The Visual Basic Team : Kit George

Fun with VB !!!

VBTeam — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 23:08:00 GMT

Who says you can't obfuscate VB code?

For fun, I tried writing some VB code which was shaped in the letters 'vb' (that's right, the code itself forms the shape of the letters), where the 'v' and the 'b' are formed from the Visual Studio inifinity logo. In case you're having trouble visualizing that, here's a picture. Because I'm forming the letters from the symbol, the v and b have to be visually interpreted of course:

OK, so we have the above shape, but how to create the code this way? Well, we do that by using the ':' line separator all over the shop in order to allow us to create statements on the same actual physical line as the previous statement. And of course, we need plenty of underscores to format the code as well.

Finally, and importantly, we have to turn off pretty listing so the code retains it's shape. Make sure if you download the attached file, that you turn pretty-listing off before opening it (or, just look at the txt file, you'll get the idea).

In the attachment you'll find the actual file for this, and yes, compile and run at will. To build on the 'infinity' concept, I have the code producing the same picture of itself in a winform, a 'recursive' concept at least visually.

Naturally, the code is ugly to read, since the point is ont to be readable, but impressive for the effort that goes into it. All coding standards are thrown out the window for the effect: this is one situation where they just don't apply. And of course, the actual code isn't colored like it is above, but you'll find a powerpoint slide in the attachment that has the colored code, in case you want to print it out.

The challenge I put to you now is: what VB code do YOU want to create this way?

Kit George and Chris Smith on Channel9 (Beth Massi)

VBTeam — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 19:40:00 GMT

I posted a couple more videos on Channel9 that you'll definitely want to check out! Thanks again to Kathleen for helping with the production.

The first one Kit George walks us through some of his favorite VB9 language features that enable LINQ:

In this in interview Kit George, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team and a former member of the CLR Team, shows us his favorite language features that enable LINQ without actually talking about the queries themselves. His excitement about Extension Methods, Anonymous Types, Object Initializers, Type Inference and the new Refactor! shows through in typical Kit fashion. It's an interview that's as much fun to watch as it was to produce!

The next one Chris Smith gives us a quick TechEd "booth babe" demo of LINQ to XML in VB9:

In this in TechEd demo Chris Smith, a Developer on the Visual Basic Team, gives us a whirlwind tour of some of the unique features coming in Visual Basic related to XML.

I suggest watching them full screen for easier viewing of the demos. And stay tuned for more VB Screencasts on Channel9!

Enjoy!
-Beth Massi, VS Community

Sons and Daughters Day: a pure blast!

VBTeam — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 02:35:00 GMT

On Friday, Chris Smith and I (Chris is a test engineer on the VB Team) attended an event called 'Sons and Daughters' day. The day consisted of 2 sessions (20-25 kids in each) where kids aged 6-13 were run through a class of writing an app in VB (20-25 kids in each). The class was very introductory, but eas very appropriate for the audience. Parents typically hung out with their kids to help things along. The role Chris and I played was to be additional helpers, to be able to provide extra assistance as necessary (parents were typically good at helping their kids along, but the odd issue or question wuld arise that needed extra help). Of course, the target version of VS was VB Express.

Talk about FUN!

I was concerned going in that it would be hard to lower the bar enough to let people use the product for the age of the audience. But the combination of the following meant that pretty much everyone had a great day. The feedback was all positive, and some kids clearly had the time of their lives. But our product really is pretty darn easy to use. I sometimes forget that getting started with Express really is easy. I had this nagging feeling that people would have to know more about what was going on for the day to be successful. But the presenter (Robin Reynolds-Haertle) did a great job at preparing the material, and targeting it well for the day. She basically showed people the environment, got them to make a winfors app, add a control, change properties and add some code. From there, she had a project for people to start with that was a simple game, but demonstrated a few more concepts. Straightforward, but esential, and fun stuff.

It didn't hurt that the kids were all enthusiastic, and the parents engaged well ;-).

My highlights of the day:

I don’t know if you remember that time (and I’m sure it happens for all of us) when you write an app and you get this ‘jolt’ of excitement because you literally see the program do yourcode. I saw that jolt all over the place today. The first app of course, is to drop a button on a form, and put a msgbox(“Hello World!”) behind it. There were audible cries of ‘wow, awesome!’ all around the room for this step. That’s the jolt, and I just love seeing that. Even more, I’d suggest to the odd person they should change it to be their name such as “Hello, Sarah!”. This gets an even bigger grin
The first person I helped out was a young boy about age 8. As soon as I arrived, he matter of factly said ‘I can’t type, I need you to walk me through this’. So I did. All the way down to how to type in a double-quote (which he could barely manage with one hand: he had to contort his small fingers to get the combo right, but he seemed to insist on doing it because his neighboring pupil did it that way). This kid was completely aware of what he could and couldn’t do, talk about a good pupil
One girl was very excited about her app, and proudly showed it off to Chris. It had two buttons, with different colors and different Msgbox’s. The message on one of the msgbox’s was very professional. Chris, giving an appropriately enthusiastic response stated “That’s awesome! You could SELL that!”. To which the young girl, in complete earnestness responded ‘I KNOW!!!’. Bring on the money
One of the apps was a ‘fortune teller’ which got the children to click on three buttons (color, age, favorite number) and then gave a string as a ‘fortune’ (“Be happy” for example). The kids were encouraged to change the strings displayed. One child’s frank appraisal of the extremes of fortunes appealed to my own sensibilities. He wrote as one fortune ‘You wil get 1,000,000’ and as another ‘you will be poor’. His next was “You will get the measles”. Lucky thing I went to the doctor that morning

- On a whim, I decided to show them my space invaders game at the end of each session, just to hammer home ‘this is where you can get to, you have the basics!’. This went over well of course.

