Visual Basic

The new phone books are here, the new phone books are here...

Bill Sheldon — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:27:00 GMT

This is one of those 'hey look at me' posts that always make me feel like... well if you recognize the title of the movie that the quote which is the title of this movie comes from - that pretty much sums it up.

Anyway a few 'ads'.

First off, I have a new article available over at SQL Magazine. It's a very introductory article to LINQ for SQL so if you are looking for a good starting point for just getting started with LINQ, here's a short article that might be of assistance: http://www.sqlmag.com/Article/ArticleID/98205/sql_server_98205.html

The second item fits the post a bit better. Back in the first Quarter I signed on to do another book - yes my wife is ready to kill me - which since she is pregnant get's the pregnancy multiplier (we're currently around 7 or 8 so the danger level is getting pretty high). At any rate if you are interested it's still way out in the future - like October 2008 - if "we" (me) make "our" (my) final due date - here is the page: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0470377313/105-1544171-6096430

As you can note on that page this next book is an Office Business Applications book. Of note, it will have both C# and VB samples (ok VB sample - but more on that later) and covers using WPF with Outlook Form Regions and Excel not to mention server side document generation. That's the good news - the bad news - well I'm late on my chapters - of course that's pretty typical for me - the question is can I catch up in the next few weeks - especially given the increasing pregnancy multiplier...

Finally, I thought I should mention that my last book is finally getting read to be available. At 1600 pages it pretty much is a phone book, and it should ship for the first week of May which apparently is fast approaching: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Visual-Basic-2008-Evjen/dp/0470191368/ref=sr_1_1

Happy Holidays...

Bill Sheldon — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 22:37:00 GMT

Mort's retiring

Bill Sheldon — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:11:00 GMT

It's Friday so in a slightly more light hearted spirit I thought I'd link to a less serious post. I for one have written about and certainly talked about the persona Mort. Mort for those not up to speed is a Microsoft 'persona'. Microsoft created these persona's to help them focus on the type of person that used a given product. Paul Vick has a fun little post describing (with pictures) three of the main developer persona's and suggesting that it's time for Mort to retire. http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2007/11/14/22589.aspx

My personal opinion is that Mort took a bath and learned C# a long time ago, he's got a big velvet Elvis hanging in his trailer. (I'm saying this in the context of Paul's post) Thus from the standpoint of VB retiring Mort only makes sense, and I find the Ben persona much more appropriate :-)

Visual Basic .NET Programming I

Bill Sheldon — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 22:44:00 GMT

This winter I'll be taking my first crack at a new class at the UCSD Extension. It's surprising that I'm heading into my third year teaching the Visual Basic .NET Programming II class and now I'll get to do my own lead in. I'm looking forward to this opportunity especially since I'll be updating the materials to account for Visual Studio 2008. As always I'll make certain the course supports those who only have access to the VB Express Edition in terms of lab work.

So if you are looking to learn about the most powerful and most popular .NET language, stop in for a class.

For more information on the when and where and if you are interested in registering for the course go to the UCSD website at: http://www.extension.ucsd.edu/studyarea/index.cfm?vAction=singleCourse&vCourse=CSE-40615&vStudyAreaId=14

The State of Visual Basic

Bill Sheldon — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:06:00 GMT

Often as a new release of Visual Studio approaches there are posts regarding, where are the two primary languages in .NET going? In short as has been noted on one or two places around the net the VB MVPs posed the question of, what is the strategic long term expectation for VB and how is VB doing in the market? Which language should I learn, which will help me get a job? etc.

(The short answer regarding which language to learn is - if you are going to do just a little programming VB is easier to learn and maintain. If you intend to be a Professional Software Engineer and limiting your career to being a full time Cubicle Code Monkey you need to know both. Just knowing C# or VB isn’t enough, as a developer I’ve learned somewhere between one and two dozen programming languages, to be honest I lost track of them all and stopped counting long ago – although interestingly enough I still have my high school ‘Basic’ programming book...sentimental value only - the point being casual developers will be more comfortable in VB and professional developers learn languages and VB and C# are both necessary with .NET today.)

At any rate focusing on the core topic, depending upon where you ‘stand’ your view of VB or C# might be that it’s doing great or not so great. After all if you are working in a shop where your senior management likes C# it might seem like very few people are working with VB.

On the other hand this perception might be a self-fulfilling prophecy for your company. After all if every project uses a hammer then there must be a lot of nails (how’s that for twisting a proverb “if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail”) If your company “supports” both VB and C# languages but encourages that new projects use one language well then you begin to wonder. As I noted in the past I’d consider that pretty short-sighted for a consulting company. After all if your goal is to sell software as a service (which consulting companies do) you don’t want to lose a major portion of your market to language bias… so before I go further I want to clarify where I got some of the data I’m about to toss out.

