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VB.NET Branches Out
by Patrick Meader

Posted November 21, 2003

Chris Dias, group program manager for Visual Basic .NET at Microsoft, talked at length to VSM Editor in Chief Patrick Meader about the present and future of Visual Basic .NET, including its target audience and Microsoft's larger goals when creating the tool. This is the expanded version of the interview that ran in Visual Studio Magazine's January 2004 issue.

PM: The VB development team serves a lot of masters. Can you describe, in a nutshell, whom this tool is for?

CD: We have a wide audience that we need to provide services for, but these users do have one important characteristic in common: They are looking for the best combination of productivity and power.

We spend a lot of time reviewing how VB developers work, and we try to provide tools that suit how different types of VB developers use their tools. It's critical that we make things easier for developers, but it's just as critical that we provide the features and capabilities for high-end VB developers. This is why we provide features such as generics, operator overloading, and so on. It's my opinion that all these features will eventually be applicable to everyone who uses the product.

For example, take a look at the My.Classes we've added to the framework, which enable you to speed-dial into aspects of the framework. These classes also come with hooks back out to the framework, where appropriate. We have some simplified file access stuff in there, but the Stream object is right there, hanging off the top-level file I/O class. So you can do the 80 to 90 percent of the stuff you need to do right there with two to three lines of code. But if you are the bleeding edge power-user, you can jump off right there using the Stream object.

PM: Reviewing some of the features for version 1 of VS.NET—inheritance, support for multiple threading models, direct access to the underlying framework—it appears a lot of time and effort went into disproving that VB was a toy language. How much was the desire to create a "real" development tool a factor for you when designing and building the first implementation of VS.NET?

CD: The reason we made many of the decisions we made was so we could make VB a first-class member of the platform. In order to play in that space, we needed to add all those things you mentioned. We got a lot of those power features because we implemented the .NET Framework.

So, it isn't that we set out by saying that we were going to create a really powerful object-oriented tool that is going to satisfy x or y group of people who have been demanding x and y features. What we said was, "We want to be a first-class tool on the .NET platform," and those features came along with that. But we also know that what we didn't get in version 1 of the product were features like edit-and-continue.