It’s been a while since I have been able to post anything.
Latest news, well I’m getting closer to releasing Connect Blocks Developer to beta (www.connectblocks.com). I finally sold my old home in Madison Florida, talk about an ordeal, first I had to live with renters for about 2 years and each renter tore up the house more and more. What’s with people? The last renter just about destroyed the house. Ten thousand dollars worth of time and money later I had it back together and ready to sell. One whole year after it hit the market I finally got it sold in March 2005. You just don’t know how good I feel, I didn’t make much off the deal, after paying friends back for time and money loaned and such and different credit cards I used to get things done. Well I just about broke even, but now I don’t have two mortgages anymore YAHOO!!! That’s enough to make me happy alone.
This month also marks my Mothers passing, what’s really odd is that I sold the house (that she died in) on the same day and around the same time of day on the same month that she died. It didn’t freak me out until much later on (about a week later).
In other news, recently I had a friend that works for the state hand me a document that a vender (no less) gave them titled “Visual Basic .NET vs. Visual C#.NET” man all I can say is that the guy that wrote is was so biased he might have bettered titled it “Why you MUST USE C# instead of VB.NET”. What were most funny were sections in it where he states that when developing in C# one can’t use VB.NET compiled assemblies and vice versa one can’t use C# compiled assemblies in VB.NET. Plus in another section they say “This leads to the argument that the language that one uses in .NET is completely irrelevant as they all generate the same IL and therefore some even claim that you can develop parts of your application in different languages and put them together. In theory, this can be done, but in practicality, it is not possible.”
What do you think of those eggs, well I guess all my applications that use a combination of Managed C++ (for bits to expose to native), application blocks written in C# and all my other classes all written in VB.NET, I must be living in the NOT POSSIBLE WORLD.
Oh there are so many funny parts; one part says basically that the IL produced by VB.NET isn’t the same as C# when people use VB only functions. Come on here; let’s see can anyone with a toaster for brains figure out that if you use something that isn’t available in another language why the IL would look different? Gezz, all one has to do is remove the Microsoft.VisualBasic reference and only stay strictly .NET (which is what I do so that conversions are easier to do). What’s really funny his how this guy portrays C# applications being able to run on many other platforms one day? Ok let me see, if the applications is compiled to IL and there is a runtime on the other platform then is it really running C#? Just too funny! The guy even went so far to say that functions/subs written in VB.NET that use optional parameters, when compiled the compiler makes overloads LOL just too funny, it just makes all the parameters required when viewed from like C#, where is this guy getting this information? Most of the rest of the document was out dated and many other bits soon to be taken care of in .NET 2.0, while a great bit of it was just “SO WHAT!”, hell the guy knew so little about VB.NET that he claims that the only method for doing events was to use the “WithEvents” keyword when declaring the object and the “Handles object.Event” bit at the end of the method and how bad this format was. I guess he never heard of Add/RemoveHandler. Just too funny, if I wasn’t worried about anyone getting in trouble I would post the document, but for now I will accept request.
Why am I upset about this? Well that’s easy, we are in the state capital, the state like most government likes Java, here we have a vender that is showing a rift in .NET (yes it exists (the feud between C# and VB.NET)) but one shouldn’t show crap like this and make statements so untrue that languages within .NET don’t really talk to each other very well and “NOT POSSIBLE”, this just gives more power to the Java heads. We need a united front not a divided front. This document only serves to divided people not join people, it would seem that the vendor was only interested in getting people to C# (state workers) so that they would have an easier life, which reminds me of the statement that the author states basically “C# forces developers to think more about logic and architecture before they start to write” and that it forces developers to write good code. Wow, amazing huh, no such thing as bad code in C#, it forces you to write only good code. Wow that would make it the first language in the world that doesn’t allow bad code.
Basically I try to promote .NET as much as possible in this region; documents floating around like this for inexperienced people to read just don’t help. You see the Java heads can use this you know. They would say “well since you got to relearn a language you might as well learn Java” and it works, if a VB.Classic developer reads this document they will tell their superiors that they need to be retrained to learn C# and that’s when Java will come into play. Funny thing is that this document was for those state workers with VB.classic experience and in the summary it states reasons you should standardize on VB.NET, one of which are “You have a development team with past visual Basic Experience”, so why so bias other then to make the vendors life easier, it’s supposed to be the other way around, the vendor makes the workers life easier.
Oh well, I guess I just gripe too much, I got a couple members of the VB team coming to Tallahassee (Jay and Jay) and I invited the author to come and get fractural and up to date information for his document, I kept it nice and civil. I really hope he comes, for we don’t need this around, it’s hard enough getting projects in .NET then to have this crap over our heads (as developers doing state work in the state capital).
I need to write more often then I do
Take care everyone.