I'm not seeing any chatter about this here yet.  Of course the whole thing is only a few weeks old at this point.

So far I'm seeing a few posts on VBx:

http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2007/05/01/vb-on-silverlight.aspx

http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/visual-basic-language-on-silverlight.html

... and of course lots on Silverlight itself, which looks/smells like a Flash competitor.  This used to be called WPF/E.

So it appears that "VB" (or at least the .Net incarnation) is being positioned as a VBScript/VBA replacement for both Windows and Mac.  Probably outside Silverlight it'll first emerge in a new Office release.  No idea what this means for PowerShell but perhaps we'll see some convergence.

I also can't be sure whether this means VB.Net will "lose its legs" as it follows this evolutionary path or not.  Maybe VB.Net will vacate its niche alongside C# for "traditional" CLR (non-DLR) development?  I pity the poor fool who decided to invest heavily in VB.Net if that is true.

I have my doubts though.  The Silverlight 1.1 JavaScript-to-IL compiler was built in VB.Net.  Maybe VB.Net is simply splitting into two parallel paths like the old VB/VBA dichotomy?  A pretty well-circulated "poster" graphic mapping the Silverlight universe seems to list both VB.NET and VBx.Net (listed as Visual Basic and VBx respectively).

Platform coverage seems to include IE 6 & 7, Firefox 1.5 & 2.0, and Opera... on Windows 2000 through Vista and Mac Leopard & Tiger.  A sort of stripped CLR weighing in at about 4MB seems to be at the core.  I assume from the chatter that it contains at least some of the "dynamic language" support so maybe it's more of a stripped DLR.

Isn't technology churn wonderful?  Anyone else having trouble keeping up?

I gave up on keeping up on all aspects of it awhile back. And I am still very young (just entered the business world a year ago). I like keeping up on the hardware and only the specific programming languages I use.
Other than that I prefer to keep up on news such as that from TechDirt.
For the hardware I even only really keep up on whats going on with graphics cards and processors. The rest I just find only at the times I need it (constructing new computers).
There are just way way too many fields to keep up on all things computers.
And I really enjoy programming, just more as a pastime rather than where I think I will end up going with my future.

~
Give a man some fire, he will be warm for a day, Set a man on fire, he will be warm for the rest of his life.

Give each MIS manager a Supercomputer and a staff to do dataentry on IT changes and one might be able to keep up with the "Changes in the IT World".

David W. Grewe Dave

LOL I only bought a DVD player last year!

Granted i work on fairly cutting edge VoIP hardware, but ask me about the latest gadget and I'll draw a blank...

Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

I know what you mean.

I go into a store and see those giant flat-screen TVs and I think "Wow, who needs that?  I just bought a 24" TV 5 years ago for cheap and it works fine yet."

I suppose if I walked into some electronics store a fast talking salesman could wave a shiny foil blister pack of red Sudafed tablets at me and claim it replaced 500 DVDs... and I might fall for it for a second or two anyway.

The recent product churn in this industry reminds me of walking through a large flea market, populated by vendors hawking little glass figurines, gewgaws, and miscellaneous microscopic junque.  After a couple of hours, you'll contract "stuff overload", your eyes begin to bleed, and you have to get the hell out of there.

Phil Hegedusich
Senior Programmer/Analyst
IIMAK
http://www.iimak.com
-----------
Not NULL-terminated yet.

Generally, when I am looking into getting a new gadget, I just read up on the technology then.
When I first decided I wanted a new monitor, it was research time. Learned all about refresh rates, dot pitch, max resolutions, etc. Then compared the choices per price.
Simple, in a long drawn out kind of way because of research time. But it gets the job done and I don't feel like they can pull the wool over my eyes when I walk into a store (or shop online).

~
Give a man some fire, he will be warm for a day, Set a man on fire, he will be warm for the rest of his life.

