Visual Basic 2005
In case you missed the announcement, VS 2005 SP1 is released. You can get it here. Beta support for Vista coming soon!
I discussed a little while back that we've made a few hotfixes available to address some performance issues people have seen with VB. There's now a program that makes these hotfixes available as a regular download, rather than forcing you to call support. I'd recommend anyone running into performance problems give them a try...
Despite the fact that we made what I still feel is a solid release, we've been clearly seeing some customers having problems with the performance of the VB 2005 compiler when used on large VB projects. In response to a number of problems that we've isolated, we've released a QFE that addresses many of the major problems people are having. To quote the announcement in the forums: We've received feedback, both directly from developers and in the forums, regarding slow performance of the Visual Basic 2005 IDE in certain situations (larger projects, projects with many errors, etc.). I’m sorry that...
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>
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!
OK, well, now that I’ve had a chance to recover a bit from the jet-lag from flying back and forth from Tokyo in just three days, I thought I’d give a short update on how the launch went there.
Executive summary: Great!
This was my first experience presenting outside of the US, and it was very interesting. My main presentation on VB 2005 was simultaneously translated, but everything else was done sequentially. So I spent a lot of time saying one or two sentences, pausing, saying one or two more sentences, pausing, saying one or two more sentences, listening to the reply...
We’ve now got the final version of the Visual Basic 8.0 Language Specification now up and available on MSDN! And, as it seems with everything these days, I’ve already gotten several bug reports for the samples. I guess I can go ahead and commit to shipping a service pack for the language specification in the near future…
Updated 11/26/05: Corrected link to language specification. (Thanks Roger!)
The VP for the division that VB is a part of, S. Somasegar, recently sat down with Ken Levy for Channel9 and had a chat about VB, the future and other stuff. Ken asks him a lot of the frequently asked questions about VB, like:
How much does Microsoft use VB internally?
How much does Bill Gates care about VB?
Why wasn’t there an unmanaged VB upgrade from VB6?
What are the plans for the future?
And more…
I’d encourage people to check it out…
(Funny side note: To deal with the persistent annoyance of comment spam, I instituted some extra filters in the...
Just as an FYI for those of you in Japan who read my blog, I’m going to be in Tokyo next week for the Microsoft Conference 2005, where we’ll be doing the Japanese launch of VB 2005! I’m going to give the VB 2005 launch keynote, which is very exiciting, as well as doing a number of community events. My only regret is that since the conference is the week before Thanksgiving here, I’ll only be in Tokyo (a place I’ve never been before) for only a few days… Maybe next time!
In the comments to my notice that we shipped, karl asks:
I haven't played with VB.Net 2005, but are all of the bugs also causing problems? Most seem CLR related, but with a hint of IDE link, and I know C# and VB.Net don't share all the IDE code. The list of reported issues has put a halt, possibly permenantly, on my push to upgrade the entire team to 2005.
I’m guessing Karl is talking about a lot of the blog entries that came out around the release of VS 2005 to MSDN subscribers, some of which are summarized by MiniMSFT.
So, is...
Full Visual Basic 2005 Archive