Visual Basic Comes to Windows Phone 7

"We’re giving VB developers early access to the Windows Phone 7 platform so that they can start thinking about what amazing apps they want to build."

toth

"* for some value of 'amazing'"

mott555

I didn't realize that didn't exist before. Since WP7 is .NET-based I guess I had just assumed any .NET language could be used.

davedavenotdavemaybe

@toth said:

"* for some value of 'amazing'"

To be amazed is (literally) to be bewildered, made crazy, or stunned. The sense that means to be overcome by awe is a modern coinage (at only 500 years old).

toth

@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

@toth said:
"* for some value of 'amazing'"
To be amazed is (literally) to be bewildered, made crazy, or stunned. The sense that means to be overcome by awe is a modern coinage (at only 500 years old).

Exactly.

dhromed

@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

@toth said:
"* for some value of 'amazing'"
To be amazed is (literally) to be bewildered, made crazy, or stunned. The sense that means to be overcome by awe is a modern coinage (at only 500 years old).

Incidentally, the word "awesome" received its meaning of "cool" fairly recently also, where before it was closer in meaning to "terrible".

AlexMedia

Aw come on, it's VB.NET. That's not nearly as horrifying as VBA is.

Shortjob

@Alex Media said:

Aw come on, it's VB.NET. That's not nearly as horrifying as VBA is.

Bless my heart, that is true. VBA... *shudder*

Medezark

@Shortjob said:

@Alex Media said:
Aw come on, it's VB.NET. That's not nearly as horrifying as VBA is.

Bless my heart, that is true. VBA... *shudder*

VB, VBA, VB.NET --- Better than ASP.NET. I hate building web apps. I hope this internet fad goes away soon.

Shortjob

@Medezark said:

@Shortjob said:
@Alex Media said:
Aw come on, it's VB.NET. That's not nearly as horrifying as VBA is.

Bless my heart, that is true. VBA... *shudder*

VB, VBA, VB.NET --- Better than ASP.NET. I hate building web apps. I hope this internet fad goes away soon.

I'm actually not hostile at all towards ASP.NET. As long as they program in C# and don't use webforms.

blakeyrat

@Shortjob said:

@Medezark said:
@Shortjob said:
@Alex Media said:
Aw come on, it's VB.NET. That's not nearly as horrifying as VBA is.

Bless my heart, that is true. VBA... *shudder*

VB, VBA, VB.NET --- Better than ASP.NET. I hate building web apps. I hope this internet fad goes away soon.
I'm actually not hostile at all towards ASP.NET. As long as they program in C# and don't use webforms.

What's wrong with webforms?

Shortjob

@blakeyrat said:

@Shortjob said:
@Medezark said:
@Shortjob said:
@Alex Media said:
Aw come on, it's VB.NET. That's not nearly as horrifying as VBA is.

Bless my heart, that is true. VBA... *shudder*

VB, VBA, VB.NET --- Better than ASP.NET. I hate building web apps. I hope this internet fad goes away soon.
I'm actually not hostile at all towards ASP.NET. As long as they program in C# and don't use webforms.

What's wrong with webforms?

Webforms is a technology, built to conceal the 'web' in 'web development'. It "solves" the state problem for HTTP, but in a way that is inefficient and suggesting the wrong things to the developer. A web developer should always be aware of which parts of her solution are server and which are client-based. In webforms, this separation is rarely obvious. To be honest, I'm apalled by the idea of building a server-side model simply for deducting the client state. And the state handling effects are a good wtf themselves. Few websites ever need to know the exact client state, so why even bother?

sh_code

@toth said:

@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
@toth said:
"* for some value of 'amazing'"
To be amazed is (literally) to be bewildered, made crazy, or stunned. The sense that means to be overcome by awe is a modern coinage (at only 500 years old).

Exactly.

...oh and here we are, Orwell. a little late, but anyways... newspeak anyone?