Some issues for me to raise with the team:

By far, the most annoying issue throughout the day, is that its REALLY hard to see when the designer is in ‘run’ mode. Many, MANY times, a child, and/or parent would be blocked, and arriving to help out, it’s often not immediately obvious to us even, what’s wrong. We need to better differentiate when the app is running. And if you try to do actions in the designer, we need to make it more obvious that the designer can’t because it’s in run mode!
If you change the available drives, after you’ve opened save all, it doesn’t refresh. Not a major issue, but came up at least 10-11 times today, because of the way the lab was run (kids would be told to open the screen to save the app, and plugin the thumb drive to save the app to. Having done that, the save project dialog wouldn’t have the thumb drive listed, you’d have to close the dialog, and do it over. This was not at all clear when looking at the dialog)
Line continuation character with a space, could be pretty listed to do the right thing

If you have code like "SomeMethod(Arg1,_ " it doesn’t get pretty listed, it just gets an error. This hit a couple of kids

Thanks very much to April Reagan and the other organizers, this was a very fun day. I look forward to doing these more often!

Linq Cookbook, Recipe 6: Your first Linq Application using Northwind (Kit George)

VBTeam — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 05:48:00 GMT

This example is intended as a ‘primer’ for following recipes (so we don’t repeat the same instructions multiple times). This recipe takes you through everything you need, and assumes only that you've installed Visual Studio (and in so doing, you've installed SQLExpress). Subsequent Northwind based Linq-To-Sql recipes will point to this entry.

Ingredients:

- Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher)

We assume that SQL Express (or better) has been installed

Categories: LINQ-To-SQL, LINQ and WinForms

Instructions:

We need the northwind database, so Download the northwind database here. Run the file from the download button on the page
Once downloaded, you’ll find the new samples in “C:\SQL Server 2000 Sample Databases”. We’ll be using the northwind.mdf file
Open Visual Studio, and create a new Windows Forms Application
Go to the View menu and click the Server Explorer menu item
On the treeview on the left, right-click the Data Connections and select ‘Add Connection’
In the next dialog select ‘Microsoft SQL Server Database File’ and click Continue
In the next dialog, click the Browse button, and navigate to “C:\SQL Server 2000 Sample Databases”. Select the ‘NORTHWND.MDF’ file, and click Open
Click OK to finish Adding the Connection
In your Treeview node, under ‘Data Connections’ NORTHWIND.MDF will be available. Expand this node (click on the plus beside it) and expand the Tables node

Note: The steps up to this point need only be completed once. If you create a new project, then the database will still be available through server explorer. You may need to reopoen the Server Explorer window from session to session (see below)

Now add a Linq To Sql file to your application. Go to the Project menu, and select ‘Add New Item’
In the Add New Item dialog, select the ‘LINQ To SQL Classes’ item
Change the name to ‘Northwind.dbml’ and click Add
From the Server Explorer window (which will still be open) select all of the Tables from the node we expanded (DataConnections\NORTHWND.MDF\Tables) and drag them to the O/R designer window to the right (this window will have opened after we added the Northwind.dbml file)
You will get a dialog asking if you wish to copy the database locally. Click Yes
Close the designer file, and the Server Explorer window. You’re ready to start writing your LinQ To Sql code!
To reopen the Server Explorer window, go to the View menu, and select Server Explorer
To reopen the O/R designer, go to the Solution Explorer window, and double-click Northwind.dbml

Test our project

To ensure our project is ready to add linq statements to, let’s try it out!
Add a button to form1
Add a DataGridView to form1
Double-Click the button to open its click event
Add this code inside the click event:

Dim db As New NorthwindDataContext

DataGridView1.DataSource = _

From cust In db.Customers _

Where cust.City = "London" _

Order By cust.CompanyName _

Select cust.CompanyName, _

cust.ContactName, cust.Fax

Run the App (F5) and click the button to test it

LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 5: Concatenating the selected strings from a CheckedListBox (Kit George)

VBTeam — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 02:28:00 GMT

Ingredients:

- Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher)

Categories: LINQ-To-Objects, LINQ and WinForms

Instructions:

Open Visual Studio 2008, and Click ‘File/New Project’. Create a new Windows Forms Application project
From the toolbox, drag a CheckedListBox to the main form, and a button. Ensure the listbox is large enough to view multiple items
DoubleClick the form to creat the load event. Add this code to the load event (this simply populates the CheckedListBox with entries)

