A couple of years back I was closely involved with helping developers take their investments in VB6 forward (I run http://blogs.msdn.com/goto100 for a time which still has great stuff in its archives). Those with sharp eyes will have noticed that the (IMHO rather poor) Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard is no longer part of Visual Studio as of Visual Studio 2010. My recommendation has always been to look to the partners for great tools to help with the grunt work of moving the code – but all these tools ......
This show is a bonus edition. It includes a brief overview of the announcements this week around Azure at the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans and then a 30minute interview recorded at Qcon 2009 in London earlier this year. This time around, I am the interviewee for a change. Many thanks to Ryan Slobojan and InfoQ for letting me take the original video interview and create a podcast from it. If you prefer, you can watch the video on the InfoQ site. I was asked the following: Eric, what's ......
I have been sitting on a long list of part finished posts on Visual Basic “stuff” intended for my other blog http://blogs.msdn.com/goto1... Last week I finally started to finish them and get them published. Enjoy. Virtualization and Visual Basic 6.0 applications There may be some circumstances where upgrading a VB6 application is not feasible, for example it may rely on a control that simply does not work in the target operating system. I came across a couple of articles on MSDN that discussed the ......
Back in March I presented at Qcon 2009 in London which is a great conference. I also was interviewed which is now up on InfoQ. TBH – it isn’t a bad interview yet at the time it felt awful right from the first moment when after agreeing the opening question before the camera rolled, I got asked something completely different :-) Then it went pretty broad :-) You can watch the video on the InfoQ site which includes a transcript. The questions I was asked were: Eric, what's going to be coming up in ......
Nothing special – just a list of good Visual Basic .NET articles I read over the last month. Enjoy: Visual Basic Lambdas are not quite the same as C# Lambdas. This article explains how to work around the differences. Visual Basic needs a hand with iterators as it has no specific syntax. Useful when you live in a world of LINQ and IEnumerable. This article shows you how to create iterators in VB. Combining XML Literals, WCF and LINQ to create temaplates. Interesting stuff. Add “Ruby like” MethodMissing ......
Somebody posted a comment up my blog which contained something along the lines of “and VB .NET does the clever try catch stuff that C# can’t” . That got parked at the back of my brain and I finally went off looking for what this was. Turns out there was a great post on it back in February 2009 on the CLR team blog “Catch, Rethrow and Filters – Why should you care?” . Turns out VB allows us to inspect an exception without affecting state and conditionally decide whether or not to handle the exception. ......
I was looking at some statistics on developer book sales in the months leading up to Christmas 2008. Overall C# outsold VB (there are a lot of C# books to choose from!) BUT VB 2008 had three of the top five slots including the number one slot. Unfortunately I can’t share the data but I felt it was worth sharing the good news :-) Well done VB!
The Microsoft Patterns & Practices’ Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (formerly code-named "Prism") was released with a heavy bias on C# which was a real shame for the many Visual Basic developers who are working on Xaml based user interfaces right now. The good news is there is now a shiny new download just for Visual Basic folks. This download includes QuickStarts, Hands-On Labs, and How-to Topics in Visual Basic all reviewed by senior folks in the VB team. It also includes: ......
[Survey is live from January 21st to January 26th, 2009] I have been working with my marketing colleague Sarah to create a survey to better understand the current reliance on Visual Basic 6.0 in the United Kingdom and what plans companies have to move to .NET (or not!). The survey is a little over 20 questions but should only take you a minute or two to complete. As an incentive we have a number of four day Visual Basic 2008 training courses as prizes worth £1640 – very nice. Remember it is just ......
On Monday I gave a session on “Windows Azure and a little SQL Data Services” for the .NET Developer Network in Bristol with the main focus being on storage. Thanks to all those who attended – and I hope to be back in the audience next month :-) The main links I wanted to share were: www.azure.com and specifically the downloads: Windows Azure SDK Visual Studio tools and templates The table sample I showed using StorageClient is available for download along with a walkthrough screencast Code sample ......