The Visual Basic Team : DLR

What is the difference between VB 9, VBx and Silverlight? (Scott Wisniewski)

VBTeam — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 04:58:00 GMT

I recently received an email from a customer asking for clarification as to what the difference was between VB 9, VBx and Sliverlight. In particular, it seems as if we have been releasing so much information about cool new stuff that at least a few people have become confused, making them a bit nervous about the future of VB.

The customer had also expressed some concerns about upgrading from VS 2005 to Orcas (VS 2008), particularly because he was considering making an upgrade from VB 6 to VS 2005 and wanted to make sure he would be able to take advantage of Orcas when it was released.

I figured there may be other customers that have similar concerns, and so thought this would make a good blog post, particularly because it's been a while since I've posted anything (J).

As a result I've included a few of the questions he asked (paraphrased) below, along with my answers.

I hope this helps.

What is the difference between VB 9 and VBx? Which one is the next version of Visual Studio?

Visual Basic 9 is the next version of Visual Basic. Visual Basic 10, or VBx as it's sometimes called, is the version of Visual Basic that will follow VB 9. Currently VBx is in very early stages, and is a long way off from production. In fact, most of our development team is actively working on VB 9.

Why on earth would you start talking about VB 10 before you've even released VB 9? This is confusing.

The product cycle for VB 9 is starting to wind down. We recently released Beta 1 of Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas", and are currently working on releasing Beta 2. As the product cycle starts to wind down, our language design team is starting to think about what the "next next" version of the product will look like. They do this mainly as a way to "keep the pipeline moving". If they had to wait until VB 9 was 100% complete before they started thinking about VB 10, then there would end up being a significant delay from when we finished VB 9 until we could start working on VB 10. This is because designing a product, and coming up with a plan to develop it can be extremely time consuming. It requires us to come up with a design, create a schedule, make any necessary organizational changes, and ensure we have the right staffing levels, all before we start coding. By "overlapping" the early design work for VB 10 with the "end game" work for VB 9 we are able to better "bootstrap" the whole process, thus making the transition from one project to the next as smooth as possible.

As our design team comes up with designs they like to release information about them as early as possible. The earlier we can get information out to our customers, the earlier we can get feedback about the things we are doing. This helps us to build the products that actually meet our customers' needs. One thing we've managed to learn over the years is that the best possible way we can learn what it is that our customers want is to engage with them early and often.

As a result, near the end of a product cycle we will release information about our plans for the version of the product to follow the one we are currently working on. This gives our customers the chance to comment on it and let us know what they think. We then take that feedback and use it to develop a more complete plan for what we want to do.

What is VB 10 going to be like? What is this Silverlight Thing I keep hearing about? Is Silverlight a replacement for Visual Studio?

Our plans for VBx and Silverlight are still very rough and are nowhere near complete. As our customers start to use VB 9 and provide us with feedback that data will drive exactly what we end up doing in VB 10. That being said, however, we do have some rough ideas of the things we would like to do.

Silverlight 1.1 is a new light weight version of the .NET Framework that will allow you to develop rich applications that run in a web browser using .NET languages. The basic idea is to allow you to replace client side java script with .NET enabled languages, allowing you to write both the client side and sever side portions of your web applications in the same language. It also allows you to use WPF (windows presentation foundation) and WCF (windows communication foundation) to create extremely rich and interactive web applications in a way that is much easier than what is possible using HTML, Ajax, Java Script, or Flash.

VB 10 is going to be the version of Visual Basic that will follow VB 9 (the "next next version"). It will include new features designed to make VB a really great language for developing SilverLight apps, as well as enhancements to many of the new feature we are delivering in VB 9, such as Linq. You should still be able to do all the things with VB 10 that you could do with both VB 9 and VB 8.

The migration from VB 6 to VS 2005 is non-trivial. If I upgrade to VS 2005 will I able to use VB 9 when it comes out, or will I have to scrap all my work? What about VB 10? Should I be worried about the future of VB?

The transition from VB 8.0 to VB 9.0 should be smooth and relatively painless. We have gone to great lengths to ensure this.

Our plan is to also make the migration from VB 9 to VB 10 equally painless.

Although the migration from VB 6 to VB.NET is a bit tough, we are actively working on making that easier as well. We have been releasing a "VB Interoperability Toolkit" that allows an application to be gradually migrated from VB 6 to VS 2005, rather than requiring the whole thing to be migrated at once.

You can get more information about it here:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/aa701257.aspx

As far as the future of VB, you should definitely not be worried.

