February 2006 Entries
Avner has posted some information on updates that we’re planning on making to the XML integration feature in our next VB 9.0 CTP. Check them out and let us know what you think!
To join in the chain of reminiscences, I have to say that I fondly remember Almost Live! as an invaluable resource to me when I was a new transplant to Seattle back in 1992 knowing no one and virtually nothing about the city. How else was I to know that Ballard was full of old Norwegians who couldn’t drive? That Freemont was populated almost entirely by hippies? That Aurora Ave. was the place to go to get a hooker? This was all great stuff for someone fresh to the city and without a clue!
Like Raymond, I think that the sketch...
I found Guido van Rossum’s meditation on Language Design Is Not Just Solving Puzzles quite on target and relevant to what we’re going through right now as we consider how to design the myriad of language features that make up LINQ. (Thanks to Lambda the Ultimate for the pointer.) If you look at all the possible kinds of language features that you can stick into a programming language, it often seems like there’s an inexhaustible supply of them and many of them are quite interesting or compelling. But the problem is that, in the end, a programming language has to...
OK, I’ve got a question for y’all. Take a look at the code sample at the end of this entry and leave me a comment on what you think the output of the program should be. Note that I’m looking for people’s opinions here and this isn’t one of those “how well do you know VB” trick questions. Once you’ve put in a comment on what you think the output should be, then feel free to run it and see what it does, but do hold off commenting on the actual behavior until people have had a chance to comment....
I know this is old news, but I’ll say it anyway: several weeks ago, we released an updated preview of our proposed 9.0 features. The preview is enhanced in four primary ways:
We now support some Intellisense for Select expressions. This is a step forward in our investigation of the Select/From vs. From/Select question, so we’re definitely interested in feedback here.
We now support a lot more LINQ, specifically DLinq and variable capture (so you can now access local variables in queries). A huge chunk of my November/December went towards implementing lambda expressions and expression trees in Visual Basic and that, combined with...
It’s been a little quiet around here because for the last two weeks of January I was on vacation in sunny Puerto Vallarta. Andrea and I calculated that it had been many, many years since we had taken a vacation that didn’t involve: a) family, and b) lots of sightseeing, so we decided to take a nice long vacation somewhere sunny where we had nothing to do. The trip itself went great and we had a wonderful time — lots of time to lounge about by the pool or on the beach, enjoying the wonderful Mexican sun. (As a side...