I am just not sure how to react to this! These changes could push more VB programmers to C#. But also, buried in this press release was a hint that Microsoft is going to actually try to patent these new keywords. Give me a freakin’ break!

With the upcoming release of beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0, Microsoft is today announcing changes to the Visual Basic language that is part of Visual Studio. Continuing to focus on making Visual Basic the most productive language on the .NET platform, Microsoft is adding new keywords to the language.

The new “The” keyword assists programmers in identifying particular data objects or computing resources. This keyword will identify any default resources, such as printers, directories, or databases. This allows code constructs such as:

If The Database.IsDown OrElse The Database.IsTooSlow Then

    The Database.IsProbablyOracle

End If

“We think developers can definitely benefit from this. They won’t have to worry about locations of default resources,” according to Victor Silver, PR Manager for Visual Basic.

The new “A” keyword allows access to generics. Generics are a previously announced feature of .NET 2.0 that allow programmers to work without knowing anything about what they are working with.

VB Guru, Rockford Lhotka was hoping for additional keywords. When contacted for his comments on these changes, he said “I think they should have included “an” as well as “a”, because the current decision leads to “a awkward situation for some words”.

Past president of the highly influential Northern Colorado .NET SIG, Kathleen Dollard responded, “It’s a good first step, but I was really hoping they’d include adverbs”

Jeffrey Rochstar, author of several prominent books on .NET says, “I’m happy to see these additions for VB, but since they cut ‘that’ at the last minute, it seems that C# still has the advantage with ‘this’.”

These changes may be in response to pressure by the newly-formed Joint Organization of Keyword Enthusiasts. This group has been pushing for a full English sentence structure. There manifesto states that Visual Basic should be significantly more verbose. A spokesman said “Duh! Without periods, they still aren’t sentences,” and went on to say, “I think the backward compatibility problems presented by punctuation like semi-colons are solvable.”

According to Visual Basic Language Progression Manager, A.J. Thejays, the keywords are being added to the language to “enhance the ability of Visual Basic developers to create code in a more natural language. Adding “the” and “a” brings them closer to actual English sentences.” Thejays continues explaining that a great number of Visual Basic developers come, not from the Computer Science bacground, but with degrees in many Liberal Arts programs. “These are people who are used to communicating in proper English. We think that this be beneficial to the coding experience.”

Microsoft has not announced a timeframe for the new keywords, nor whether to the Visual Studio IDE will introduce a new color for the new class of keywords. Apparently, Microsoft has also applied for patents.

No one from Microsoft was available for additional comment because of Microsoft’s scheduled company-wide day of silence on April 1.

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Boy am I out of the loop! I hung out with my friends four children last night while she was having surgery and her hubby was at the hospital too. We had a blast. The girls range from age 4 to 12. While the 12 year old was doing her homework, she asked my opinion on one of her questions she was working on. She was doing theoretical probability! In 7th grade! She had questions like “if you drew 12 cards from a deck of cards, how many clubs do you think you would get, and why”. “If all of the diamonds were removed from the deck and you drew 12 cards again, how many clubs do you think you would get and why?” I don’t remember what I was doing in math in 7th grade (a million years ago…) – but I sure don’t recall it being that!

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Here, Doug Seven (did you know Doug swallowed the red pill) explains in his words what CodeZone is all about. Much easier to digest and comprehend than the marketing speak.

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I have a client who has crazy wonderful ideas about what they would like their software to do. They don’t go by any rules of “what software should do”. I told them from the beginning “just dream…I’ll let you know what I can and can’t make happen.”

Sometimes these ideas are really hard to implement, sometimes not so bad. It’s really gratifying when I get emails that say “this works great! I love it!!!”

Kate Gregory notes that the speakers list (check the dropdown) on the TechEd site is filling in. She also already did the Brian count. There are (just guessing by names) 8 Brians and 11 women, so maybe the ration (I decided to leave that typo in tact since it made me laugh) is increasing? This has become fondly known as the Brian Factor.

What is nice to see is that after the early indication that a lot of the 3rd party (aka Non-Microsoft) speakers who are frequent TechEd speakers were not on the roster, it seems to have improved. I see lots of people that I know are not MS employees on the list. That’s good for the community I think. PDC is the all Microsoft event. So an apparent reduction for TEchEd had (understandably) ruffled some feathers and egos.

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(writing in lower case in honor of my subject: casey).

casey has a fun post which a list of pros, cons and moots about writing for msdn online.

out of his, i will pick one from each category that i agree or disagree with

pro: getting paid (no brainer)

con: waiting for the article to go live. as you may have noticed, i have nothing on msdn online, though i *have* actually written three articles and am working on a 4th. Though, heck, that’s nothing compared to print!

moot: he lists the due diligence paperwork as moot. eliot, did you hear that? hahahaha. I’d definitely put the paperwork in the con list! though, since the paperwork makes getting paid possible, perhaps that’s how it balances out to a moot for casey. 🙂

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And why do I, a person who can do no more with  C++ than spell it, care? Because if I’m lucky, Kate will be speaking at C++ Connections which is part of the DevConnections conference in the fall. I’m speaking at the VS Connections and ASP.NET Connections shows.