CheckedListBox1.Items.AddRange( _

New String() {"Apple", "Orange", "Banana", _

"Avocado", "Tomato", "Tamarillo", _

"Kiwifruit", "Cherry"})

Create the click event for the button (in the code editors dropdowns, in the left drop down, select Button1) and add this code

MsgBox( _

Aggregate Box In CheckedListBox1.CheckedItems _

Into Concat())

At the very bottom of the code (after End Class) add this code. This code creates the aggregate 'Concat' function which enables this code to be used on the 'Into' above

Public Module AggregateModule

<Extension()> Public Function Concat(Of Type)( _

ByVal ie As IEnumerable(Of Type)) As String

Dim str As String = ""

For Each item In ie

If str <> "" Then str &= ","

str &= item.ToString()

Return str

End Function

End Module

Alternatively, change the code in the button to be the following and remove the function we created (this is less code, but if you're going to use this code a lot, then writing the Concat function is preferred)

MsgBox((From c In _

CheckedListBox1.CheckedItems).Aggregate( _

Function(ByVal x, ByVal y) x + "," + y))

LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 4: Find all complex types in a given assembly (Kit George)

VBTeam — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 04:30:00 GMT

Ingredients:

- Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher)

- An assembly which you want to analyze (in this example, we use mscorlib.dll, the assembly which houses String)

- A definition for 'Complex Type'. In this instance, a complex type is defined as having more than 10 public methods, of which at least one has more than 3 arguments

Categories: LINQ-To-Objects, LINQ and types, LINQ and WinForms

Instructions:

- Open Visual Studio 2008, and Click ‘File/New Project’. Find and double-click the ‘Windows Forms Application’ Icon

- Drag and drop a Listbox to the form. Size the listbox to be fairly tall. Drag and drop a button to the form

- Double-click the button, and add the following code to the button:

Dim q = From type In System.Reflection.Assembly.GetAssembly( _

GetType(String)).GetTypes(), _

m In type.GetMethods() _

Where type.IsPublic _

AndAlso type.GetMethods.Length > 10 _

AndAlso m.GetParameters.Length > 3 _

Select type Distinct

ListBox1.Items.AddRange(q.ToArray)

LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 2: Find all capitalized words in a phrase and sort by length (then alphabetically) (Kit George)

VBTeam — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 02:59:00 GMT

Ingredients:

- Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher)

- Some text you want to search

Categories: LINQ-To-Objects, LINQ and strings, LINQ and WinForms

Instructions:

- Open Visual Studio 2008, and Click ‘File/New Project’. Find and double-click the ‘Windows Forms Application’ Icon

- Drag and drop a Listbox to the form. Size the listbox to be fairly tall. Drag and drop a button to the form

- Double-click the button, and add the following code to the button:

Dim text = "Good morning everyone. I'd like to welcome " & _

"you to today's presentation on LINQ. My " & _

"name is Kit George and I'm a Program Manager " & _

"for Microsoft, on the Visual Basic team. You " & _

"might be wondering where my accent is from? " & _

"Well, I hail from a small country called New " & _

"Zealand but it sure is great to be here in " & _

"Atlanta today!"

Dim capitalWords = _

From word In text.Split( _

New Char() {",", ".", "!", " "}, _

StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries) _

Where word(0) = Char.ToUpper(word(0)) _

Order By word.Length, word

ListBox1.Items.AddRange(capitalWords.ToArray())

- Change the text being searched to the text of your choice. If your text is coming from a file, use My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllText to get the data into the text variable

LINQ Cookbook, Recipe 1: Change the font for all labels on a windows form (Kit George)

VBTeam — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 02:24:00 GMT

Folks, we’re gonna start a ‘cookbook’ of LINQ entries, which we’ll be building over time. This is just meant to be a series of solutions to specific scenarios, that the team comes across when writing code and using queries. I can't think of a better way to communicate everything you might use LINQ for!

The point of the series is to show you the wide array of things LINQ can do. Like any good cookbook, we’ll have categories for the cookbook, so you can easily find items later. Don’t expect any particular ‘recipe’ to have a large description, although they will contain repro steps. Feel free to ask for any recipes you want to see, and we’ll get as many created as we can!

Ingredients:

- Visual Studio 2008 (Beta2 or Higher)

Categories:

- LINQ-To-Objects, LINQ with Windows Forms, LINQ with controls, Label

Instructions:

- Open Visual Studio 2008, and click ‘File/New Project’. Find and double-click the ‘Windows Forms Application’ Icon

- Increase the size of the window to be large enough to fit a number of controls

- Drag and drop multiple controls from your toolbox onto the form. Ensure at least 3-4 labels are added

o My own personal favorites are two group boxes, with two labels in front on textboxes (and labels above the group boxes), and a couple of radio buttons in each. This ensures the recursive code is tested

- Add a button to the form and change the text of the button to ‘Go’. Double-click the button, and modify the EventHandler code and add the method below:

Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

For Each label In GetLabels(Me)

label.Font = New Font("Comic Sans MS", 12, _

FontStyle.Bold Or FontStyle.Underline)

End Sub

Private Function GetLabels(ByVal sourceControl As Control) _

As IEnumerable(Of Control)

If sourceControl.Controls.Count > 0 Then

Dim labels = From cont As Control In sourceControl.Controls _

Where TypeOf cont Is Label _

Select cont

For Each c As Control In sourceControl.Controls

labels = labels.Union(GetLabels(c))

Return labels

End If

Return New List(Of Control)

End Function

- Change the ‘New Font’ line to be the style of your choice

Holiday fun with LinQ, and LinQ technologies in mind

VBTeam — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 21:56:00 GMT

OK, so when you're playing around with LinQ and all it's various additional bits, you really do get to have a bit of fun.

