Article: Fall In Love with Visual Basic All Over Again in Visual Studio 2008
I have been using Visual Basic for longer than I care to remember. Each version is better than the last, and the latest release is no exception. The combination of VB9 running inside Visual Studio 2008 makes a powerful development environment. My latest article was published on DevX last week and covers my favorite features of Visual Basic 9 and Visual Studio 2008.
I was a little more lazy than usual about posting to my blog about this article, but I received quite a bit of email regarding this article. The bulk of the mail responded to my judgments about some of the new features. Some people didn't like that I even made judgments (sorry, but get used to it) while others didn't agree with my judgments (if my email responses didn't help, let me know). Many said they agreed with me and just wondered why I didn't include more LINQ samples.
Here we go. I try to let people know when I think something they are doing is stupid or when I think they are at risk of unwittingly doing something stupid. In the case of VB9, I am warning people about the latter problem: VB9 allows some seemingly freakishly lazy modes of coding, which I don't like. The article does a pretty good job of pointing them out, so I will not elaborate here. Many who didn't seem to mind me judging VB9 just didn't agree that I don't like the relaxed nature of how VB9 treats type declarations. I shutter to imagine going back to a BASIC language where we don't explicitly declare types. I consider the the choice to NOT explicitly provide a type for a variable a shortcut that will cause undue confusion later during the development process - I don't like that. It just doesn't seem to be the sort of coding practice I would expect from a true Craftsman. For those that think I should have included more LINQ examples, type "VB.NET LINQ" into Google and see where it takes you.
Some of the readers even pointed out that many of these features were added explicitly to support features in LINQ. I made that point in the article. Out of the context of LINQ, however, some of these features just add code smell. I don't like that.
If you have a different idea, let me know.
