Robert Green's Visual Basic Blog : Visual Basic Whidbey

VB Suggestions Update Sept 16

rgreen_msft — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:35:00 GMT

As of this afternoon the VB team has 232 suggestions entered through the MSDN Product Feedback Center. This is up from 186 the last time I reported, which was August 25. Over the past two weeks we have made a serious effort to reduce our backlog on these and have now resolved 166 of the suggestions, up from 104. By the end of next week we hope to have the backlog mostly eliminated and moving forward we hope to respond to suggestions within a week of receiving them.

Status	Total
Not yet resolved	66
By Design	43
Won’t Fix	38
Fixed	35
Postponed	34
Duplicate	8
Not Repro	6
External	2

See my August 25 entry for detailed explanations on all of these categories. In a nutshell, By Design means we did it this way on purpose and there is nothing to consider changing. Won't Fix means someone asked for a change and we won't/can't change it. Fixed means it was either in there all along or we're adding it to VB 2005. Postponed means it's a good idea that won't happen in VB 2005 but we'll consider it for versions after that. A Duplicate could mean the suggestion is actually a bug that was already entered or it could be a duplicate of another suggestion. Not Repro means either we couldn't see what you see or we don't understand and you didn't respond to our request for more info. External means some other team is being counted on to do the work.

Visual Studio Standard announced

rgreen_msft — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:34:00 GMT

Jay Roxe explains VS Standard in eWeek
"With Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition we've recognized there is no one right tool for all developers and we've tried to target the line at the different types of developers," said Jay Roxe, product manager for Visual Basic, in an interview with eWEEK. "With Standard Edition we're targeting individuals who develop professional commercial quality applications but who develop on their own. The announcement of Standard Edition completes the picture for the Visual Studio product line."

and in InfoWorld
“With the Standard product, we’re looking to move the Visual Basic 6.0 developer forward and also looking at Web developers who might be using, say, [Macromedia’s] Dreamweaver,” for Web development, said Jay Roxe, Microsoft product marketing manager for Visual Studio.

Good ink Jay!!

VB suggestions update

rgreen_msft — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 20:10:00 GMT

As of 8/24, the VB team has 186 suggestions entered through the MSDN Product Feedback Center (up from 169 the week before), 168 of which have been entered since Beta 1. Of the 186 total suggestions, 104 have been resolved (up from 93 the week before).

Status	Total
Not yet resolved	82
Won’t Fix	26
By Design	24
Fixed	23
Postponed	18
Not Repro	7
Duplicate	5
External	1

What does all this mean? First a little background. As you hopefully know, you can enter not only bugs, but also suggestions, at the Product Feedback Center (PFC). Do you want features added to the product? Do you want existing features to behave differently? Do you want existing features taken out? Let us know. All bug and suggestions entered via the PFC are copied into our internal bug database where they wait to be triaged.

Every morning (Monday - Friday anyway <bg>) I run a triage query that shows me all the VB bugs and suggestions that came in the previous day. I assign the bugs to Marc Rodman. Marc reviews the bug, checks to make sure he can repro it (see http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?feedbackid=19bbb25f-f51e-405b-ada3-d9c751ca142c for an example of when he couldn't and asked the submitter for help) and assigns it to the different team if needed (more on that later).

I am the first person to look at VB suggestions (again, this happens daily). Sometimes these can be answered right away. Sometimes they need to be sent to another team. The majority of suggestions get assigned to the Program Manager who owns the feature area. Language suggestions go to Amanda Silver, My to Joe Binder, Data to Steve Lasker, Projects and ClickOnce to Sean Draine, IDE to Jay Schmelzer and Express to Paul Yuknewicz. Some I assign to myself, particularly if they don't fall into one of these feature areas. Before I assign the suggestion to one of them I thank the sender and acknowledge that we got the suggestion and will look at it. I have to admit that this acknowledgement is a more recent thing and we didn't do this the first few weeks. Hey, we're learning. <g>

The table above shows 8 different statuses for suggestions. What do they mean?

Not yet resolved (82 of 186)
The suggestion has been assigned to a PM, who has not yet answered. This doesn't mean the PM hasn't looked at the suggestion. It just means they haven't answered. Suggestions are very important to us, but let's be honest, they aren't as important right now as bugs. We are driving down bugs on the road to Beta 2 and if a PM has 25 bugs on their plate and 10 suggestions, they are going to focus on the bugs. That said, it does no good for a customer to make a suggestion and not hear anything from us for a month or more. We are trying to strike the appropriate balance and will get better at it. Thanks for your patience.

