In the MSDN Flash June 25th issue my colleague Mike gave his farewell. His mention of a typewriter has inadvertently reminded me of a great story from my early days of playing around with computers - but I will save that for "Editor's Intro" in the next...

I have created a page with my future "gigs" listed - all an opportunity to see some Visual Basic, chuckle when I add a semicolon and pull me up on it if I do C# from start to finish :-) For the moment it is just a simple list but it is crying out to be...

Refactoring is a hot topic and something many developers are expecting to be available straight OOTB. Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 gave C# developers a whapping 6: Rename Extract Method Remove/Reorder parameters Promote Local Extract Interface Encapsulate...

One of the roles of my new team is to offer a "menu" of .NET sessions to UK user groups. I was pondering about adding a couple of specific Visual Basic sessions to that "menu" and see if there was take up. I came up with the following. Any thoughts? Visual...

As I get ready to transition role, I find myself increasingly thinking "what happened in the last 12 months that would be useful to take into the next 12 months". One of the great bits about my current role is I spend a lot of time 1:1 in day long, two...

I was wondering what folks felt the job market looked like out there for Visual Basic .NET developers? Based on my experiences with ISVs it appears healthy to me - but I have had some feedback to say that Visual Basic .NET jobs are rare. I would love...

Hi all, the last week flew by. Thanks very much for the comments and emails I received during that time. Keep them coming - especially any great VB resources. As mentioned previously, I don't switch role until July 1st and hence my VB posts will be a...

I love to put faces to names (not least because I am terrible with names but pretty decent with faces!). I am doing a short 10minute intro as part of the keynote of Fest08 tomorrow and hope to work in the back of the room as much as possible during the...

Mandy in marketing asked me to "Create some text that we could use on a flyer to tell folks why they might want to visit that new blog of yours on Visual Basic". My first thought was "Cripes - I haven't got any real content yet!" - but I'm glad to say...

William has been heavily involved in helping UK companies migrate their VB6 applications to .NET. William kindly agreed to a short interview. Enjoy. William, could you just say a few words about your role inside Logica? Hi Eric, I’m the Lead Architect...

A little over a year back I first spoke to Roberto to see if Artinsoft could help me with a large ISV with a significant investment in Visual Basic 6. Since then I have had the pleasure to meet Roberto on a number of occasions and have seen Artinsoft...

Back in April I posted a brief summary of some resources which my ISVs were finding useful as they considered moving to .NET. Since then I have been pointed by a colleague to VB Migration Partner which looks really interesting. Hopefully I can dig into...

Check out these screen clips which clearly shows that most folks are doing Visual Basic :-) Just kidding. vs C# Ok - admittedly this was on http://www.vbforums.com/ :-) (Good forums by the way!)

I see in my travels lots of developers using C# - but I also see plenty doing Visual Basic .NET, just not quite as many. I have been attempting to get a better feel for just how many folks are using which - and have been using highly scientific techniques...

My name is Eric and I am a Virgo :-) More importantly, as of June 2008 I am an Application Architect in Microsoft UK that has spent the last 12 years working with UK ISVs to help them explore and adopt the latest development technologies. On July 1st...

Hello folks and welcome to Goto100. The obvious question is - what is Goto100? There is a short answer and a longer answer to that. The short answer: It is resource for developers in the UK. For developers using Visual Basic .NET and developers faced...