Hi,
Some time in 2004 you were searching for a mstcp sdk containing dos_sock.lib.
For a few hard weeks I shared your desperation for not finding this covetted piece of software I was in desperate need of!
Have you found it?
Well, if you are still interested I did!
Google for "mstcpsdk", you'll find on some chinese servers this link:
 http://xuguangfz.blogchina.com/inc/MSTCPSDK.doc
Download it, rename it ...rar and unrar it!
Do it now! who knows, it may disappear any second.
I was so happy to find it that I joined this forum just to pass this info to you and to the guy you were talking to at the moment, (JWILIS - but he seems not be active on this site anymore)- your chat gave me the great tip.
 For reference, the old thread, now closed, was "thread314-855131: QB/VBDOS and C Libs (Sockets)".
 And again "Found MSTCPSDK - TCP SOCKETS under DOS LANMAN Client"
 for other "googlers" to find this.

Best luck!
Dan N.

Yes I recall those discussions.  I don't have a need today but I'll go get it and take a look for future reference.

Thanks.

Speaking of trying to keep up with things: http://www.ftponline.com/vsm/2007_05/magazine/departments/guestop/

_____
Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks,  The software I write sucks.  It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me

Well I was with her for a bit there until she flipped and concluded:

Quote:

I am more optimistic today.

I don't quite follow this break in logic.  It read like gloom and doom, and suddenly the sun came out for her.

Did a paragraph get left out?

I understand the remark about VB3 and coping with the Windows API.  I do not see the connection between .Net and the swirl of .Net's own expansion in a million directions.  How is .Net going to solve the problem... which is .Net?


She sounds like somebody who said "the emperor has no clothes" but then the thought police got to her and she's now running around denying her previous words.  Recent Microsoft hire, or what?

What did I miss here?

Ok, I've read her 2004 article now too.

I get it.  She's a Quisling, then as now.

Yeah, it's a non-sequitur.  She didn't present any reasoning behind her optimism.

The Foundations are no panacea.  They continue the baby-with-the-bathwater path that .NET has taken.  So *sigh* I'll learn to use the new stuff, until the newer stuff makes it obsolete :-|

Interesting interpretation.  I read it as her feeling that 1 or 2 versions from now, we'll hit a threshold and the curve will flatten allowing us to focus on the business problem instead of the underlying technical issues.  I suppose I'm being simplistic.

_____
Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks,  The software I write sucks.  It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me

Sounds like gloom n doom to me, but maybe because I am a 'canary'

MasterRacker - thats' what I got from her conclusion as well.  I don't know that I see it happening though...  

Ignorance of certain subjects is a great part of wisdom

Quote:

I read it as her feeling that 1 or 2 versions from now, we'll hit a threshold and the curve will flatten allowing us to focus on the business problem instead of the underlying technical issues.

Yes, I was kind of hoping for her to show how this may come about.  All we got from Dollard though is that her strategies of "faking it" and specialization will buy time until... something happens.  In the meantime hang on and try not to die in the thinning atmosphere.

My interpretaion of the article is "Yeah, .Net is wiping out hobbyists, one man shops, and in-house development in droves.  But if you don't stick to this thorny path you're impatient, stupid, and lazy.  Hang in there for five more years and Santa Claus really will arrive and he'll be serving cake and ice cream."

I was at the MSDN Roadshow in London back on Monday.  We're currently evaluating platforms for developing new software in, as we (my employer and I) realise we can't stick with VB6 (and Office VBA) forever.
Pretty much all of the examples were in C#, including those relating to office development. Those with VB.NET snippets were very much a sideline alongside the C#, which has put me off learning VB.Net if that is Microsoft's attitude towards it.

Whilst the examples on screen given were very pretty, I really couldn't see how they could be used in my own organisation - I have a need to develop data based applications, either web or Windows client, mostly based around SQL Server on the back end, and nothing I saw actually indicated to me that writing new apps in .Net would be a good thing from my business perspective.

