Visual Basic
Now that we’re past the PDC, there are a bunch of video resources coming out on VB 10.0 and Oslo. Here’s a roundup of what’s available so far: Channel9 has a video that I did with Don and Chris on M called, “Don Box, Paul Vick, and Chris Anderson: Introducing M” Channel9 also has a video Don and Chris did on their own covering Oslo, “Don and Chris explain Oslo in 5 minutes” The Pearson folks also recorded some vidcasts they call OnMicrosoft. If you go to the previous link, you can see all the videos posted, but the...
Yesterday I gave my valedictory address on Visual Basic at the PDC. I think the talk went well and it was a lot of fun, if not a little sad that it’s one of the last times I’ll be giving a talk about Visual Basic. We covered a lot of exciting stuff, some of which should be familiar to readers of the blog. I’ll let people know when the video is up on the Channel9 page for the talk, should be some time today. For those of you who don’t want to sit through the talk it went something like...
I just wanted to give a shout out to my fellow Oslo employee Vijaye Raji whose Small BASIC project just launched on the new DevLabs site. It’s a version of BASIC targeted at truly beginning programmers, and I think it’s a great example of how BASIC can be utilized to make things very simple and easy to use. I got the chance to see Small BASIC in action being taught to high schoolers and it was wonderful to see the kids start to make the connection between what they were doing and what they could do. It’s a great project,...
I didn’t realize I’ve been so silent about the PDC! I’ve been struggling to get off of .Text and on to Subtext for my blogging engine, and so I’ve been avoiding posting because “I’ll wait until I get moved over to the new engine.” Pffffft! Anyway, I’m going to be doing a number of things at the PDC, so if you’re going to be in LA next week, stop by and say hi! I am co-presenting “Future Directions for Visual Basic” with Lucian on Tuesday at 5:15pm in room 406A. Do stop by and let’s chat about where Visual...
Hi all, I wanted to take a moment to introduce the new specification lead for Visual Basic, Lucian Wischik. Lucian has been getting to know the user community over the past few months, and now you’ll have even more contact with him as he’ll be taking over my responsibilities in terms of owning the language spec! He’s already been an enormous help in ironing out some of the trickier aspects of the Dev10 spec, and I feel very confident that the specification will be in good hands. Here’s a short bio: Lucian Wischik is the Visual Basic specification lead....
As difficult as it is to say, I wanted to let my loyal readers know that after a decade spent working on Visual Basic, I’ve made the decision to change jobs at Microsoft. It's somewhat hard for even me to imagine just how long I've worked on Visual Basic. I joined the Developer Division (VB's home) over 11.5 years ago to work on OLE Automation. A year and a half after that, I moved over to the VB team proper to work on the compiler's code generator just as we started the move to what would become .NET. In...
WARNING: This is a speculative post. Caveat emptor. Actually, in this case I don't thing the above warning is strong enough. This is a super speculative post, because I believe the chance of it appearing in the next version of the language is not extremely high, not because it's not a worthy feature but because it's more than a little work and we've got a lot of other very worthy features we're considering. However, since it's something that's valuable and something we keep getting requests for, we have decided to at least generally sketch out what iterators would look like...
WARNING: This is a speculative post. Caveat emptor. I haven't finished reading through all the comments from my previous post yet, but I did think it was worth stating that we are considering improvements to lambda expressions in the next version. Specifically, we're looking at allowing single-line lambdas that don't actually return anything, something like:Dim x = Sub() Console.WriteLine(10)
This was something we wanted to support in 2008, but just ran out of time for. We're also thinking about multi-line lambdas that contain statements instead of just a single expression. So something along the lines of:Dim y = Function(x)
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While I was out on vacation last week, Beth posted a video that she did at one of our language design meetings on Channel9. Check it out. If you get confused about the joke about the gray shirt, Beth also explains that on her blog. I had a little more to say in this video than I did in the one of the design meeting that I go to as a guest...
WARNING: This is a speculative post. Caveat emptor. It's been a while since I've had much of anything to say about our thinking about VB10 (well, it's been a while since I've had much of anything to say) and I wanted to give a quick update on our thinking: Implicit line continuations: we're still considering it. Automatically implemented properties: we're still considering it. Implicitly implemented interfaces: we've put this on the back burner. The feedback we got on my post was helpful in identifying problems with the idea and it seems like we have bigger fish to fry. Collection...
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