Won't Fix vs Postponed
Marie has talked about Won't Fix vs Postponed in the Product Feedback Center blog and whether customers know the difference and what each means to them. Both mean we aren't going to implement the feature in VS 2005. Won't Fix means we won't consider doing it in the version after that and Postponed means we would consider the feature post VS 2005. That's what they should mean. I don't think we have been consistent in this usage although we are trying to be.

Won't Fix (26 of 186)
Auto Update feature in Setup Project (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?feedbackid=31c09c32-de5a-422a-8a81-a60e073dad4e) is a good example of a Won't Fix. FDBK12582 asked for an Auto Update feature in the Setup project. Sean replied that auto-update is a feature of the ClickOnce deployment model and the feature would be in there rather than in the Setup project. So moving forward (this time and in the future) we will focus our efforts on ClickOnce as the deployment technology and are not likely to add this to the previous deployment technology.

Upgraded Windows Forms (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?feedbackid=120644d7-c1f6-442d-8ec8-297b6648f549) is another good example. Shorty points out that when you upgrade a VS 2003 project to VS 2005 the forms are not upgraded to the VS 2005 style (Form1.vb and Form1.Designer.vb). So your new forms will have the designer generated code in the Designer file but your existing forms won't. I responded that we looked at this but decided the risk of getting it wrong outweighed the benefit. We don't want to take a form that works and convert it into a form that doesn't. I also pointed out how to manually do the conversion.

By Design (24 of 186)
Don't use ''' for XML comment designation (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?feedbackid=d38461b0-1cc0-4f2b-9b84-33276943f7eb) is a good example of By Design. FDBK12582 asked us to use /// for XML comments like C#. I explaned that quotes are the way VB has always done comments and that's why we chose ''' for XML comments.

Fix "And" and "Or" Keywords to shortcircuit and drop that goofy "AndAlso" and "OrElse" stratements (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?feedbackid=d3a0e50b-7025-4c0f-a33c-7060ebb2f6f2) is another good example. Matt Gertz (a dev on the VB team) responded to this suggestion from dkangel explaining that having And and Or shortcircuit would break VB6 (and prior) code so we chose not to do it. Also, dropping AndAlso and OrElse would cause much pain among customers currently using those statements.

Fixed (23 of 186)
Very often these suggestions are for features the customer has not yet discovered in VS 2005. XML Comments, Renaming, TryCast are a few examples. In a couple of cases the suggestion was for something we are going to do in VS 2005.

Postponed (18 of 186)
These are all fine ideas. But we won't be able to implement them this time around. We will consider them for next time. Keep these coming and vote on the ones you really like. These suggestions will help us build a better VB and a VB that is more of what you want.

Not repro (7 of 186)
Either we couldn't see the same behavior the customer saw or we asked for more information and didn't get a response.

Duplicate (5 of 186)
2 of the 5 were suggestions that had already been entered. 3 of these are duplicates of existing bugs that we are working on fixing either for Beta 2 or RTM.

External (1 of 186)
This one is also an existing bug, but the work is being done by a different team.

Internal terminology vs external terminology
You will not find any suggestions resolved as External in the Product Feedback Center. How do you know what that means? And if it is a bug, why should you care who has to fix it? The Microsoft Status of the External bug is still Under Review. The comments from Microsoft state that it is a bug. It is still Under Review because the team that is fixing it is still fixing it. Also, the 3 Duplicate suggestions have Under Review as their Microsoft Status on the PFC. They are duplicates of existing bugs and once those bugs are resolved the suggestions will be resolved as well (hopefully Fixed).

I will provide this summary every week so you can keep track, along with us, of the suggestions. Thanks to those of you who have made suggestions. And we encourage all of you to send us more.

Community Tech Preview for MSDN Subscribers

rgreen_msft — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 04:15:00 GMT

Word on the street (or at least in the hallways) is that MSDN subscribers should have access to the Tech Preview for download sometime this week. Look for it. Pass it on.

VS 2005 Community Tech Preview

rgreen_msft — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 23:51:00 GMT

At VSLive this week we handed out the first VS 2005 Community Tech Preview. This is our first updated bits since the PDC Tech Preview and represents more than 6 months of coding. The Community Tech Preview is not the same quality as a Beta. It is more of a snapshot of how the product looked at the time the snapshot was taken. That said, it is in fairly decent shape. I installed it on a clean machine this weekend and was able to run through some of my usual walkthroughs.

