May 2006 Entries
Wow, where does the time go? I can remember when VB was just this tall. Soon it’ll be driving!
Microsoft Announces Visual Basic at Windows World '91 General-Purpose, High-Productivity Programming System for Microsoft Windows
ATLANTA -- May 20, 1991 -- Microsoft today announced MicrosoftR Visual BasicTM programming system at the Windows World '91 industry trade show. Visual Basic is a graphical application development system for Microsoft WindowsTM graphical environment version 3.0 that combines visual design tools with a powerful, general-purpose programming language and Windows .EXE compiler. It provides a simple solution to the complex task of creating real Windows-based software applications.
"We set...
Just an FYI, I strengthened the spam filters this morning on the blog to attempt to filter out some of the spam that had been creeping around the edges. Hopefully, no one will notice, but if you run into problems, do drop me a line using the comment form. Thanks!
FYI, we just released an updated community preview of our LINQ support for both VB and C#, entitled “Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Language-Integrated Query, May 2006 Community Technology Preview.” Or you could just call it “the May CTP.” Anyway, this new CTP has a lot of new goodies for VB programmers, as our LINQ support is greatly expanded. To crib straight from the readme, here’s some of the stuff we did:
Enhanced DLinq Support: This CTP adds support for Inheritance, Stored Procedures, User-Defined Functions, and Optimistic Concurrency Conflict Resolution (OCCR). The new DLinq Designer provides a visual design surface...
John Montgomery’s entry on “Express “Orcas” Principles” got me thinking about the whole “principles” thing. Just like you should always be able to give an elevator pitch for your product, I think you should always have a clear idea of your product’s principles. I particularly liked Bjarne Stroustrup’s description of C++’s principles in “A Brief Look at C++0x”:
C++ is a general-purpose programming language with a bias towards systems programming that:
is a better C
supports data abstraction
supports object-oriented programming
supports generic programming
By "systems programming", I mean programming the kind of tasks traditionally associated with the operating system and fundamental...
As the eagle-eyed may have noticed, I recently added a new post category called “VB/Script.” In it I have collected a number of posts that I’ve written over the years concerning VB, scripting, dynamism and so on. Specifically, I’ve pulled together (in chronological order from earliest to latest):
Why do hobbyists matter?
Simpler IDE + more permissive VB language = script magic?
Boo to you, too!
Time ever marches on...
Dynamic languages/dynamic environments
The Tyranny of the Suite
VB as a dynamic language
Introducing LINQ!
See me on Channel9...
I haven't gone AWOL...
I’m doing this because I expect that in the coming months/years I’ll be talking more about these kinds of...
We’ve been hard at work on an updated CTP of the LINQ work, and when you get it (no comment on dates at this point), you’ll notice several new things about the VB LINQ support. One the biggest is going to be the fact that, after trying all the Intellisense tricks we could think of, we’re throwing in the towel on Select/From and adopting the “Yoda style” From/Select syntax. As in:
Dim WACusts = _
From c In Customers _
Where c.State = "WA" _
Select c
instead of:
Dim WACusts = _
...
As you may remember, I asked last year whether C# programmers are masochists for using C# to program against the Office model since VB deals with COM much better in a number of cases. My comment was prompted by the publication of Eric Lippert’s and Eric Carter’s book “Visual Studio Tools For Office Using C# with Word, Excel, Outlook and InfoPath.” Well, now you don’t have to be a masochist any more! You can read “Visual Studio Tools For Office Using Visual Basic 2005 with Excel, Word, Outlook and InfoPath”. As Eric Carter says:
This edition of the book focuses on using the...