Look Into the Future of VS.NET (Continued)
Longtime VB Developers Lament
PM: Were you surprised by the negative reaction of some longtime VB developers to VB.NET?
ER: I can't say that we were surprised. We had a wide beta when we were developing Visual Studio, and we had millions of beta copies out there. We had broad discussions with the community about some of the changes we were making. The feedback that we received helped tremendously. We absolutely changed elements of the product based on some of this feedback, including the way we handled True and False and certain conditional things. There were other areas where we got strong feedback, and we made different choices.
Were all our decisions absolutely correct? No. But looking at the aggregate of these changes, we delivered a platform that will last 10 years and take the developers into the future. I think we did a great job of creating a new platform and making developers more productive overall. I think the overwhelming majority of developers will look back on us favorably when they consider the decisions we made on .NET 10 years from now.
We went through a similar transition when moving from VB3 to VB4. We had a lot of complaints on how we did X and how we did Y. Did we make every decision right from VB3 to VB4? No, I can't claim we did. But we did take the user from the world of 16-bit to 32-bit Windows and COM and OLE. I look forward to a time when people realize that we've done the same thing here. I do want people to know that they have been heard, even though we don't always agree, and even though we made some decisions that are in the broader interest of the .NET Framework overall. The feedback is heard, it's understood, and we do everything we can to try to satisfy our user base.
PM: Referring back to VB5/6 developers who haven't adopted .NET, what do you think has to happen before VB.NET will win them over? Is it even important that Microsoft do so?
ER: It is extremely important that .NET appeal to as broad a developer constituency as possible. Certainly, the VB developer is our most important developer constituency by a lot of measures. We're going to do everything we can to win them over.
You saw in today's keynote some of the features we hope will bring them along. For example, VS.NET 2003 has improved conversion utilities, whether it's taking the wizards and exposing user controls or Web classes, or pasting your old code into the snippet converter. We're going to do everything we can technically in the product, given where .NET is, to move VB6 users forward. I think the real appeal has to be the draw of the new solutions on the platform. There have to be compelling Web services out there that VB6 users want to take advantage of. There have to be compelling versions of Office that use XML in new and interesting ways that developers want to take advantage of. There will be a lot of data out there in XML, and there will be many interesting things to consume. At Microsoft, we're going to create new platform elements that we expose through the framework and managed code that VB users are going to want to take advantage of. It's up to us to invent and produce great things that are consumable through the framework and entice VB users over.
PM: I don't think that functional equivalence should be the be-all and end-all of programming in .NET for the various languages. However, longtime VB developers are used to feeling like afterthoughts in the development process. For example, in the VB5 and VB6 timeframe, there were often components or utilities written that lacked VB-friendly interfaces—really, a small thing, but it was left to others to provide these interfaces before VB developers could consume them. Now, we're seeing something similar with C#. For example, given the importance of Web services and WSE in general, why isn't the source code available in VB.NET as
well as C#?
ER: I think it's just a matter of timing. We should absolutely put out more samples if people want more samples. I'll commit to doing that as I sit here. There's no intent at Microsoft to favor one language over another. Our overall strategy in moving to the .NET Framework was to provide language independence, enabling VB developers to take advantage of the same exact classes and the same exact framework that anyone else could. I wouldn't read anything into the fact some examples are written in C# and some are written in VB.NET. If you look at our overall help and documentation—I get these statistics once a quarter—VB.NET examples still comprise the preponderance of new samples out there. Be it WSE or other technologies, we'll be happy to provide examples for VB.NET developers.
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