I've made this available simply because i enjoyed doing it. The basic idea is to time and then compare the duration of various 'IsPrime' implementations. The 'client' simply allows you to run various IsPrime implementations. The IPrime interface defines the basic structure of running the exercise, while BasePrime provides the majority of the required code. Then, three imlpementations are provided (I make no defense of their efficiency!).

The LinQ aspect to this is in two parts:

- The 'Run' implementation in the BasePrime class. There's only a very, very minor LinQ statement to do here, but I continue to find even the smallest LinQ query more exciting than it's alternate

- How we might expose the 'IsPrime' method. In the example, I expose IsPrime as a method on IPrime, but the initial idea i had was to use an extension method. Extension methods of course, allow me to define a method on my own class, but expose them in such a way that i can use them like they're an instance method on another class

If you look at this example, you might start thinking about these things:

- Is the implementation of IsPrime the best one? If this question takes your fancy, that's great. But honestly, it's not the objective I had when I wrote the example. I did come up with 3 implementations for IsPrime, solely to satiate my own curiosity. Clearly, the LazyPrime implementation is poor. If you try the other two implementations, their performance is of course, extremely similar. The 'permanent' implementation allows primes to be save to a file on disk. This would improve first run performance of the implementation, but because both this, and the 'Temporary' memory have a store for the primes, subsequent runs will be similar. Feel free to try out your own implementations, and send them back on this thread, to see who's got the best one. I've set up the interface and base class for you to use and everything, so you just need to rewrite the IsPrime method.

- What classes could IsPrime extend? This was the question I had in mind when I wrote the example. Here's some things to try out yourself and see how far you get. First, genericize the IsPrime method. Now, limit it to the set of things that would make sense for it to extend. This might be kind of hard. This begs the question, do we need an interface for numerics (a not-uncommon request), or alternatively, should we consider extending the capabilities of generics, so we can 'limit' it better? THe next question is, WITHOUT an interface to limit the application of IsPrime, how gnarly is the implementation of a generic IsPrime method, that recognizes 4-5 specific types? Try it out and see. Comments welcome

- Does the order in which the imlpementations is run, affect their performance? I tried this out myself, and over a few runs, couldn't see a difference. If you find a difference, then simply run a single type at a time

- What OTHER methods are interesting to start conceiving of for extension methods on basetypes? Should VB write these and supply them?

- What philosophy should be taken with regards to extension methods? Should we encourage them? While it might seem there could be a glut of them, we have to remember that you have to opt in to any assembly that has them. Myself, I'm a fan of them, but I'd love to hear other thoughts

To run the example:

- Start a new project, and add the supplied files. Ensure primes.txt has the 'Copy to Output Directory' property set to 'Copy if newer'

- Set the count to different sizes to see how the result vary

Notes from a recent tour to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Phillipines (well, almost!)

VBTeam — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 03:13:00 GMT

All, I recently went on a trip to 3 Asian countries, and thought I would share the notes.

Here’s my summary of the recent trip a colleague and I made to Asia. The trip was cut short due to a typhoon in Manila, which was a real shame: my colleague and I were very much looking forward to seeing the Philippines. However, the trip was still excellent. My notes below are written semi-formerly, to make it a more interesting read.

Arrival

Well, Hong Kong is certainly a bustling place.

I arrived just before midnight on Saturday, and there must have been a few of flights arriving at the same time, because the luggage carousel was absolutely jam-packed with bags. So many bags that they became stacked on top of one another, and an unfortunate lady standing near the loading chute failed to notice the backlog. The bags forced there way onto the carousel and a couple of bags fell on her, something I haven’t seen before. She was fine though, if a little dazed.

On Sunday, my colleague and I met for lunch. She had booked at a traditional Cantonese restaurant, which was extremely popular. The only issue was that we had to wait for our table for a while, and the waiting area was extremely small, and crowded with people waiting for tables. My colleague joined the folks peering over the counter to see there name on the list, and had to be extremely aggressive to get the seating-person’s attention. Of course, that’s one of those cultural differences you need to get used to here I think: being aggressive brings you success. Perhaps there’s a business mantra in the making…

Hong Kong if you haven’t been here, is an assault on the senses. People everywhere, cars going in all directions (aggressive is the name of the game here also of course), far warmer climate than I’m used to, far more humid than Seattle… it has it all. They only have compact cars, I don’t think they know what an SUV is: I love it! The taxis are deceptively roomy however, there’s always plenty of space in the backseat for people with long legs.

