http://www.AcehAid.org
Well, it almost came to fisticuffs at the Web Services Edge conference when I asked Thom Robbins, who is the New England Developer Evengelist for Microsoft, if he could come to Vermont.NET and give us the wonderful Visual Studio 2005 overview presentation that I was watching Doug Turnure, the Atlanta area D.E., do during one of the workshops.
The battle was because, well, as we all now, Vermont is a really nice place to visit! Especially in May. Doug said “I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” (His wife loves Vermont) But I guess Thom won since Vermont *is* his territory and I haven’t had him speak at the group in a while.
When we started the user group I probably could have filled up 2 years of our schedule just from inviting Russ Fustino (back when he was ours – boo hoo hoo), Joe Stagner and Thom who are always very happy to come to Burlington. It’s too bad that the MSDN events are not coming here any more, but those are expensive to put on, whereas it’s not a big deal for those guys to buzz up here (they don’t mind the drive in their nice cars) and do an overnight or visit clients.
I guess we’ll have to find some other excuse for Doug to come to Vermont.
http://www.AcehAid.org
Many people are talking/writing about Richard Grime’s farewell article especially about his comments about VB not being the true .net language. Boy, the advertisers over on that website must be happy campers!!
I only want to respond to one point that he made – about the fact that VB is in .NET only for marketing purposes.
I was very happy to learn .NET first with a familiar language and syntax. I had plenty of learning curves to attack as it was. If VB.NET didn’t exist, there is a very good chance that I would have stopped programming. I’m not kidding or exaggerating.
I was pissed that Microsoft had pullen the proverbial rug out from under me and sent me tumbling from being a very advanced programmer to feeling like a beginner again. This was preventing me at first from seeing the great advantages that .NET was going to give me as a developer. Sure VB has evolved, but still it was familiar. Everything else was different. It would have been a much bigger struggle for me to learn .NET if it was 100% new. In fact, I was *so* mad, that I bought JBuilder. I figured if I had to start from scratch again and use semi-colons, wtf – I may as well use Java and forget about Microsoft. (Remember, this was also the same time we were hearing all about Hailstorm and Microsoft taking over the world with it.) I had already gone through a big learning curve in moving from FoxPro to VB, when FoxPro became Visual FoxPro. Big learning curve… big pardigm shift… so I figured it was a good time to totally switch. I did NOT want to go through that again.
But after a few months of mucking around (I edited that word for google) with jBuilder, I looked at .NET again and realized that because of VB.NET, the learning curve was not going to be as bad as I had thought. At least I didn’t have to relearn 100% of the syntax. VB.NET gave me an anchor into .NET.
I still do most of my coding with VB.NET, though I am getting more and more comfortable working with C# when I need to, and there are things about C# that I really like, but not enough for me to switch to it as my predominant language. I am just more proficient in VB. That’s really all there is to it. I don’t care if it’s marketing or whatever the reason is. If .NET had only been only C#, there is a good chance that I would not have been willing to start ALL over again after 18 years of programming. Maybe I would have just stopped programming, taken back up my long lost love of being a potter, spent more time cycling and skiing – you know, had a life. 😉 That sounds pretty dramatic, but it is not exaggerated as I truly was pretty close to walking away from it all. Of course, there was that mortgage to worry about…. As it is, I have never worked as hard in my life as I have since .NET came out. I used to work about 30 hours a week and bill most of them. The rest of my time was spent bicycling, skiing and hiking. Now I work about 80 hours a week and bill about 30 of them. Not having VB would probably have made it more than I was willing to do.
As for VB.NET not being VB… I have no problem with it. I am a .NET programmer, and I use the VB language to write my .NET applications. I am no longer a VB6 programmer.
http://www.AcehAid.org