As another side show of Teched DotNed organized a meeting to discuss VB.NET and C# with MS team members.
Despite the football some 30 people showed up. We had a good time
with a lot of laughs. Everybody was given the time to ride their
hobby-horse, the team members patiently took the time to take notes.
Maybe some of the suggestions will make it into the product. The best
one went like this : “It should be difficult to make easy mistakes...”
which started as a discussion on iterating through the members of an
enumeration.
The VB feature the team would like most to drop (but cannot do because of backward compatibilty) is On error resume. Backwards comptability is very important to MS, the only issue which is allowed to break existing code is security.
VB.NET seems to be focussed more on WinForm than on ASP.NET, at the
MS campus they are in the same building as the Winforms team. So
bringing the .NET framework to every desktop is important. What will MS
do to bring the framework to every desktop ? Everything they can
! A way could be to include it in a (critical) update. The main
reason for not doing that (yet?) is the size, after all it is a 20mb
download.
Peter