Last spring, I ran into Don Box in the hallways at MIX07.

I hadn’t seen him in quite a while and asked what he had been up to lately in his wizard’s tower.

Though he couldn’t really talk about what he was doing, he did say that he was working on some cool new stuff and having fun.

I had a quick fantasy about suggesting in a blog post that perhaps Don was working on the next version of Visual Basic, which would have been, of course, a completely insane idea. Don has a bit of a history with VB and I have a bit of a history of calling him out for public jibes at VB (which were likely more innocent than they sounded….).

On the other hand, it was definitely painful to sit in a WCF session a number of years ago where he had been clearly coerced to code in VB (after he was swayed to actually use Visual Studio rather than emacs in public ;-)), though the audience was composed of about 95% C# programmers. I felt badly for him, though he managed to have a little fun with it.

Again, it was no more than a silly idea that crossed my mind, provide me with a momentary evil grin and then it was forgotten, because it could so easily be taken out of context.

Who knew my silly little idea was closer to the truth than I could ever have dreamed? Not to suggest that he is, in fact, working on VBX, but he certainly is whistling (or is that singing) a different tune when it comes to VB these days.

Check out this Channel 9 video with Don Box, Chris Anderson and Amanda Silver!

You can read more of Don’s new-found VB love over on his blog (and look for some posts about the fact that his team is hiring!)

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