December 2005 Entries
As I’ve said before, I’ve been a big fan of just about all the games that Origin produced (Ultima series, Ultima Underworld series, System Shock, Wing Commander series, etc.), and Ultima in particular has been a favorite. Ultima I was the first game that I really loved* on my old Apple ][+, and I think the first game I actually ever paid for was Ultima VI: The False Prophet for my PC. I even followed the series all the way through to the very bitter end of Ultima VIII: Pagan and Ultima IX: Ascension. So it’s really cool to see...
Someone recently sent me a question that comes up every now and again:
C# has been submitted and approved by the ECMA, will Visual Basic ever be submitted?
Well, never say never, but there are no current plans to submit Visual Basic to a standards body. The idea has certainly been discussed internally from time to time, but we’ve usually gotten stuck on several points:
By and large, the demand for this from developers has been very low, at least in terms of the people that we talk to in customer visits, trade shows, conferences, online, etc. Now, it’s always possible that there’s a...
I’m catching up on my blog reading and just plowed my way through Joel’s curmudgeonly “old guy” rant about The Perils of JavaSchools. I don’t have a lot to say about the central thesis of his rant — I’ve always been of two minds about the efficacy of the Darwinian theory of weeding the weak out through hazing-type classes — but there was an analogy that caught my eye:
Heck, in 1900, Latin and Greek were required subjects in college, not because they served any purpose, but because they were sort of considered an obvious requirement for educated people. In some...
This is a bit of old news, but I did want to point out that we have heard the feedback about the relative dearth of VB samples in the past few releases and now MSDN and Microsoft as a whole has been consciously shifting their focus. Tom makes some interesting observations about the readability of the different languages for different types of developers and there’s some lively discussion in the comments, well worth checking out!
On a happier note… Brad McCabe passed along some info about free training that MSDN is offering for VB 2005 and/or ASP.NET 2.0. To quote him:
With the holiday’s coming lots of people have some extra time on their hands, with this in mind MSDN and Microsoft Learning got to together to give you something to do, free training!We were trying to figure out what course to give away and decided to let you pick. That’s right pick one of 6 courses about Visual Basic 2005 or 9 courses about ASP.NET 2.0. In addition, after you have completed your free online...
You can read more about the details of the case in the Seattle Times, but, briefly, it was a trial for attempted first-degree murder. The first maybe two-thirds of the trial was not too hard to deal with, as it was sort of an extended episode of Law and Order crossed with CSI, which was quite interesting. However, the last third was quite difficult — between discussions of the impact of the shooting, the testimony of the defendant and the actual rendering of the verdict, there was a lot to process. Thankfully, the other people on the jury were just...
In addition to my interview with the ITPro website, I’ve also got a personal webpage on MSDN Japan. It has links to things like an interview I did with Takashi Tsujigo, an evangelist from MSDN Japan, and an interview with @IT. I believe there are also going to be some webcasts up before long. Unfortunately, I don’t believe there are any English translations available for any of the content, although I don’t think I said anything secret that I haven’t said elsewhere… <g>
Not that I usually am burning up the weblogging wires around here this time of a year, but as an FYI, I’m going to be a bit slow blogging for the next couple of weeks. I’ve been selected as a juror in a trial, and the expectation is that it’s going to be going for a while. I can’t say anything about the trial until it’s over, but it’s definitely been an interesting experience so far. On the one hand, it’s a super-inconvenient time both with the holidays and with our work to get an updated LINQ prototype out there...
For my Japanese readers, you can now read an interview that I did with the ITPro website. We had a wide-ranging conversation, so we covered some interesting points…
I get the question “Why does Visual Studio target only one version of the .NET Framework?” occasionally, and now John Rivard, a new VB blogger, answers. John is the other Technical Lead on VB, and I’m looking forward to him blogging more in the future!