Schedule for the week

Day 1

Morning: customer visit with customer, presentations at Hong Kong TechEd

Afternoon: presentations at Hong Kong TechEd, customer visit

Day 2

Morning: travel to Taipei

Afternoon: customer visit, customer focus group

Day 3

Whole Day: presentations: 800+ people

Day 4

Morning: travel to Manila

Afternoon: customer focus groups (2)

Day 5:

Whole Day: presentations: 800+ people

Day 1

My colleague went directly to the convention centre since her presentation was in the morning, while I went to the first customer meeting of the week.

Customer Meeting 1

The first customer does a LOT of java development. However, we talked to a specific group within the company, who developed only in VB: currently vb6, and looking to move to vb.net. It can be eye-opening when meeting with customers, to get first the overall approach for the enterprise (which in this case, gave me the impression they would be adversarial), and then meet a specific group, and realize that that group is extremely different from the overall enterprise. It can give you a bit of insight at what it must be like to be the Evangelist working with that customer, and how you might manage the relationship. In this case, keeping a specific group inside the company happy and approachable was the approach being taken.

We met with three gentleman. This was an exceptionally friendly meeting, since the account leader, wanted specifically to know about migrating the company’s existing VB6 applications to VB.NET. They had 10 existing applications, with a small team of developers, and the lead wanted to migrate the team. I simply took the lead and his team through the standard migration story, taking some time to demonstrate the available tools to help them with the migration. It was interesting because The lead was clearly willing to move his entire team to .NET, but was definitely concerned about the cost, and trouble of migrating. I encouraged his team to take a considered approach, and start with only moving 1-2 applications, or simply starting some new application development in .NET. The lead had heard about the interop form toolkit, but was pleased to see it demoed, and warmed to it immediately. He also liked the upgrade assessment tool, and could clearly see how to get his team working on .NET. They planned to be moving to .NET early next year.

We didn’t really need to discuss much else, and the customer had no specific reason they were staying on vb6, beyond the historic. All in all, one of the easiest customer visits I’ve ever had.

Colleagues’ talk: 3 MVP’s

At my colleague’s talk, there happened to be 3 Microsoft Partners who sat behind us who we got chatting to: one for VB, one for C#, and one for ASP.

Favorite new features:

- VB guy: definitely click once. He mentioned that this really took away one of the biggest pain points in developing applications, and was fundamental to making proper applications

o He did make a side comment that we need to do a far better job at ensuring we make vb as accessible as C#. There’s still too many things getting released by the company in C#, but not in VB. He mentioned that the insders list can help here of course, but we still give the wrong impression when C# code is available, but the equivalent VB code is not

- C# guy snippets, refactor, and the class diagrams. He said that the snippets and refactor were awesome because they speeded up his development. Indeed, refactor is something he mentioned, has become critical for his development, he can’t imagine developing without it anymore.

- ASP guy: couldn’t pick one particular thing he liked about Whidbey. Instead, he simply talked about how much of an improvement Whidbey was over .NET 1.1, and how it really lowered the barrier to entry for customers, by making developing asp applications easier

Presentations

My colleague and I gave a total of 3 presentations (WinForms, TipsNTricks, Upgrading VB6 apps) at Hong Kong TechEd. All went well, and I even got a good laugh from the audience for my ‘tip and trick # 11: have an email address for someone in Microsoft’ (I gave them mine).

Evening meeting: Customer 2

Like the customer in the morning session, this meeting was about showing them the migration tools, and discussing best practices for upgrading their existing VB6 application, to VB.NET. Their application was very large it seemed, a million lines of code was mentioned as if it were a drop in the bucket.

The meeting went exceptionally well, mostly being me showing them the tools available, and then them asking the odd question, or piece of advice. There was no issue that they WANTED to upgrade their application, they simply wanted to get over the hump of ‘how’. We went through the various options from rewrite to fusion, and the main business manager focused very much on the benefits and difference between rewriting their application, vs. upgrading their application. They especially loved the assessment tool, warming to it as soon as we showed it: they could clearly see how to use it to get an initial gauge on the size of the effort they would have to undertake for a migration.

As with customer 1, the atmosphere was friendly, and it was more of an ‘instructive’ session, than a ‘sell me’ session. The business manager asked if we were available to come back and provide advice and further assistance (which we took as a very good sign), and it took a while for us to explain that we worked on the actual VB product: we didn’t simply travel the world providing consulting. The concept that we weren’t available as standard consultant personnel was clearly a bit alien to the management.

Reasons they wanted to move to .NET:

- Employee satisfaction: the business manager made the point that for new employees, working on VB6 was simply out of the question. It was impossible to hire new recruits from college, and sell them on coming and working on VB6, even if it might be slightly higher pay. As she put it, ‘VB6 just isn’t exciting’.

