The Future of Visual Basic Talk
I just finished my last session here at DevTeach called "The Future of Visual Basic" and it was another packed room. I have to say I really enjoyed giving this talk because the audience was awesome. I just love the Visual Basic community. When you get a bunch of VB geeks in a room talking about language, data access and n-tier applications the excitement is just too much.
I (as always) had way too much content to present in way too little time so I had to cut out the VB Silverlight demo but fortunately Alan did two sessions on building Silverlight apps and more than half the people had seen it already so I didn't feel so bad.
I did 50 minutes of LINQ and VB language features including XML literals and people were very jazzed. I got some good questions on anonymous types and LINQ to SQL especially. One person had the same question I had when I first saw LINQ to SQL: "What is the T-SQL code it's writing and how do I know it's good?" <paraphrase>. I told him about the Log feature of the DataContext so he could see for himself. For more information on the LINQ to SQL and the O/R designer check out Young's webcast.
I also spoke to the new tools around making n-tier applications really easy to build with the new n-tier datasets and WCF proxy type sharing. I didn't have time to build the application from scratch but I did show a completed solution I built from scratch in my Datasources and Data binding talk. You can also see John do it here in this webcast.
Finally I spent 20 minutes on the DLR and VB 10 (VBx). I showed an implementation of Visual Basic on the DLR that showed interactive programming and dynamic event handlers. People were VERY impressed with this (lots of applause when I showed the dynamic event handler). This version of VB is NOT VBScript, it is VB on .NET and the DLR. For more info, check out Amanda and Paul's posts.
I think what made the talk most enjoyable is that I had a C# developer come up to me at the end and tell me that based on all these new features and the bright future of our language, that he's making the switch to VB!! Yea! Also, everyone chipped in and Dave came up at the end and gave me flowers! Wow! What an awesome community!!!!
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About Beth Massi
Beth is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft and is responsible for producing and managing content for business application developers, driving community features and team participation onto MSDN Developer Centers (http://msdn.com), and helping make Visual Studio one of the best developer tools in the world. She also produces regular content on her blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi), Channel 9, and a variety of other developer sites and magazines. As a community champion and a long-time member of the Microsoft developer community she also helps with the San Francisco East Bay .NET user group and is a frequent speaker at various software development events. Before Microsoft, she was a Senior Architect at a health care software product company and a Microsoft Solutions Architect MVP. Over the last decade she has worked on distributed applications and frameworks, web and Windows-based applications using Microsoft development tools in a variety of businesses. She loves teaching, hiking, mountain biking, and driving really fast.
