March was a month of extreme weather.  The first two weeks were record highs. This really brought on the tomatoes.  Then the last two weeks were colder than usual, and had a bit of rain.  The rain put out the nearby tyre fire:   I think the smoke helped ripen the tomatoes and give them […]

Reading the blog entries around OOXML is almost as bad as sitting through an episode of Days of Our Lives.  Most of the opposition comes directly from different people that are directly vested in ODF. And now that the vote looks like it might accept OOXML, the conspiracy stories start, such as claiming of stacking.  […]

Paul Vick posted a speculative post as to Automatically Implemented properties for VB10.  Although it’s kind of nice, it really is just a minor modification from what C# did in 3.0 and misses a lot of the “what if” scenarios we should be asking. What if : You want to add a break point on […]

Paul Stovell finally notices the lack of support for statement lambdas in VB9.  Unfortunately Vb9 only supports lambda expressions such as can be expressed in today’s expression trees.  .NET 4.0 will most probably include support for lambda statements, and hopefully at the same time VB10 will have support for them too. When support for multi […]

Patrick Meader writes on the divide between VB and C# inside Microsoft, and raises an interesting question. My response is probably going to be lengthy; more than I have time for at present. In the meanwhile, what do you think of the issues raised in Pat’s editorial ?

Does VB need prefix and postfix increment and decrement operators ?  Here’s an example I posted today for a question on adding an index with LINQ:    Sub Main()       Dim values() As String = {“aaa”, “bbb”, “ccc”}       Dim index As Int32 = -1         Dim view = From v In values _ […]

No, not the chocolate ones or the decorated chicken eggs… I mean software easter eggs.  Like the ones in Excel where you could display an animated scroll of all the contributors. And they had similar in Outlook, and even in Visual Studio 6 !  Has all the fun (and chocolate and caramel centres)  been taken […]

Earlier today I followed Soma’s link to the updated Visual Studio Express pages. Soma gave emphasis that the “approach was to add Silverlight without making it look like we just dropped something new into our existing site without any thought“.  Hmmm, could have fooled me 😉 The first thing I noticed (other than having to […]

“First time or casual programming” : that’s apparently what VB is good for.  If you want a great combination of power and productivity that’s what C# is good for…… well, at least that’s how Microsoft tells it to us. Microsoft, why do you treat VB so patronisingly ?