- Customer demand: units consuming their application were beginning to demand a shift to .NET, to better leverage services and new technologies. It was clear that the SI unit was under increasing pressure to begin developing applications using .NET technologies. We talked to the evangelist about this afterwards and it became clear that a critical hump has been passed by a LOT of business in the area, and that .NET is really starting to take off. This was great to hear

Consideration as part of the move to .NET:

- One of the key decisions it seemed, was whether to remain as a forms application, or to move to a web based application. The idea of ‘thick’ clients was clearly concerning, partly for deployment (so we gave them the good news on click-once. Again, it took a bit for the story to be accepted, but once it was, it was met with big grins), but partly also because the hardware people had to run applications probably couldn’t cope with a thick-client anyway. We unfortunately didn’t get to discuss this in much detail, but I asked them to contact us so I could forward them on to the asp team, so they can give success stories about forms to asp.net migrations

Cultural Tip for the day…

A senior colleague had mentioned to me before we left that there’s a particular etiquette to giving out business cards. You hold the business card in both hands facing the person you’re giving it to, and you give a little bow (or any sign of respect) as you hand over the card. The other person of course, does the same. I assumed that he was playing a little joke on me, and that I would be busy handing out cards this way while people stared at like I was crazy. So of course, the first meeting of the day I flipped the card at the customer in the standard, nonchalant manner. Imagine my surprise when this etiquette was a very real phenomenon! However, I was soon double-handing business cards and bowing with the best of them. Note that the same rule applies to giving someone money, receipts, or other goods purchased.

Day 2

Day 2 on the tour saw us rising early to leave the hotel at 6am, and be at the airport early to travel to Taiwan. The trip was short, just a 90 minute flight. From the 2 regions I’ve managed to see, Taiwan reminds me of Seattle. Rolling hills, and lots of trees. After checking in and a short 20 minute slot for lunch, we were immediately whisked off to see a customer.

Customer 3

Taiwanese companies are sincere about physical security it seems and it took 30 minutes for us to be cleared by the front desk. We also had to put on some rather fetching blue ‘dust’ booties (which fit over our shoes), because they don’t want any additional dust being draped through the office: it can interfere with the manufacture of chips and hardware. Permanent employees had a special anti-dust sandal.

We presented and talked to 30 employees for 2 hours, on upgrading from VB6 (which is becoming a most common theme throughout the tour, it’s clearly the favorite topic), and new features in ASP.NET 2.0. The presentations were received warmly, although not many questions were asked in English by the group, who was very quiet. As they started asking questions in Chinese, more and more questions were asked, so I sat back and let my colleague do the talking ;-).

The questions asked in English were:

- If I drop an image on a master page, and then I have a page that inherits that page in a different directory from the master page, it can’t view the image properly. How do I fix this?

o Master

Images

Some image, shown on master

Some dir

Some page inheriting master

Doesn’t show image correctly

Some page in same dir as master

Shows image correctly

- A very specific question about a potential memory leak in ASP.NET 2.0, where the machine running ASP would crash after 30 days. The customer will be contacting us about this issue via email

- A feature request for math.max/min that takes an array of numbers, not just 2.

Focus Group

After talking to the customer, we returned to the city and had another 2 hour customer session, but this time, with 20 people from a variety of customers, not just one company. This was another opportunity for customers to ask questions, and again, they were most comfortable asking in Chinese. So again, I sat back, and let my colleague do most of the talking. From time to time, the odd issue would be raised in English, or translated for my benefit:

- One customer had a specific issue with the compatibility of his vb6 library. It used to work on Win2K, and he had moved to winXP, and his app no longer worked. We explained the support policy, but also indicated that he could send us a repro and we’d see what we could do

- One person asked for us to differentiate VB from C#, so we walked through the focus for VB (ease of use) and a few of the differentiating features (My, intellisense filtering, etc.)

- LinQ was raised, and there was a bit of a stir: LinQ clearly raised a bit of excitement in the group. There was a question around it’s performance, with the assertion beig that unless it was performant, it clearly wasn’t going to be much use. We assured them LinQ would pay a minimla overhead, and bring a much improved programming model

- A customer enquired if they could take their existing usage of office in their application and transform their apps to .NET? Of course!

- One customer asked if we had a c# to vb translation tool. It turned out the reason they wanted this was to translate C# samples provided by us, into VB. In no way did the customer mean to be attacking us here, but this particular query cut me deep. Essentially, it’s yet another person indicating, in an even more subtle way, that we continue to send the wrong message publically about the support for VB. We have to do a better job at ensuring samples and code are available in VB! Another example mentioned was samples for Enterprise libraries!

- One customer enquired about dynamic languages, and support for scripting, and competing with RubyOnRails. We mentioned that the VB team is always interested in this space. This is the first time I had heard this question on tour, it will be interesting to see if this comes up again

Day 3

Day 3 was our first full presentation day. We gave 4 presentations to an audience of 800, followed by a session of questions/answers to the audience. The sessions for the day were:

- Keynote

- Tips And Tricks

- Windows Forms: What’s New

- Upgrading VB6 to VB.NET

- Question/Answer session

The day went exceptionally well, with a very positive response from attendees, and organizers. The crowd was attentive, and mostly quiet throughout. They were responsive enough that we could make the odd joke, and they got an positive response, with the exception of a New Zealand sheep joke I made that no-one seemed to get: I had to try it out though.

