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Reclaiming the Soul of VB
by Patrick Meader
Posted October 28, 2003
Who got soul?
You got it.
You got it.
—"I Know You Got Soul" by Eric B. & Rakim (words by Eric Barrier, William Griffin, Bobby Byrd, James Brown, and Charles Bobbit)
"We want to put the magic back into VB, to re-instill and re-invigorate VB.NET with the soul of what made the product great in the first place. We want to satisfy the needs of all the different developer communities, including what we call the occupational programmer."
—Ari Bixhorn, lead product manager for Visual Studio .NET
Who got soul? The Whidbey version of VB.NET, according to Ari Bixhorn, lead product manager for Visual Studio .NET.
Ari and I discussed the future of VS.NET in a recent meeting at Microsoft's Redmond campus, including features in the next version of VB intended to facilitate use of the tool for what Ari calls the occupational programmer. Among the topics we discussed: the perception that in the transition to VB.NET, VB lost a little bit of the essence that made it great.
This has been a common complaint from longtime VB users since VB.NET's release. One thing that excited people about the original Visual Basic was the way it empowered nontraditional programmers who understood the business rules of a department to create applications that served the business needs of that department. Visual Basic became evermore powerful through the years, and some of these features were complex. However, you didn't have to use them, and VB always retained a RAD-oriented, drag-and-drop character for prototyping or creating applications quickly.
The poster-child example nearly everyone points to as proof VB.NET lost some of its RAD character in the transition is edit-and-continue, the ability to pause and restart an application when testing in the IDE. I've said it previously, but don't mind saying it again: VB needed to make the transition to .NET if it was to remain a relevant programming language in today's business environment. Visual Basic was being squeezed by Java and other programming tools, and was less suited to creating scalable, n-tier, and/or Internet-enabled applications that now dominate enterprise businesses. The transition to the .NET platform gave VB a new lease on life.
Given that, it was on Microsoft to take every step necessary to include the language in VS.NET as part of the CLR. It did, too, but most of the effort in the initial version went to making sure VB was compliant with the .NET Framework. One casualty of this emphasis was edit-and-continue. I think it's important to note that the hue and cry you hear about edit-and-continue has never been about the feature itself. There were always circumstances where it wasn't wise to use it, and I knew project managers in companies who removed it from their programmers' toolbars. Edit-and-continue is merely shorthand for the kinds of productivity features that developers missed from the original version of VB.
I'm happy to say Microsoft understood this, too. It would not have been enough to merely reinstate edit-and-continue and ask VB developers, "All better now?" Because the answer would have been a resounding, "No!" Visual Basic .NET 1.0 was a powerful tool, but it lacked the small touches that make you more productive. The Whidbey version of VS.NET attempts to correct that. It features new abstractions such as simplified access to system resources that let you manage these resources more easily, but these abstractions do nothing to limit your access to the underlying framework. The glass ceiling imposed on VB developers for many years was frustrating to many of its users. There's no question many developers wanted these restrictions lifted, but not at the expense of VB's productivity features, which they've always appreciated. They wanted these limitations lifted within the context of a tool that let them be as productive as ever.
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Speaking of the next version of VS.NET, the January issue of VSM will be a special, blow-out look at it. Our goal with this coming issue is not simply to tell you the features of the tool, but to set them in context and explain what they will mean to you in your everyday duties as a developer. This special issue is a one-time event; we will not be turning over the pages of the magazine to exclusive coverage of a tool you won't see for a year, but instead will continue to focus on practical, real-world information to help you do your job better and faster.
Talk Back:
Is there some special quality that makes VB what it is? If so, what is it? Tell me at .
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