I think it’s common knowledge that I’m an MVP (I can hear some of you: ‘could he mention it one more time…’) anyway I bring this up to note that it shouldn’t be a shock to realize that as an MVP I have a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with Microsoft. This comes up because as a group we MVP’s have some communication channels (formal and informal) with Microsoft. One of the formal ones revolves around my specialty area Visual Basic.

In this area the VB-MVPs have essentially an opportunity to truly speak freely to Microsoft on NDA topics. It’s where we can say we think that feature A is useless or that we think the VB team has dropped the ball by not having a given feature, or where we think they need to take the ball and really run with it. It also allows us to ask questions and get answers that might embarrass one or more people at Microsoft. In general it is a valuable tool. Every so often we get permission to post some information from that discussion to help frame discussions outside that group – things that aren’t too germane to actual company business, and that’s the case for the numbers I’m about to post.

There are way more people online downloading C# right? Wrong – At this point you aren’t going to be surprised when I say the VB Express is the top download of the Express editions. It probably also doesn’t surprise you if I say that it’s downloaded far more frequently then C++ Express. But does it surprise you when I note that C++ is the number 2 download behind Visual Basic. It surprised me, after all I expected Visual Web Developer to be in the top 2 (after all both VB and C# web developers would use that one tool).

That’s right Visual Basic alone is more popular by a margin of 20% over C++ <credit VB Team>. What I will say is that the other three express editions are all much closer in terms of downloads, and registrations. The point is that Visual Basic is noticeably more popular. Of course this is the Express Edition, that’s for students and hobbyists, they aren’t professional developers.

So how big is Visual Basic when someone reviews the market?

Well according to Forrester research Visual Basic is the #1 .NET language. <credit VB team> Note that’s not some legacy number based on COM developers, that’s just in terms of .NET developers. That’s right the majority of professional developers out there are using Visual Basic, and that even makes sense.

Think about it this way, prior to .NET the two primary development languages were C++ and VB. C++ was far more powerful, but it took longer and cost more to develop applications. Sure for someone developing tools or with a huge install base the disadvantages could be overcome for the power. VB on the other hand was much easier to learn and use, the code was easier to maintain and its performance while not equal to, was certainly comparable to C++.

Along comes C#, from the standpoint of C++ developers C# offers a familiar syntax and reduces the disadvantages of C++ - applications were easier to develop and accordingly cost less. C++ developers and Java developers have without a doubt flocked to C#. In fact if you are a Java developer and haven’t moved to C# boy are you missing out on the future. However, these were smaller developer communities to start with then Visual Basic which also released a .NET version.

Visual Basic also moved to .NET and its disadvantage – not having the same runtime environment and power as the other major language went away. Note the fact that VB is easier to learn, read and maintain is still true but now you also get all the power of C# and since .NET creates code on par with C++ it means you as a VB developer are creating first class applications.

Sure some people have jumped from VB to C# that is to be expected, and many companies which in the past would have C++ for some projects and VB for others are moving to use only 1 .NET language. However, as I’ve noted in the past most VB developers will find the transition to VB.NET fairly easy and natural. When I teach I find that the students with previous VB experience do very well, and in fact that once they get the key elements of Object Oriented Development are ready to become productive. More importantly the VB teams recent move from a migration wizard to the Interop toolkit (similar to WPF Interop) and the Power Packs make the transition from VB6 much easier.

What is interesting is how the VB team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/) ranks in the top 1% of all MSDN blogs and the fact that the VB Developer center on MSDN is one of the top trafficked sections of MSDN (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/vb). <credit VB Team> In other words VB is doing just fine and as I’m sure we would all agree so is C#. In the near term there is no reason to suspect anything about this equation will change – C++ and Java developers will tend to prefer C# and those who have mastered both VB and C# will prefer VB J

So what about the future?

Well for starters the Visual Basic team recently published the Beta version of the Visual Basic language specification. A great step for defining how the language works, and one I look forward to seeing become the basis for standardization. We also know Paul Vick is discussing VB X (aka VB 10) over at Panopticon Central (http://www.panopticoncentral.net/) and is very open to input on things to deprecate in the languages specification and new language features to add. I highly suggest going over to get in a good suggestion or two. As for Visual Basic – I’m confident that it’ll be around and diving into all corners of the Microsoft development tools.

XML Literals - String Formatting

Bill Sheldon — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:07:00 GMT

One of the most highly anticipated features of Visual Studio 2008 is XML Literals. It doesn't sound like much until you start thinking about some of the ways that you can leverage this capability. One creative way is to replace code, Beth Massi of the VB Team recently made a post highlighting a little of the power that you can have with XML Literals in Visual Basic 2008.

http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi/archive/2007/10/23/avoid-underscores-in-your-multiline-strings.aspx

What's interesting is her post leverages another new feature call type inference which allows her to create the new object with specifically needing to specify details of the type. She continues the example but just the first section allowing you to format strings without any special characters is pretty awesome. Of course the syntax <%= %> might give me nightmares of ASP but overall the capability is very cool, and combined with some of the power of XLINQ that VB provides (see Scott Hanselman's post: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/XLINQToXMLSupportInVB9.aspx) VB is definitely looking to simplify working with XML... you know that data structure which is at the core of things like XAML and Silverlight.