Today, from the various questions customers asked in between breaks, and in the question/answer session, three very real themes came through:

- Give us samples in VB please!

A number of customers throughout the day made this request directly to us. But other customers asked us indirectly, by asking for a C# to vb code translator, and one customer even asked for the ability to embed C# code in VB (which I interpret as a request to allow him to take C# code he can get his hands on, and use it cheaply in VB). While everyone was well-intentioned in their response, I’m frankly, sick of hearing that as a company, we continue to be doing a poor job at serving our customers in this area. We have to figure this space out, and as the VB team, it’s up to us to ensure that we’re delivering this message right. We need to be ensuring that for product releases, including betas and formal releases, VB samples abound, so people don’t need to ask for language translators

- We’re ready and willing to move to .NET!

I have to admit, that a year ago when I did a customer tour, people were positive about .NET, but they just didn’t seem to have reached the ‘hump’ at which they had committed to shift. The feeling on this trip has been different, and while a lot of customers are still on VB6, they clearly have made a decision to move. When I give the upgrading session, the section on ‘why should you move’ is listened to, but it’s clearly not the most interesting part of the talk to customers: they’ve already decided to move. Instead, they’re most interested in tools to help them move, and then, the capabilities, and functionality available in .NET. Seeing our low-code demos (ease-of-use) goes down particularly well with customers

This sentiment was echoed by the Taiwan office, who commented that customers are at a point where they are now worried about falling behind their competition, therefore moving to .NET is becoming an accepted ‘next logical step’. And it’s certainly not grudging, people are happy to be moving. They just want help in doing so. We need to keep the migration strategy and message coming through loud and strong, to help keep the barrier to crossing over for customers low

- Differentiate VB from C# for us

A number of customers commented that they initially moved to C# because they were told it was more powerful and flexible (I didn’t get a chance to clarify, but it seemed they were saying the company told them this, yet another way we seemed to have stepped wrong) than VB. With the release of 2005 they’re now learning that VB is powerful and flexible too. This is a GREAT trend, and was very positive feedback. But we need to continue to do this. We especially need a core set of things we can point to and say ‘this is why you want to move to VB’. My, easier syntax, Just My Code, filtered intellisense, these are all good. But we need to build on this even further. There’s still a prevailing attitude that C# can do things we can’t, and that it’s more performant than we are. We’ve got to bang the ‘productivity’ drums really loud, and back it up with demonstrable, differentiated features

Question and answer session

All of the questions we received were written down on paper. However, here’s a shortlist of the questions I got pre-translated, so I could participate actively in the session:

One customer asked for the source code for the formview and gridview. I mentioned the closest thing available now is Rotor
One customer asked for more details on the design of smart tags. The key thing to know here is that we need to ensure if we assert something is customizable and targeted at third-party vendors, that we enable them to build on it successfully
Describe for us the communication between the C# and VB teams
There are lots of samples in LinQ for C#, but not so many in VB. Can we provide more?
Recommendation: please give us more VB sample code!!!
I want to know more about running VB.NET on Vista: are there any issues? Is it performant?
Feature Request: VS crashes from time to time. Why don't we have an auto-backup feature, like word and excel?
Are there any tools to translate C# to VB, and vice versa?
Could you add the capability to embed C# code directly in VB code?
Will VB support anonymous methods, like java/c#?

Lowlite of the day

A customer approached me with the picture that had been provided for the printed marketing material, and commented to me that ‘you look just like a fat Bill Gates!’

Highlite of the day

Another customer who I was talking to at the end of the day, was trying to summarize the event, and after some time struggling with what to say, simply said ‘you’re a magician!’, shaking his head, and not knowing what else to say. This made me feel somewhat better.

Day 4

Day 4 saw my colleague and I flying from Taipei to Manila in the morning, and then 2 focus groups in the afternoon in Manila.

Unfortunately, the trip was cut short very abruptly when our plane to Manila turned around 2/3s of the way to Manila, because a typhoon was ‘attacking’ Manila (‘attacking’ was the term used over the intercom. I had a comic-book like view of what this entailed in my head at the time, with a big swirling many armed beast wreaking havoc). After exploring our options back in Taiwan, it became clear that we wouldn’t be making it Manila this week. This meant our trip ended here ;-(.

Learning Chinese

In my attempts to learn Chinese, I have learned 5-6 symbols. One is the phrase for ‘exit’ which to me, looks like a cactus, and then a symbol for a moon. My colleague assures me that actually, the symbols are for ‘mountains’ and ‘mouth’ which I’ll have to concede, makes a bit more sense (apparently there IS a symbol for a moon, but it’s a sliver, or a half moon, not a full moon). ‘Mountain’s mouth’, or what I think of as tunnel, seems a fair enough term for exit. ‘Cactus moon’ doesn’t make much sense at all. The best I could reason was ‘Exit, because there are cactuses all over the place and it’s night-time, so you won’t be able to see them’. Not very plausible

I guess I’m not that good at interpreting Chinese: I did try though!

| | | |------|

|---|---| | |

| | | Exit

| | | | |

|---|---| |------|

Mountains Mouth

Whats New In VB2005 - Some parts of the TechEd demos

VBTeam — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 02:24:00 GMT

So I cleaned up my teched demos and editted the notes so hopefully, someone other than me (without access to what's inside my head ;-)) can follow along and see some of the cool new things in VB2005. Simply unzip the solution, open it, and remember to START with the demo.vb file in the DemoProject solution!

