September 2006 Entries
Lots of code has been flowing out of Redmond recently: Two Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs have been released. The Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 and Microsoft PrintForm Component 1.0 are both targeted at people who use COM and VB6 and should make migration of code easier in many cases. You can get them here, and more are likely to come. Beta 1 of VS 2005 Service Pack 1 has been released. This service pack includes a significant amount of work on the part of the Visual Basic compiler team and addresses a lot of the major issues (performance or...
Interesting how random things sometimes come together. I was checking out Chris William's pre-beta rogue-like game Heroic Adventure! on CodePlex and noticed that although most of the game is written in VB, he had included some C# code in there. The motivation was the fact that the pseudo-random number generators that VB and the .NET platform provide (i.e. VB's Rnd function and .NET's System.Random) are not strong enough to satisfy the random number needs of his game. So he borrowed some C# code that implements the Mersenne Twister algorithm, which is a much better pseudo-random number generator.
I thought it was a...
If you are curious about my talk at the Lang .NET symposium that I talked about a while ago, you can now download the video of the talk here. As is usual, I can't bear to watch the damn thing since I think my voice sounds just awful--it's so much nicer sounding in my head. Oh well. Overall, I think the talk was only OK. I kind of switched around what I was going to talk about late in the game and so I don't think it was as interesting as I was hoping to be. It talks some about some...
Omer van Kloten's entry on Internationalization of Programming reminded me of a (possibly apocryphal) story that I was told when I started working on OLE Automation. I asked why IDispatch::GetIDsOfNames takes an LCID and was told that once-upon-a-time, the VBA team conducted an experiment in localization with VBA in Excel (which was the first application to host VBA). Apparently, they attempted to localize the entire language--keywords, function names, etc.--into French, and possibly other languages. This mean you could write code along the lines of what Omer outlines in his entry, except in French instead of Dutch. The problem was that because...
As I intimated a few posts ago, I'm going to be back on the East Coast at the end of the month. Part of the reason is to visit family (my family this time), but part of it is to give a talk at the Capital Area .NET Users group. You can find their website at http://www.caparea.net/, and here's the blurb: Visual Basic 9.0: Language Integrated Query (LINQ), XML integration and beyond... Tuesday, September 26, 2006 at 7:00 PM With its second version on the .NET Framework, Visual Basic has largely completed the process of moving from its previous...
Normally, I don't promote videos and stuff that I haven't actually watched, but since I'm still buried under vacation emails, and I know that it's just got to be good stuff, I recommend checking out: Erik Meijer: Democratizing the Cloud and Brian Beckman: Monads, Monoids, and Mort Erik and Brian are just two crazy guys with lots of crazy ideas who've been a lot of fun to interact with over the past couple of years... Without Erik, there'd be no XML support coming in VB and he's added a lot to our LINQ discussions. And, well, I haven't quite figured...
Well, I'm at the tail end of my East Coast summer vacation, which has included a trip to the beach (Oak Island, NC) and a trip to see the in-laws (Richmond, VA). Highlights: Getting my 9 year old niece and 11 year old nephew hooked (nay, obsessed) with the board games Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. I mean, I love those games, but man... I think they would play Settlers 24/7 if they could. Frightening. Taking one last ride on the Hurricane at the Myrtle Beach Pavilion. This was the fourth summer we'd taken the kids to the...