June 2005 Entries
In the Micronews (our internal newspaper), there was an article talking about teaching English that used the following quote from George Orwell:
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
As I read it, though, it occured to...
Joe Binder, one of our PMs, has written an article on MSDN on how you can extend the ‘My’ namespace. The ‘My’ namespace is one of the cool new features that we’re introducing in VB 2005. If you’ve ever been interested in adding your own stuff to ‘My,’ check it out!
Close one hole and they move on to another… Spammers have started to work around my filtering by using Trackbacks. This is a test to make sure that I’m not breaking Trackbacks by adding filtering to them too.
Almost exactly a year ago, I mourned the loss of Firefly, a great sci-fi show that died way before it’s time. When I saw news that the Sci-Fi Network was going to pick up Firefly, I momentarily hoped that they were going to produce all-new episodes, but they’re just going to rerun the existing episodes (plus the three episodes that never aired but were on the DVDs). Although I doubt Firefly will ever return as a regular series, I’d encourage everyone to check out the show and the upcoming movie – it’s much better than the current sci-fi favorite Battlestar...
Thanks to Brad for pointing to a cool little console roguelike written in VB called “Heroic Adventure!”. Certainly brings back the memories, and I’ll be looking forward to more code release to see how one might play around with it. I always thought that a roguelike would be a fun project…
It’s a little later than planned, but we’ve now got the 8.0 VB language specification posted up for downloading. It covers all the new language features in VB 2005 and should be completely current with Beta2. Please let me know of any errors or corrections – it is a beta document, so it’s not going to be perfect.
In case anyone is wondering about 8.0 vs. 2005, the language itself is referred to by a version number, but the product has a year. So:
VB 2002 product contains Visual Basic 7.0 language
VB 2003 product contains Visual Basic 7.1 language
VB 2005 product contains Visual...
Since Brad’s already started the teasers, I guess I can add that my semi-hiatus this summer has a lot to do with the VB PDC05 session that Brad mentions. I know that PDC sessions are supposed to be about “the future,” but given the blinding amount of hype around PDC03 and the resulting blowblack I do feel a little funny about talking about future innovations on a product that won’t have actually shipped yet (although it will be very close at that point). Anyway, I think we’re going to have some stuff to show you that’s going to blow your...
…that the book I was talking about in my entry “Are C# Programmers Masochists?” was Eric Lippert’s and Eric Carter’s book “Visual Studio Tools For Office Using C# with Word, Excel, Outlook and InfoPath.” Many kudos to the two Eric’s on the impending completion of their efforts! (Although I still think you’d be crazy to choose C# over VB when working with Office…)