We of course always recommend that you install pre-RTM bits on a clean machine and not on your primary machine. Does the Tech Preview work side by side with VS 2003? We didn't test that so we can't say. We'll test whether the Beta does, but not the Tech Preview. If you don't have a clean machine and you already have the PDC or Alpha build on your machine then uninstall those. I would also recommend cleaning out your registry. In particular HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0. I installed the Tech Preview on my main laptop, which had previous builds, and ran into several issues. When I cleaned out the registry first and then installed those issues went away. I also did a clean install on a spare hard drive and expect the best experience on that.

Of course, you are asking “How do I get this Tech Preview?” MSDN subscribers will be able to download it. All Alpha participants will get it. We will be giving it out at conferences, such as VSLive, VSConnections, TechEd, etc. Also check with your local .NET user group and your local Microsoft office. They should be giving out, and asking us for copies to give out. (We are looking into ways to make it downloadable by anyone, but there are issues with that.)

I will be playing around with it quite a bit in the next few weeks and beyond. And I will be posting mini-walkthroughs and code samples here for your viewing and playing-around pleasure.

Naming update

rgreen_msft — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 19:16:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2005
.NET Framework 2.0
ASP.NET 2.0

For context, see the post below.

What's in a name?

rgreen_msft — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 19:02:00 GMT

You probably already know this, but Visual Studio “Whidbey” is not going to be the official name of the next version of Visual Studio. Turns out it will be Visual Studio Whidbey, same name just no quotes. Isn't that funny? I just made that up. Could you tell?

Actually, the name will be Visual Studio 2005. Notice two things. First the 2005 part, indicating we won't be shipping in 2004. Also notice we are no longer going to call it Visual Studio .NET. But we will continue to call it the .NET Framework and we will continue to call them ASP.NET and ADO.NET. What about the languages? Just call them the Visual Basic language and the C# language. No .NET there. What about products. Well it would be Visual Basic 2005 Standard Edition, or Visual Basic Standard Edition version 2005. One of the two.

Does this mean .NET is dead? Of course not. We tweak names all the time. Remember when it was called Word for Windows? That distinguished it from the Word for DOS version. Eventually Word for DOS was no more and we just started calling it Word. No need to call it Office XP for Windows. Office XP only ran on Windows. And now it it officially now called Microsoft Office Word 2003. But at the end of the day it is still Word. Similarly, VB 2005 is obviously the .NET version and you know what it is, whether or not is has .NET.

Admitedly, renaming things can cause confusion. (We were asked today by our buddies at CoDe magazine about ASP.NET. They have been calling it ASP.NET “Whidbey”. What should they call it now? I have the luxury of asking the ASP team and will report back what they tell me.) But remember, we're building the next version of VS, VB, C#, ASP, ADO etc and that's what they are, regardless of what name eventually officially winds up on the box and in print. And all the new features and capabilities we have been talking about since PDC will be in there.

“What ’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
- Shakespeare

Whidbey at the .NETDA Part 2

rgreen_msft — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 02:37:00 GMT

Previously on my blog I wrote about showing VB Whidbey to the .NET Developers Association General Meeting in Redmond. I covered IDE enhancements aimed at increasing productivity. Here I'll cover Data.

I showed the Data Sources Window. You can use it to connect to data from a database, a Web service, an object and a database local file. (You can still connect to data using the Server Explorer, but the Data Sources Window provides additional capabilities.) I dragged the Employees table onto a form and got a databound grid and a navigation toolbar. Hit F5 and the form shows up with data in the grid. No code required!

In the Data Sources Window the Employee table has a dropdown next to it which lets me specify whether I want a grid or individual controls when I drag onto the form. Also, each field in the table has a dropdown that lets me specify which control to use. I showed how to specify a user control for the phone field.

I talked about the navigator, a new WinForm control. It understands the data binding and has buttons for next, previous, add, delete, save, etc. Of course, you don't have to use it. I deleted it and showed that although it understands the data bindings, it doesn't contain the data bindings. I added a next button to the form and wrote the following code:
Me.EmployeesDataConnector.MoveNext()

The DataConnector is a non-visual control that surfaces the form's BindingManager. This is more intuitive for folks new to .NET. I've seen several times on newsgroups somebody asking how to bind to data and scroll. They are used to typing Recordset.MoveNext but in VS 2002 and 2003 they have to find the BindingManager and set its Position property. That will of course still work in Whidbey, but those used to scrolling through the data by calling a method of the data/recordset will find the DataConnector easy to use.