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Since I plan to attend Wintellect’s Devscovery in Reston, VA in early May, I have submitted talks to the Code Camp that is that Saturday (May 7th) in the same building as the Devscovery conference.

The website for Devscovery is pretty funny. It says “our aim is to have you beg us to stop cramming information into your head.”

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I am just catching up on a lot of posts and see that pricing announcments were made regarding Team System. I had heard  about the new SKUs for MSDN Universal a while ago and scratched my head about small or independent consultants not having easy access to learn some of the tools that will be priced way over their heads (6 month trials notwithstanding…). But one of the interesting points about this is that Microsoft is clearly aiming the VSTS stuff directly at the large enterprise shops and the benefit is that, as Jonathan Cogley and Eric Sink note, they are not leaving the market for 3rd party tools like NUnit and SourceGear mostly in tact.

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I got home in the wee hours of the morning from a fantastic 5 days at DevConnections in Orlando. The conference was, as always, just great. (Note that the spring 2005 show is getting archived. Watch this page for links to that show.) It was held at the Hyatt Grand Cypress which is a real paradise-like resort. Shirley and Gary Brothers run such a top notch show. I was very happy with my presentations and I ended up doing my session on What’s new in ADO.NET 2.0 twice. Unfortunately that extra session was due to the fact that Dino E was unable to make it. Of course there is just no way anyone can duplicate Dino’s effervescent presentation style – he is truly unique (in a wonderful way).

Thanks to everyone who attended my talks. It is your response to them that inspires me to keep doing this! Don’t forget to email me those questions and I will blog the answers!

The 2nd ADO.NET 2.0 session was in a one hour slot and we somehow managed to get through the whole thing at a fast  pace since there just wasn’t anything I was willing to cut out. As expected, I heard gasps and applause when I showed how SQL Server Query Notification was tied into ADO.NET and ASP.NET.

I had two sessions that were challenged by being scheduled at the same time as an Indigo session by Ari Bixhorn and a live recording of .NET Rocks. Three of my talks were held in the humongous 500 (looked like it a least) seat ballroom — though I encouraged the 30-40 or so attendees to sit up close.

I also got a hot off the presses copy of the updated (for beta) version of Alex Homer, Dave Sussman and Mark Fussell’s new ADO.NET and System.XML 2.0 book from A-W, which I perused for additional insight before my ado.net 2.0 talks.

I did a 1/2 day workshop on Sunday which was teaching Web Service Security Fundamentals (the cryptography stuff) and an intro to WSE2.0. Although it wasn’t heavily attended, it  went great and I think everyone there really got a lot out of the session. I LOVE doing that talk. And the more I do it the more fun it is to do. The more fun it is for me to do the more fun it is for the attendees. The 1st part of the talk – the crypto stuff – has become my “I want to teach the world to sing” talk. Perhaps I’ll look into doing a webcast on it. I do have an article coming out on MSDN Online with that content.

Also of course, hanging out in the speaker lounge with so many of my friends (old and new) is just the best best fun. The expo was great and I had fun hanging out with Dave Noderer at the INETA booth (thanks to MSDN for that). Stan Schultes also drove down from Sarasota for dinner one night.

Anyway – thanks again to everyone attending my talks (and especially to Chandler from Vegas who was grinning from ear to ear throughout the entire ADO.NET 2.0 session!) I will be uploading my powerpoints and demos to my website on the Talks page, here.

I will be presenting at DevConnections in the Fall in Las Vegas. The line up right now looks like this:

Leveraging SQL Server 2005 Query Notification in ASP.NET 2.0 and ADO.NET 2.0
Both ADO.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 take advantage of SQL Server 2005’s Service Broker. Although ADO.NET 2.0 is only able to receive query notification from SQL Server 2005, ASP.NET 2.0 has an implementation that will also know about database changes in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 7. This session will demonstrate how to receive notifications through both ADO.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2 as well as cover the pros and cons and the many rules surrounding Query Notification.

A Look at WSE 3.0
WSE 3.0 is slated to be the last version of WSE prior to Indigo. It is also the first release of the Web Services Enhancements that will be fully interoperable with Indigo and incorporates more of the WS-* specifications than previously. Come to this session to see highlights of WSE 3.0 as well as how it relates to what we know about WSE 2.0 and to the upcoming Indigo.

Customizing the debugging experience in Visual Studio 2005 with new Debugger Attributes
New features in .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 allow you to take more control over how information is displayed about classes while you are debugging. Debugger Visualizers are custom user interfaces that can be written to display information about .NET classes or your own custom classes. The new debugger attributes can be applied to your classes to define the formatting of debug info displayed in the watch windows. This session will walk through how to write and deploy custom visualizers as well as how to leverage the new debugger attributes found in the System.Diagnostics namespace.

Hopefully I’ll also be doing the C# for VB Developers talk again which is a look at syntax and some IDE differences as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org