I’ve been rummaging through the Windows Vista User Interface Experience Guidelines draft, a 33 MB pdf file, and it poses some interesting questions around warning and exception dialog messages.  Now apparently it is not OK to present the user with an exception message and an OK button.  Instead the guidelines recommend the button caption should […]

I got an interesting email today, which, to paraphrase, said: I would like a syntax where I can say “an XElement that follows this XSD” This question actually digs deep into the issue of strong typing versus dynamic typing and what it really is we want from a type system. A lot of people think […]

of one hour of my birthday time thanks to day light savings 🙂 The good news is it means summer is here !! Oh, and I counted seven clocks I had to set the time on: 3 timers, 2 clock radios, 1 phone/answering machine, 1 car stereo. No wonder I don’t wear a watch 😉

When VB moved to .NET the claim was made it would be a first class citizen on the .NET platform. Despite that claim VB is often not supported in new SDKs or emerging platforms. Two major platforms where Microsoft has chosen to omit VB are: XNA .NET Micro Framework Over the last month or so […]

Of programming languages, VB has in many ways had a checkered history mainly due to the changes from VB6 to VB7 (VB.NET). I remember clearly the change from “Wend” to “End While”.  Some folks claimed that was “gratuitous”.  To me, I couldn’t see what the big deal was about… the IDE would fix it if […]

  31. Templates for anonymous types It’d be nice if you could change the template used for anonymous types, such as to include INotifyPropertyChanged or other functionality. If you add a template to your project, you could then specify which template to use, e:g Dim customer = New With{.FirstName=”Fred”, .LastName=”Flintstone”} BasedOn mytemplate  Similarly: Dim projection […]

Today I was only going to add one, item, #29, but in writing the samples for it two more items came to mind. One however was an IDE thing more than a language thing, so just 2 items for the list today 🙂   29. Embrace declarative style codingVB led the way with declarative coding […]

I’ve still got some more thoughts, but these are beginning to be big items, so I’m only touching on two more today Backing fields nested inside Properties      Public Property Name() As String       Dim m_Name As String       Get          Return m_Name       End Get       Set(ByVal value As String)          m_Name = […]

StandardizationIOSO or ECMA standardization, to allow fully open development and meet organizational and governmental requirements for open standards.  At present part of the language is under Patent protection, making it unclear for example if a third party provider can use the IsNot operator for example. start of a statement with ()’sInstead of having to create […]

Expression trees allow you to walk through all the information about an expression.  So you can use this to create a NameOf function similar to the one I outlined in my post on VB 10 thoughts (part 5)      <Extension()> _    Function NameOf(Of T1)(ByVal obj As T1, ByVal fn As Expression(Of Func(Of T1, […]