Microsoft is committed to VB, and making it a great language for developing applications for our various platforms. The future of VB should be a bright one!

Four dynamic languages for .NET interoperating!

VBTeam — Wed, 02 May 2007 21:06:00 GMT

John Lam just posted a screen cast of four dynamic languages interoperating in SIlverlight on the Mac! Check it out!

What do the announcements at Mix mean for the Visual Basic developer?

VBTeam — Tue, 01 May 2007 08:52:00 GMT

At the Mix conference today in Las Vegas, Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie were dropping goodies like tootsie pops from a piñata. There was so much packed into their over two hour keynote that I thought it would be useful to distill the announcements down into one bite-sized post that should make for a pretty quick read (but unfortunately, includes no code samples.)

- VB on Silverlight – In short, this means that you can now use Visual Basic as the code-behind for whiz-bang rich interactive applications that run on Windows or the Mac and can run in IE, Firefox, and Safari. You can download the alpha .NET-enabled release but to develop you will need the Visual Studio Extensions for Silverlight for “Orcas” Beta1.

- Unparalleled support for dynamic languages – As you may have noticed us hinting at over the past couple of years now, VB has certain aspects to it that are dynamic – late binding, explicit member indexing, runtime conversions and operators, etc. With Silverlight comes the introduction of the DLR, a shared runtime component for dynamic languages atop .NET. There are many, many, things this means for VB that will unfold over the coming months, but one of the most important ones is that it will enable simple interoperability between Visual Basic and the other dynamic languages on .NET like Ruby, Python, and JScript.

- Live Services – The Live Services team has created Windows Live in a Box that will allow you to begin integrating rich photo experiences, search, contacts and more into your applications.

- Productivity Frameworks – Scott and Ray didn’t talk about this in their keynote, but with Mix comes a couple of new productivity frameworks. The first is Dynamic ASP.NET controls which uses runtime database schema and coding conventions to data-bind and generate ASP.NET pages. The second is “Jasper”, a dynamic data access layer that is independent of a presentation technology which sits atop the Entity Framework. We’re looking forward to seeing the reception for these kinds of frameworks.

So, that’s the two-bite version of the announcements… Over the next couple of weeks we’ll post new entries, videos, and samples demonstrating what each of these means in detail – though for some dirty details, you’ll have to wait for the PDC.

I’ll be at VSLive next week to talk about LINQ and Integrated XML in VB Orcas. I also have my turn for the webcast series for the VB LINQ deep dive and TechEd not that shortly after I get back – so I’ve got some work to do! Enough overview, back to coding!

So, you're going to Mix?

VBTeam — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 03:38:00 GMT

Now that Orcas Beta1 is on your machines, we’re trying to finish up the Beta2 version of Orcas to deliver those features you are so eagerly awaiting – features like Group By, explicit Joins, Nullable, keyword Intellisense, and Lambda Expressions. Things are looking very good as you probably witnessed in Kit’s web cast just the other day.

In other news, the MIX developer conference starts on Monday in Las Vegas. I wanted to make sure that our VB web developers out there know which sessions to attend to get the best picture of what’s coming down the road. Obviously, the most revolutionary for VB developers will be the keynote with Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie – this will make VB developers of all sorts get pretty giddy. What’s coming is awesome and I promise to have another blog entry on Monday to make sure that those who can’t attend are well informed.

Aside from the keynote, be sure not to miss:

- Jim Hugunin and John Lam talking about dynamic languages on .NET. (11:45am, Tuesday) This one has so much revolutionary stuff in it that they actually pulled it from the session descriptions on the Mix site. Long story short, search the web on musings about why John and Jim are at Microsoft, add to that the fact that the VB team has been working with them heavily, and you might be able to figure it out.

- Developing Data Driven Applications Using the New Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET

Very, very cool new controls for ASP.NET that are particularly attractive to people that appreciate every opportunity to write less code.

- Rapidly Building Data Driven Web Pages with Dynamic ADO.NET

Sam and Shyam will talk about a new LINQ-enabled API for data access that’s very productive and again, will be appreciated by folks that don’t like to have to type so many characters or use designers to generate a simple forms-over-data app.

- Using LINQ to Dramatically Improve Data Driven Development in Web Applications

Anders will be giving the LINQ overview but this time it will be specifically targeted at using LINQ to author web applications. Be sure not to miss Anders typing the “Dim” keyword!

Once the sessions have been delivered, I’ll make sure you’ve got the scoop on what the heck these guys are talking about.