@Medezark said:

VB, VBA, VB.NET --- Better than ASP.NET.

But what about an ASP.NET site written in VB.NET?

Indrora

thats like writing an http daemon in brainfuck.

TBH, you could aways use VB with WP7... you just had to use some intelligent hacks: http://justinangel.net/WindowsPhone7VBnetAndFSharp

Now, stop corrupting my C# land... With your... VB...

XIU

@Shortjob said:

blabla ... of her solution ... blabla

There are no girls on my tubes!

dhromed

@XIU said:

There are no girls on my tubes!

There was a girl on my tube, last time.

That was pretty good.

amischiefr

@dhromed said:

@XIU said:
There are no girls on my tubes!

There was a girl on my tube, last time.
That was pretty good.

I didn't know morbs was post-op. Congrats!

Where is morbs? Did he hit a CS bug that prevents 5600+ posts, or something? Did his mother sit on him?

Soviut

@blakeyrat said:

What's wrong with webforms?

Complex page life cycle, often making the state very difficult to determine.
A Viewstate that bloats easily because it stores the state of all your controls in an encrypted string and stored in every page as a hidden variable
Difficult to style controls.

Those are my top three issues with it. It boils down to needless complexity once you want to do anything more than drag a gridview and a few buttons onto the page.

dhromed

@Zecc said:

Where is morbs?

Went on a trip around the world to find himself and his place in existence.

blakeyrat

Fair enough, I guess I just don't see your issues as real issues... the life cycle is all taken care of by ASP.net itself, and the viewstate isn't that big.

@Soviut said:

- Difficult to style controls.

What do you mean by this one? Care to go into more detail?

@dhromed said:

@Zecc said:
Where is morbs?

Went on a trip around the world to find himself and his place in existence.

You mean he's never coming back?

WeatherGod

@El_Heffe said:

windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone
"We’re giving VB developers early access to the Windows Phone 7 platform so that they can start thinking about what amazing apps they want to build."

Does this mean that we could eventually see SpectateSwamp's SSDS (aka: SSRR) ported to these phones?

heffkat

@blakeyrat said:

@Shortjob said:
@Medezark said:
@Shortjob said:
@Alex Media said:
Aw come on, it's VB.NET. That's not nearly as horrifying as VBA is.

Bless my heart, that is true. VBA... *shudder*

VB, VBA, VB.NET --- Better than ASP.NET. I hate building web apps. I hope this internet fad goes away soon.
I'm actually not hostile at all towards ASP.NET. As long as they program in C# and don't use webforms.

What's wrong with webforms?

I enjoy writing good code that follows OOP and doesn't turn in to a mess of spaghetti, which web forms tends to make. In web forms it is easy to make awful code that 'just works'. Using a concept for web development is just a bad idea. Microsoft doesn't even like web forms last I checked. Now MVC 2.0 thats the good stuff.

dhromed

@heffkat said:

Using a (...) concept for web development is just a bad idea

I indicated the position where I think you have forgotten a crucial noun.

blakeyrat

@heffkat said:

I enjoy writing good code that follows OOP and doesn't turn in to a mess of spaghetti, which web forms tends to make. In web forms it is easy to make awful code that 'just works'. Using a concept for web development is just a bad idea. Microsoft doesn't even like web forms last I checked. Now MVC 2.0 thats the good stuff.

Well I'm not saying webforms is the end-all be-all, I'm just saying it's not bad at all. Especially if you're comparing it to, say, Classic ASP, or ColdFusion, or PHP without any frameworks... compared to those things (that is, it's actual competitors), webforms is brilliant.

If you're going to say webforms is bad because *that entire way of building websites* is bad, well, fair enough... but that's not really webforms' fault, is it? I prefer to compare things to the things they compete with.

b_redeker

@dhromed said:

@Zecc said:
Where is morbs?

Went on a trip around the world to find himself and his place in existence.

