October 2005 Entries
Since it’s been a long while since I’ve been really closely involved with VB2005, this seems like a strangely anti-climatic announcement, but: we’ve shipped!
Visual Studio 2005 (Standard, Pro, and Express versions) and SQL Server 20005 are now available for download on MSDN if you’re a subscriber, otherwise you’ll have to wait until after the November 7th launch event.
For a good overview of the new features in Visual Basic 2005 check out Ken Getz's article. You can also find a collection of VB 2005 articles at our developer center.
Updated 10/27/05: Corrected MSDN link. Thanks Serge!
You’ve probably seen this elsewhere, but… The PDC05 videos are now online and available to anyone who wants to watch them for (I believe) the next six months. You can catch my sessions there in case you missed the fun the first time around!
TLN308: Visual Basic: Future Directions in Language Innovation
PNL03: Scripting and Dynamic Languages on the CLR
PNL11: .NET Language Integrated Query End-to-End
Dan Mabbutt has some very nice things to say about The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language. Keep it up and maybe there'll be a new edition sooner rather than later!
I think Rico’s spot on when he says that the real way you win the performance war is 5% at a time. Actually, I think he’s been overly optimistic — a lot of the time, it seems like you win the performance war 1% at a time. It’s much more like trench warfare than blitzkreig.
There’s also a larger idea at work here. Rico’s point is that in a mature product, you shouldn’t be able to come up with a huge performance win in most cases because, if you can, why didn’t somebody think of it before? The thing is, this...
Just announced, we’ve got an upcoming chat on the VB 9.0 language enhancements we’ve been talking about:
Visual Basic 9.0 Language EnhancementsDescription: Have you been hearing and reading about many of the exciting new features being planned for a future version of VB beyond the new version VB 2005? Would you like to get more details on what is planned for VB 9.0 directly from VB team members? Would you like to provide the VB team with feedback based on what you have seen coming in VB 9.0? Join the Visual Basic language design team to discuss some newly announced VB...
I notice that Darryl Taft has a very interesting article today over on eWeek asking “Will VB 9 Win Over the VB 6 Faithful?”. I think the headline is a bit off, since the real question is “Will VB 2005 Win Over the VB 6 Faithful?” given VB 9.0’s status as almost-entirely-vaporware at this point. The answer to that question is “yes, definitely, in my opinion,” but time will tell. Only once we know what happens with VB 2005 will we really be able to start talking about how VB 9.0 will or won’t change that new status quo.
There was one...
I just noticed from Duncan that the announcement for the new vb:feeds site is up, courtesy of vbCity. It’s an aggregated feed of many of the top VB bloggers, screened for content (so you don’t get random entries about the blogger’s dog or something). It’s looking to be a good way to keep up with what’s going on in the VB blogsphere!
Over the past several months, I’ve been getting questions as to whether I’m going to be updating my book, The Visual Basic .NET Language, for VB 2005. The unfortunate answer is: not at the moment.
The first problem is that the VB .NET book market has been quite soft over the past year or two. This is not entirely surprising — although uptake on VB .NET has been very good considering the fact that the shift from VB6 to VB 2002 or VB 2003 was significant, it’s been (as I’ve always said it would be) a long-term process. We’re seeing continuously growing...
I’m glad to see that Brad and Krzysztof’s Framework Design Guidelines book is finally now in stock on Amazon! Not coincidentally, I just received my own copy of it in the mail yesterday and I know it’s going to be one of the books that’s not going to make it to the shelf because I’ll be referring to it all the time… It’s a great resource for anyone who designing .NET libraries that other people have to use (i.e. most of us at one time or another) because it distills thousands and thousands of man-hours worth of experience writing .NET...