As I’m working on my presentation on C# for VB(6) programmers for DevConnections (which is not aimed at converting people, but assisting them to be fluent in C# when they need to) I enjoy finding the perspective of C# developers going to VB. In Sahil Malek’s blog post about this, I loved seeing  the comment that it is confusing to use parens for so many purposes – such as indices or passing parameters – whereas C# uses [] for indices. I am just so used to that from years of working with VB! But it makes sense that it might be confusing. It’s a fun thread to read if you do find yourself swinging both ways with your code.

But my two faves in the thread are:

…if you are on my project team and you name variables in c# as follows:
foo
Foo
FOO
I’m going to kick your ass because it’s a pain in the ass to read.

and

I have the best VB.NET to C# converter on the Market and it’s only one line:
MessageBox.Show(“LearnC#Goddamit!”)

I hope that Bill appreciates my talk!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have in the past stood in front of a room filled with mensa society big brain programmers and thinkers who had been laid off from IBM who wanted to learn how to have their own successful consulting practices like li’l ol me. I was forced to tell them that some of them just aren’t going to have the people skills necessary to start their own consulting businesses and should find a partner with those skills. Well, I didn’t put it quite that way. Maybe it was more explaining what skills are necessary and saying “ask yourself if you think you could pull this off, if you think it would be enjoyable.“

I suppose this concept needs to be transferred to who should and should not be able to blog on behalf of their companies, especially when an enormous amount of weight is going to be put on every one of their words.

I’m just taking a wild guess here since I have never met the hullabaloo-ee, who could very well be one of the most personable people on the planet. Chris Sells is a good example of a pretty well rounded (slimmed down, of course) mensa brainy guy.

It just made me think of those poor few mensa-ites that really didn’t happen to have those skills.

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I got one of those viagra pharm blah blah spams this morning entitled “don’t be an as*hole Jules”.

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yes – I have felt this pain too in writing BLInk!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have been noticing the ads for Disc Stakka in MSDN Magazine and it got me thinking. Disc Stakka is  something like a jukebox that you can put 100 dvds in and somehow it’s got some built in knowledge of MSDN Subscriptions. It’s pretty big – for all of those discs.

Wouldn’t it be cool if they could make read only thumb drives (when they get cheap enough) to distribute MSDN subscriptions on? I don’t mean the magazine, I mean all of the software in a subscription. The thumbdrives are getting up to 2 GB now. Eventually they will become consumables like DVDs are now —  a lot cheaper and maybe more cost effective than producing and shipping the dvd’s every month.

Of course, I am not a hardware geek, so this could already exist and I wouldn’t even know it. 

http://www.AcehAid.org

Actually – not much of a story here as many of the non-Microsoft.NET speakers that I know who usually speak at TechEd are not speaking at the 2005 event. Only a small handful got accepted. And among those,  in some cases, their abstracts weren’t chosen. Instead, they are being asked to deliver Microsoft directed content. Even though there are plenty of developer tracks and sessions, there is still a buzz going around that TechEd is really heavy ITPro this year. But it seems only that people are whispering it to each other in dark alleys.

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

Three cheers for Josh Trupin’s MSDN Magazine editorial on the invention of words by geeks that then get echoed in the technical community. His great examples are my own pet peeve, “performant”, as in “this method is more performant” meaning “this method gives you better performance”. I have struggled with this word as well. I know it’s not real, but it just feels more efficient – probably a C# invention. Another gem is the tongue twisting “canonicalize” which someone at Microsoft derived from canonical, not realizing that the word they were searching for is “canonize”.  Anyone that is writing or presenting should definitely read this editorial. Or anyone interested in English. Or anyone who just wants to read something funny.

Posted from BLInk!

If you are interested in debugging, this should be a great chat – with the debugger team…

http://www.AcehAid.org

I didn’t realize I had to do a 1099-Misc for someone I subbed last year, but it isn’t as hard as I thought.

You have to have real paper forms from the IRS (or your accountant, or the business supply store) because they are red. These are the ones you send to the IRS. The black copies go to the Vendor.

Quickbooks can print them out if you have it set up properly. I had to mark this vendor as a 1099 vendor and then in Preferences/Tax I had to associate the “Nonemployee compensation” box with the account I used to pay the vendor from – in my case “Subcontract: Programming”.

You also need the vendors tax-id. That could be a SS# or an EIN. If you want to be official, you can have them fill out a W-9 that you can download from the www.irs.gov website and give that to you.

Don’t forget that you need a red 1096 as well. It is basically the “cover sheet” for the 1099’s that you submit to the IRS.

Remember – I am not an accountant, just another business owner. This is only basic heads up info, but check with your accountant first!!

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