Update:
Beth's keeping the XML literal ideas going with her latest post: http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi/archive/2007/10/26/xml-literals-tips-tricks.aspx

Preparing to Ship VS2008

Bill Sheldon — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:05:00 GMT

Matt Gertz of the Visual Basic team has posted an excellent discussion describing the release process for Microsoft's product development teams. Often as a presenter I'm asked 'how does Microsoft do it?'. Matt's post does an excellent job of talking about the project management details of managing quality for a product release.

http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2007/08/27/endgame-matt-gertz.aspx

Professional Visual Basic with .NET 3.0 Excerpt Posted

Bill Sheldon — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:12:00 GMT

I keep meaning and forgetting to add a link to an excerpt from the latest edition of the Profession Visual Basic .NET 3.0 book. The editorial staff chose to excerpt a portion of one of my chapters to let you see some of what is new in the current edition. We of course are already working on the next edition now that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 are in Beta 2, but for the time being this book offers some insight into the new .NET 3.0 technologies.

http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-305563.html

Visual Basic Programming II - UCSD Extension

Bill Sheldon — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 09:29:00 GMT

I'm planning to teach the Spring quarter's edition of Visual Basic II. The class is designed to pick up for students who have been through an introductory .NET Framework class and an initial Programming with Visual Basic I class. Previously the class has focused on .NET 2.0 but with the recently released .NET 3.0 now available we'll be spending some of the additional class time looking at things like XAML, WPF, WF and LINQ (part of the .NET 3.5 feature set). Additionally for those interested in handling existing VB6 code we'll be talking about the Visual Basic Power Packs which allow you to interoperate between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET code within your existing application. My goal is to ensure that students completing this class have an understanding not only where .NET is today and how to work with Visual Basic - but where Visual Basic and .NET are going and how to be positioned so that what happened with Visual Basic 6 doesn't again happen to those working in Visual Basic.

The class can be registered for through UCSD at:

http://extension.ucsd.edu/studyarea/index.cfm?vAction=singleCourse&vCourse=CSE-40616&vStudyAreaId=14

SoCal .NET User Group Presentation

Bill Sheldon — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:16:00 GMT

One of the items I learned when I was requested to speak to the LA C# User Group, was that they were essentially affiliated with the SoCal .NET User Group (http://www.socaldotnet.org/). Apparently the same speaker coordinator works both groups and they meet one after the other. Thus I was also requested to speak to the Orange Country group on the following night April 4th. Since some people attend both meetings I agreed to adjust my topic slightly.

In this cas I adjust my presentation to focus on WPF and Interop. The focus of course being the ability to take applications built with Windows Forms 2.0 and have the user interface work with new components being built with WPF. The presentation again introduces .NET 3.0 and WPF but doesn't include much of the XAML focus from the previous night's presentation. It instead spends more time looking at Crossbow.

Crossbow is the code name which Microsoft used when it was building the Interop libraries to allow the new WPF windows graphical libraries to work alongside the existing Windows.Forms libraries. The key message was: if you are using the Interop controls, the WindowsFormHost and ElementHost controls should ALWAYS be used to host User Controls. Yes they CAN host individual controls such as a TextBox or DataGridView, but if you need to Interop you have business logic in place and you should always encapsulate the controls in a User Control prior to having those controls placed in one of the Interop controls.

In addition I spoke about how this Interop direction is really a lesson learned from the initial Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic .NET migration based path which Microsoft provided. Microsoft learned that trying to take an entire real world application and migrate it's entire code base to a new implementation language was a cost prohibitive scenario. It tended to be difficult for engineers to imagine and they constantly wanted to start with the backend components which made it that much more complex.

Instead with WPF Microsoft has pursued an Interop strategy. There won't be any tools to migrate your Windows Forms based application to a WPF UI. After all many components such as the DataGridView control just don't have a single equivalent under WPF. The key being that when you went to move the implementation from Windows Forms to WPF you'll want to change the implementation completely.

As I also note, not only did Microsoft learn this lesson when planning WPF, the Visual Basic Team has been leading the way. They have released a set of tools which will allow you to create new .NET Forms and have these forms compile into classic VB6.0 applications. In this way you can begin to extend your existing VB 6.0 applications with new .NET based capabilities without needing to spend 6+ months migrating your code base. The new VB Interop tools although not the focus of this presentation are every bit as exciting as the WPF Interop tools. You can get the latest version of the VB Power Tools from MSDN or from the Visual Basic Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2006/11/02/interop-roadmap-usercontrols-mdi-and-data.aspx

Here is a copy of my slides from the SoCal .NET User Group Presentation:

WindowsInterop.zip (992.07 KB)