I closed by showing binding to an object. I was asked if the object needs to expose an interface and the answer is no. Just public properties is all that is needed. And you have to write the code to load the data since we won't assume we know how you want your data loaded. So in my example, I added this to the form's Load:
Me.CustomerDataConnector.DataSource = ObjectBinding.Business.CustomerFactory.GetAllCustomers
where ObjectBinding.Business is the namespace and the CustomerFactory class has a GetAllCustomers method.

My part of the user group lasted an hour and I covered all of 2 things! Whidbey is a major release folks!

Clarification on My

rgreen_msft — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 19:30:00 GMT

Previously on my blog I said
”The My namespace is really just wrappers around existing Framework classes.”

Jay Schmelzer of the VB team writes
It’s not a set of wrappers for the framework, it is a speed-dial into the framework that helps VB developers find commonly used framework classes. In many cases we will also return instances of the framework class that is initialized and ready to use. Printing is a great example of this. My.Computer.Printers.DefaultPrinter returns a System.Windows.Forms.Printing.SimplePrintDocument that is setup and ready to work with the Default Printer. You can absolutely do this directly with the framework, but to get the same functionality you need to create an instance of the System.Windows.Forms.Drawing.PrinterSettings class to determine which installed printer is the default printer and then assign it to the PrinterSettings property of the System.Windows.Forms.Printing.SimplePrintDocument you want to use. Not rocket science by any means but a few more lines of code that you don’t need to write and classes you don’t need to discover if you use the My.Computer route.

So my using “wrappers” is sloppy lingo. I guess I am just used to using that term to describe things that handle deeper levels of coding for me. At the NETDA meeting I think I compared it to the XML parser. I don't want to write my own XML parser. I want one written for me that I can Dim and then use the methods, properties and collections. I would want it to have a method called ReadXML and one called WriteXML. Happily, such a thing exists. And, happily, I can write my own if I want or need to. In my mind I see that as “wrapping“ all the plumbing code that is required to work with XML. I view My in the same vein. My.Computer.Printers.DefaultPrinter is clearly the default printer that belongs to the collection of printers that belongs to the computer that belongs to me. I don't want to necessarily have to figure out how to talk to the printer.

Whidbey at the .NETDA Part 1

rgreen_msft — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 05:14:00 GMT

Last night I presented VB Whidbey at the .NET Developer Association General Meeting here in Redmond. I was on after Dave Winer and Robert Scoble spoke on blogs and RSS, etc. It is no coincidence that my blog debuts the very next day. Thanks to Dave and Robert for inspiring me.

My hour was all demos. I showed several IDE enhancements, including
- Faster startup
- Not having to be prompted for project location when you start
- Snap lines to help you line up controls
- Editing control Names and Text on the form all at once rather than having to individually edit them in the Properties Window
- Error correction options. Let's say you type Dim iVar as integr. You'll get a blue squiggly and a smart tag. Click the smart tag and we offer suggestions as to what you may have meant. Select Dim iVar as integer from the list and we'll change your code to that. Or you create a property and then make it ReadOnly. You can't have a Set in a ReadOnly property. We'll prompt you and offer to either remove the ReadOnly or remove the Set.
- If you rename form1.vb to GroovyForm.vb we'll change the class name from form1 to GroovyForm. (Actually, this was in my notes to show, but I don't remember if I did it.)

I showed debugging enhancements, including
- Edit and Continue, including how we grey out code that you can't edit if you then want to continue
- You have a class VBGuy and you Dim oBoy as VBGuy. Set a breakpoint and when you hover over oBoy you will see a dropdown that lists the properties of oBoy and their values. You don't have to dive into the debug windows to see that. You can also change the values right there in your code. This is nice because you don't have to stop looking at your code.
- I showed snippets, collections of precanned code we will ship in the box. I was not able to show how you create your own because that doesn't work in the build I was using.
- And I showed the My namespace and code like My.Computer.Name or My.Forms.Form1.Text. The My namespace is really just wrappers around existing Framework classes. So you can do things like print with less code. My.Computer.Printers.DefaultPrinter.WriteLine(“Wicked cool“)
My.Computer.Printers.Print(True)
And here is code to copy a file
My.Computer.FileIO.CopyFile("C:\BigFile.zip", "C:\Backup", False, True)
This is going to be a very popular feature! You can use the My shortcuts and of course you can use the .NET Framework classes. Your call.

Tomorrow I will talk about the Data features I showed.