I was reading Bill Ryan’s blog rant about Option Strict Off, and although I whole heartedly agree with him when it comes to writing .NET code, (that is turn Option Strict On and leave it On !!), I think some folk have missed the point as to why VB.NET has Option Strict Off. Now if […]

I read some great lists of software people have on their USB keys, but so far no-one has included one very very important thing … the ability to boot of the key ! On my USB key I have dos 6.2 and windows 3.1 and I can boot of the key and run windows 3.1 […]

You may have heard the big news that generics is now to be included in the Common Language Subset (CLS).  That’s really cool for users of VB.NET 2005 (and C# 2.0), but what if you want to know if an assembly is compliant with the earlier specification of CLSCompliant ? Considering the actual specification is […]

This is a ping back to Mitch’s ping back regarding my earlier entries on Aliasing in VB. Mitch suggests that instead of using Imports, that VB.Net could take the same approach as C# has.  Well let’s look at what C# does in a bit more detail… For C#, using aliasing-versioning is a two (or three) […]

A company I am an investor in (there, early disclosure out of the way ) focuses on cognitive ability monitoring and testing. They, CogState, have products for sports concussion management and products for measuring cognitive effects of therapeutically drugs etc.  But one aspect of their business I was not so aware of till a recent […]

Yesterday I blogged about Aliasing in Vb.NET and how I would like that to be extended to add more power, flexibility and to address future needs of versioning.  They syntax I proposed was :    Imports [alias = ]NamespaceOrType[@Assembly[,version]] In the above, “alias” can have dot syntax in it, and Assembly probably should allow paths.  […]

In Vb.NET we can use the Imports statement to create aliases, such as :  Imports VB = Microsoft.VisualBasic Then in code we can simply type VB. And intellisense lists the members of the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace.  Pretty cool huh ? But what would be way cooler is if we could use the . syntax in the […]

I blogged earlier about product support lifecycles.  Okay, I use to have the URL’s but I didn’t so I used google.  Often it’s quicker than trying to look through any list of URLs I might keep anyway So I searched for +”Visual Basic 6″ +support +lifecycle +site:.microsoft.com When I saw the last link on the […]

An email I got today was asking about Microsoft support for Visual Basic 5 and also about Visual Basic 6 and asp.   I knew that they were both just about out of time (as far as MS is concerned) but thought I’d better check…. http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/support/vb6.aspx lists VB6 main stream support as finishing on March 31st.  […]