We Don't need no Steenking Vee Bee Dot Net!

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This Richard Grimes thing has really fired up a lot of people! The guy is a pro, he can say whatever the hell he wants in his parting shot at DDJ. So he put down .NET and made a bunch of predictions.Who cares! When .NET first came out I clearly remember one JAVA guru calling it "Vaporware".

You really don't want to engage too much in mental masturbation over this kind of thing. Maybe he was having a Senior Moment. Maybe somebody in Redmond got him pissed off. One thing I know,
his comments about VB.NET were right on. We don't need no steenking Vee Bee Dot Net! Nyaaa, Nyaa Nyaaa!

It's not the language itself (although I've come to hate it). What it really is: Microsoft tried to create a new language for marketing purposes, because of all the billions ( a la Carl Sagan) of VB develpers out there. In doing so, they perpetuated all the helper classes and crutches and Option Strict=off and Option Explicit = off and the result is you have beelions of crybaby VB developers now doing .NET and they are being allowed -- even encouraged --to write crappy code and get away with it. The VB.NET compiler compiles it - it doesn't even whimper. I am humiliated almost daily by the C# compiler - I have to write quality, strongly typed code. And all this stuff about case insensitivity is a buncha baloney! What, they are gonna redo the UNIX filesystem because you think case insensitivity is passé?

If you want to feed a man for a lifetime don't give him a VB.NET fish. Let him learn C#. Look at the Enterprise Library. All C#. Look at ASP.NET - all 1 million plus lines of code -- C Sharp. What are we talking here, Greek?

Hanselman got it right when he said: Set VB6=Nothing.

I say, Set VB.NET = VB.NOT!
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous6:15 PM

    http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2005/02/22/378343.aspx

    I think Dan Fernandez handled this well. In some ways, made Richard look like a chump. Heck of a way to go.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous2:13 AM

    You're right. Writing System.Console.Write("Hello World"); instead of System.Console.Write("Hello World") is so different. You have to understand that it's possible to write good code in VB.NET as well as in C#, it doesn't depend on the language or the background, but on the developer's talent.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous4:02 PM

    IMHO, the basic problem with VB.NET is that it makes it too easy for bad programmers to write poor quality code. This is a huge disadvantage but not one that cannot be overcome (mostly) with the right settings and some programmer discipline. The first thing I do whenever I start a new VB.NET app is to turn Option Strict On and remove the reference to the Microsoft.VisualBasic.* namespaces. This will eliminate 75% of the problems.

    The better VB.NET programmers know to turn on Option Strict

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous9:58 PM

    We may not need Vee Bee Dot Net but where would we be without veebees.com I ask you???

    ReplyDelete

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