July 2005 Entries
Some of the early session preferences are rolling in for the PDC and, as expected, I’m getting spanked by Anders and Raymond. I guess that’s just what you get when you go up against a Distinguished Engineer and the most popular Microsoft blogger…
Seriously, though, if you’re going to the PDC, do take a moment and respond to the Session Preference Survey and help us make good planning decisions for the conference. After all, when you show up to my session and find that there’s no space to sit because you didn’t say you were interested in coming, you’ll only have...
In my recent entry on dynamism, I noted that one person we’ve been working a lot with lately is Erik Meijer, late of C?. Although Erik appears to be retaining a healthy dose of language agnosticism, it appears that we’ve started to turn him over to the dark side as he’s become quite enthusiastic about VB… In fact, he’s going to be giving a talk at JAOO this year on some of the stuff we’re going to be discussing at the PDC and a few speculative ideas he’s been working on beyond that. Here’s the abstract:
Moving forward, the dominant costs for IT projects are people costs more...
As longtime readers may remember, I suggested a long time ago that if/when VB added refactoring we might not call it “refactoring.” This immediately raised a hue and cry about how I was saying that VB users were “dumb,” how I was turning my back on an industry term that “everybody knows,” how this was just another example of how out of touch we were. I tried to turn in a good defense, but in the end it didn’t really matter, since first refactoring was cut and then it was an add on, and the add on uses the term...
So with tongue firmly in cheek, I complain about how some people get their names in their session titles and some don’t and then Brad has to go call my (fake) bluff and put my name in my abstract. So now I get to see just how little name recognition I really have out there compared to Anders and Raymond…
Well, I’ll show him! I now command each and every loyal reader of the blog and all their friends to sign up for the PDC and register for my session! Bwahahaha! That’ll really show him!
Or just confirm my place in the...
Now that I know that Brad added Anders and Raymond's names to their talk titles to pique people's interest in their talks, I am shocked, shocked, that he didn't do the same to my session. Doesn't he know who I am?!? Doesn't he know that the mere mention of my name would cause thousands of people to flock to the PDC to hear whatever I might have to say about VB? I mean, c'mon -- I'm sure that Don Box would also have rearranged his schedule to make sure that he can attend my talk, if only he had known it...
More information about the PDC continues to drip out drop by agonizing drop. As Brad notes, most of the PDC session abstracts are online, including:
Visual Basic: Future Directions in Language InnovationVisual Basic is designed to be the most productive language for writing data-centric, solution-focused applications. Meet with the designers of VB and learn about upcoming language features that will improve developer productivity, including new features that enable optimized queries over objects, XML, and databases in a consistent way.
I'm going to be giving this talk along with Amanda Silver and we're going to cover some really cool stuff that we've been...
Joel Pobar has posted an excellent start of what should be an interesting set of blog entries on how dynamic/scripting languages work on the CLR. When listing out the dynamic languages available on the CLR he includes among them VB, which may come as a surprise to some people. In many places the cult of Option Strict may have convinced people that VB is an entirely statically typed language like C# is, but they’d be wrong. In fact, a decent chunk of our Whidbey time was spent rewriting our late binder to handle all the new language features in this release:...
A while ago I mentioned that the first computer I programmed was an IBM 5100. It was not, however, what got me into computing in the first place. For that I can thank the Coco:
I can still remember seeing one of these in Radio Shack in a mall on the edge of Chapel Hill. I was 10 and was shopping with my mom and my grandmother. I wandered into Radio Shack and they had a Coco set up playing whatever crappy game it was that came with the system. Although I don’t remember this, I supposedly asked my grandmother, “When...