The Summit was terrific!
It was fantastic to talk with the VB Team, get their insights and share my thoughts on the direction of where VB is going.
I love Visual Basic and we even got to see Anders Hejlsberg do a demo in VB. It was during his talk on LINQ.
In case you don't know VB9 is all about LINQ, yes we are getting some other great features and enhancements, but this is the Major New element to improve our productivity.
I look forward to using the March CTP of "Orcas" and learning more about how we can improve productivity with this OR Mapping to our database objects.
I decided while at the Summit that there is not enough VB Specific coverage in our area (Phoenix) so stay tuned for a major announcement soon in this regard.
I had a chance to spend some time with some special friends in the VB Community, Kathleen Dollard who is hard at work improving her Code Generation tools and looking at incorporating LINQ into them. Stan Schultes is working on Software Factories and this sounds really interesting.
WPF, WPF/E and LINQ were the main focuses of the discussions I had, not just because they really interest me, but these technologies will surely change the face of development over the next 2 years and will become our primary focus on new learning.
Something that is also not getting enough coverage is the Interop Tools for adding .NET components into your existing VB6 Projects. These powerpacks can be really handy for adding new functionality to existing applications that need some updating but don't require full recoding to bring them current. They can increase the lifespan of your tried and true apps while leveraging some new capabilities of .NET.
Copyright © 2003-2004 H. Steele Price, IV -
All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer, your mother, or any government agency.