More talk about the future of Visual Basic
Normally I don't like to make entries that are just a collection of links, but this time I will make an exception. Here are some other blogs and posts about the future of Visual Basic and Project LINQ:
https://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2005/09/13/10501.aspx - Paul Vick
https://blogs.msdn.com/vsdata/archive/2005/09/12/Announcing_Linq.aspx - Alan Griver
https://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2005/09/13/464893.aspx - Amanada Silver
https://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/view/967 - Ehud Lamm
Don't forget to check out the VB Future page at https://msdn.microsoft.com/VBasic/Future/ and the PDC Resource CD online at https://msdn.microsoft.com/VBasic/PDC05/.
Comments
- Anonymous
September 26, 2005
Certainly we VBers are interested in the future of VB, but telling us about the future of VB now when we haven't even gotten the production version of VS2005 is information overload.
I think we would be more interested to know that the MS VB Team is working hard to finish VS2005. One gets the impression the VB Team has closed the door on VB8, and they are off to greener pastures.
Keep up the good work. - Anonymous
September 26, 2005
--> I think we would be more interested to know that the MS VB Team is working hard to finish VS2005. One gets the impression the VB Team has closed the door on VB8, and they are off to greener pastures.
Since VS 2005 is to be launched on November 7th you need to back up from there and figure the numbers of weeks to get thousands of CDs pressed to get in the hands of resellers and all of the work that has to be done between RTM and Launch. Doing this you would notice that the time to a realistic RTM date (The date the code is shipped to the manufacture and by extension impossible to change) is in a matter of time measured in days, not weeks or months. Given that things are so close to RTM the VB 8.0 (AKA VB 2005) book is closed.
In fact it was announced that BETA 2 was feature complete when it was released months ago, so effectively the book was closed at that point on new features. The Release Candidate was issued a few weeks ago so that shuts things down even farther.
Granted there are a few odds and ends in the polish space that are being worked on by the development team, however is you look at the job titles of the folks in the videos and on the VB 9.0 items they are mostly Program Managers and Technical Leads (Microsoft job title for the core of really smart Devs thinking about the big picture and things down the road). These are the hardly the folks that would be fixing bugs or writing any last minute code, like all PMs in the software world these folks are focused on defining the product and writing the specs. By nature they start on a new product before the Dev Teams come in and shift their primary focus off that product before the Dev teams.
In fact now is the perfect time to discuss VB 9.0. Once the development teams are long into the development cycle it becomes very expensive and hard to include feedback from customers. By getting out with customers and getting feedback early in the cycle we are able to make sure customer requests and issues make it into the next version. Asking for features or telling us something does not work the way you want it to late in the cycle does not allow time to make the change to the product that people would like.
Like most large software companies we always have a small team working on V.Next+1 (Right now that would be VB 9.0) or farther, a large team working V.Next (Right now that would be VB 2005 AKA VB 8.0), and a team doing maintenance on existing code (VB 2002/2003 AKA VB 7.0/7.1). This enables us to support all of our customers where ever they are in the product cycle.