the cries for refactoring against the cries for us to ship...