Man, he'll be so disappointed when he comes home and finds out he was there all along.

pkmnfrk

What's wrong with Visual Basic.NET? It supports everything that C# does, just with a more verbose syntax. The only thing it doesn't support is unsafe code, which is icky anyway.

XIU

@pkmnfrk said:

What's wrong with Visual Basic.NET? It supports everything that C# does, just with a more verbose syntax. The only thing it doesn't support is unsafe code, which is icky anyway.

Everything? How can you use yield return/break in VB.NET?

Helix

@XIU said:

@pkmnfrk said:
What's wrong with Visual Basic.NET? It supports everything that C# does, just with a more verbose syntax. The only thing it doesn't support is unsafe code, which is icky anyway.

Everything? How can you use yield return/break in VB.NET?

Luckly there will be more development houses ready for out-sourcing projects and will be more familar with VB.NET then c#, so it's a win all round.

danixdefcon5

@pkmnfrk said:

What's wrong with Visual Basic.NET? It supports everything that C# does, just with a more verbose syntax. The only thing it doesn't support is unsafe code, which is icky anyway.

The wrongness of VB (anything) is this:

a more verbose syntax.

It adds noise to the code. When your code reads like a dull English essay, you're less likely to spot bugs in the code. Most language designers realized this, otherwise we would still be using stuff with syntaxes like

IF 5 IS LARGER THAN THE PRODUCT OF VARIABLE X TIMES Y ELEVATED TO THE POWER OF 6 THEN

EXECUTE SOMETHING

UNLESS THE PREVIOUS EXPRESSION IS FALSE, IN WHICH CASE YOU SHOULD

EXECUTE SOMETHING ELSE

AND NOW YOU MAY END THIS IF CONDITIONAL BLOCK.

FORTRAN used to have the = > and < operators implemented as words instead of the symbols, but that was simply 60's tech being unable to represent those characters.

blakeyrat

@danixdefcon5 said:

@pkmnfrk said:
What's wrong with Visual Basic.NET? It supports everything that C# does, just with a more verbose syntax. The only thing it doesn't support is unsafe code, which is icky anyway.

The wrongness of VB (anything) is this:

a more verbose syntax.

It adds noise to the code. When your code reads like a dull English essay, you're less likely to spot bugs in the code. Most language designers realized this, otherwise we would still be using stuff with syntaxes like

IF 5 IS LARGER THAN THE PRODUCT OF VARIABLE X TIMES Y ELEVATED TO THE POWER OF 6 THEN

EXECUTE SOMETHING

UNLESS THE PREVIOUS EXPRESSION IS FALSE, IN WHICH CASE YOU SHOULD

EXECUTE SOMETHING ELSE

AND NOW YOU MAY END THIS IF CONDITIONAL BLOCK.

FORTRAN used to have the = > and < operators implemented as words instead of the symbols, but that was simply 60's tech being unable to represent those characters.

Now I'm all nostalgic for HyperTalk!

dhromed

@blakeyrat said:

Now I'm all nostalgic for HyperTalk!

Or Director's Lingo.

*shudder*

da_Doctah

@dhromed said:

@blakeyrat said:
Now I'm all nostalgic for HyperTalk!

Or Director's Lingo.
*shudder*

Or &deity help us, APL!

danixdefcon5

@da Doctah said:

Or &deity help us, APL!

APL at least was a language made by mathematicians, for mathematicians. It is supposed to look reasonable to them. Or Egyptians. Whatever!

Update

"Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 launches on Monday and the mobile operating system is likely to benefit from low expectations."

Windows Phone 7 likely to benefit from low expectations

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 launches on Monday and the mobile operating system is likely to benefit from low expectations. What happens when Windows Phone 7 doesn't disappoint?

DaveK1

@danixdefcon5 said:

@da Doctah said:
Or &deity help us, APL!

APL at least was a language made by mathematicians, for mathematicians. It is supposed to look reasonable to them. Or Egyptians. Whatever!

It probably looked best of all to keyboard manufacturers...