I realise that the demos were designed to make the new features of the systems shown look good, but even so, the examples they gave weren't really relevant to me.

Flash has a better overall client platform range than Silverlight, and is more widely known.

I must admit after this, I'm sorely tempted to go to the Javascript/CSS/HTML/PHP route for web applications rather than ASP.NET.  This gives me the option of hosting it on a non Windows server as well.

John

Maybe I missed Dollard's point after all then.  Could she have been hinting that C# and VBx will go separate ways, covering different problem domains?

That might be the simplification and shakeout she was alluding to.  Perhaps she's simply constrained by a non-disclosure agreement and unable to be more specific.

I could see this happening.  I'm not sure everyone would be happy about it, but it would bring some clarity.

Here's the scoop on VBx:
http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2007/05/01/20383.aspx
http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2007/05/02/20395.aspx

Dollard's latest article came out this month (not available online yet).  Basically she is saying that there are new paradigms emerging, not sure exactly what, but it'll be exciting and hang on...

_____
Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks,  The software I write sucks.  It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me

Regarding VBx/Silverlight...how is anything *truly* cross-platform if it needs a runtime?  Anyone can make any language/tool and it's only as 'cross-platform' as the runtimes.

I see a lot of new tools, etc, coming out, but it still seems like there's nothing truly new.  It's all just companies racing to get a standard adopted and installed on as big a base as possible.  

I said the same about .Net when it was coming out, and got all sorts of guff from the kool-aid drinking microserfs, and here it is years later and I still get .Net runtime errors due to the wrong .Net runtime, problems where it works here but not there, etc.  Like I said, you can make any language you want, and as long as you make an emulator for every platform out there, you could conceivably call it 'cross-platform', but it really isn't.
--Jim

Too true. Until recently I had several versions of Java installed, just to run different pieces of software from the same Vendor ... Aarrrggghh

Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

Well if that's not cross-platform... then what would be?

The only alternative I see is to try doing it at the source code level.  Yet there you'll need compilers, linkers, etc. as well as libraries for each targeted platform.

I guess my point is that nothing really is, but 'they' keep saying they've developed the magic program/tool/language that *is* cross platform.  

I've mentioned in the past that a universal standard would be nice--and the analogy I've used is the way countries do most of their roads and many utilities:  It simply doesn't make logistical sense to have 6 water mains and 6 sewer lines trenched to every single house in the country, from 6 different vendors.  Same with roads--we can't have 12 "Interstate 80"s running across the country, each competing for tolls, when a single one that is funded by the general population--whether they may or may not use it--works generally fine.

With OS's, or at least a virtual machine or browser, it would be great if the logistics and the financial side of things could be worked out to do something somewhat similar.  The irony is that this idea itself may not be logistically possible.
--Jim

We have the universal standard already: Windows on x86 hardware.

Yes I know how much this answer sucks.  But I accepted it years ago with all its warts.  Doesn't make me happy, but there's more than a little truth in it.

I would consider accepting the Windows over x86 if Windows worked with itself.
So many cross version issues its not even funny.
So no, need a better answer =P

~
Give a man some fire, he will be warm for a day, Set a man on fire, he will be warm for the rest of his life.

Windows 2000 had a life cycle of March 2000 to March 2004.  Windows XP has a life cycle of December 2001 to January 2008.  These are "general license availability" dates.

Four years isn't bad, six is better, and there were two years and a few months of overlap.  This doesn't sound too bad though I agree it could be improved.

If you're trying to support the later NT OSs and the obsolete Win9x OSs at the same time you have to expect some differences.  If you think about it though the amount of portability between the two OS families is pretty good.  I have lots of programs that will install on either type of OS unchanged, not even requiring recompilation.

It's hard to expect old versions of either OS to support things introduced in later ones though.

What's the problem?

I think lots of us would like an "OS for life" but that's not in the cards from any source.