If there's a project you're interested in that is NOT walked through ( i haven't had time to explain them all) then let me know and I'll look at adding in descriptions for it!

Kit

kitg@microsoft.com

Generics Patterns and Practices: ideas and suggestions for when to use generics

VBTeam — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 00:39:00 GMT

So at TechEd-2006, I gave a chalktalk on generics patterns and practices. I've zipped the content up here so folks can check it out if they want.

I start by giving a quick background on generics (the GenericsBasics solution attached), then looking for patterns in the framework of where generics might be applied (The Examples project in the solution attached), to help people see where they might look for ways to create generics APIs in their own code. I also give a couple of exmaples of 'anti' patterns, just so they can see clearly, why some stuff is discouraged. I finally finish with a list of "Kit's Do's and Don'ts".

The last section (Do's and Don'ts) is in the attached slides. It certainly contains a lot of my own priorities and suggestions, and so I give each of the items a rating to help you know how I would rate it's relative priority. Out of 5 stars, everything is 3 or more stars of course: less than 3 stars, and it's not something I would suggest doing, therefore, it aint on the list!

But the fundamentals for the list were developed by Krzysztof Cwalina, and were first published on his blog. In case you didn't know, Krzys is the king of framework design guidelines, and he has a most excellent book on this topic, not surprisingly titled 'Framework Design Guidelines'.

Kit George (kitg@microsoft.com)

VB Curioddities #1: Enum, Enum, my kingdom for an Enum.Parse

VBTeam — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 03:55:00 GMT

Hey folks, my name's Kit George and I've joined the VB team from the CLR. VB is after all, the best language, so of course, it makes sense to work directly on it!

Like all languages, VB has it's little 'oddities', so i thought i would start a series to present a few of these. These are little (and perhaps large) curious VB things that you may or may not have noticed. Either way, you can bring them up at the water cooler to impress everyone with your VB knowledge.

I thought I would start with an interesting oddity surrounding Enum.Parse. Enum is of course, a keyword in Visual Basic, since it was already a keyword in days prior to .NET. This creates an interesting conflict between the Enum class (Enum is itself, a class in the System namespace of .NET), and the keyword. Why it becomes interesting is that the Enum class has some Shared members on it, most interestingly, Parse. You would normally invoke such a method with code like this:

Public Class Test
Public shared Sub Main()

Dim ct as CarType = Enum.Parse(GetType(CarType), "Sedan")
MsgBox(ct)

End Sub
End Class

Enum CarType
Sedan = 1
Sports = 2
SUV = 3
End Enum

However, because Enum is a keyword, you'll get an exception on the above code because the 'Enum.Parse' line is treated as if you're trying to declare an Enum by the compiler. You could workaround this easily by simply doing the followin. The square brackets around the name Enum tell the compiler to NOT treat it like a keyword, therefore, it treats it like a class call:

Dim ct as CarType = [Enum].Parse(GetType(CarType), "Sedan")

But in addition to the above syntax, and in order to make it even simpler, VB allows you to use the actual name of the Enum (CarType in this case) to invoke the Parse method. To all intents and purpose, this LOOKS like a Shared method call, so it should be supported:

Dim ct as CarType = CarType.Parse(GetType(CarType), "Sedan")

Now here's where it gets interesting. Under the hood, the above line is actually turned into a call through to [Enum].Parse. That is, the CarType.Parse call has nothing to do with the CarType Enum itself, instead, it simply becomes a standard [Enum].Parse call. Therefore, what if I did something like this:

Enum BoatType
  Trawler = 1
  SpeedBoat = 2
  CruiseShip = 3
End Enum

Dim ct as CarType = BoatType.Parse(GetType(CarType), "Sedan")

Surely this wouldn't compile, right? After all, it looks like we're parsing on the BoatType class, into a CarType type: that surely doesn't work.

But remember that CarType.Parse simply got turned into [Enum].Parse? Well, ANY other Enum call is the same. So BoatType.Parse, really just becomes [Enum].Parse. And this works just fine! So the above code compiles and runs just fine. Of course, I would not suggest under any circumstances, that you write your code this way, it is odd to read.

Note that of course, this will NOT work:

Dim bt as BoatType = BoatType.Parse(GetType(CarType), "Trawler")

The reason is that the KEY things for the transformation to succeed are that a) the type on the left of the assignment, and the type in the first parameter to the Parse method, match (they don't in the above case, which is what causes it to fail), and b) that the string can be converted to the specified type (That is, it is a member of the specified Enum. In the above case it can, but of course, we're gonna fail here because of item a) anyway).

At the end of the day, my own preference IS to use the name of the specific Enum, but simply use the same name as the Enum I'm parsing into. But I do like messing with people from time to time with this one ;-).