Visual Basic
I'm a big fan of Visual Basic. When I was a writer on the VSTO team, we always wrote our code examples in both C# and Visual Basic; samples that shipped with the product also had a fair mix of C# and Visual Basic. Sometimes, if you look at the Visual Basic sample code, it kind of looks like the code was written in C# and then fed through one of those fancy converter tools to produce the Visual Basic code. The code works, but its not always written in the way that a VB developer would write it. I always tried to keep the Visual Basic developer in mind when creating code examples (and more often than not, I wrote the code in VB and used one of those fancy converter tools to produce the C# code).
I've recently moved over to the Visual Basic User Education team at Microsoft. So I'm really looking forward to having the opportunity to help the Visual Basic developer by writing content and code samples specific to their needs. What about VSTO you might ask? Well I plan to continue to write about VSTO on this blog and create video demos that show you how you can create VSTO solutions, but my focus will be on using Visual Basic.
As you may know, I have written a book on VSTO (called Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office for Mere Mortals) with co-author Paul Stubbs. This book is written for the VBA developer, and all code examples are in Visual Basic. We've just finished the final draft of the book and it is currently being tech reviewed. I'll continue to post updates about the book in this blog.
I also plan to expand this blog to include other types of applications that you can create using Visual Basic.
--Kathleen
