.NET From India

Moving a project from VS 2005 to VS 2008

When you open a VS 2005 project in VS 2008, Visual Studio offers to migrate the project to the new format. Usually there should be no problem with this and all your project files, solution files, Test cases etc should move seamlessly to the 2008 format.

But if you do build your project you will notice that your output assemblies actually target .NET Framework 2.0 and not 3.5. This is basically because the migration retains the targeted framework to make sure you application does not fail. The method to change this setting after migration is not easy to find.

For VB projects, this setting is actually hidden inside, My Project -> Compile -> Advanced Compiler Options dialog. Obviously, this is not very easy to find. (See Image)

In C# projects this setting is a lot easier to find in Project Properties -> Application Tab itself. I am not sure why the VB team actually made this setting so difficult to find.

Late Binding - VB vs C#

Scott Hanselman has a nice post on trying to use C# and VB with Office Interop and how he found that VB made it a lot easier.

I have always argued that the two thing that acutally bring power to Office Interop when using VB is Optional arguments and late binding. Though I have made this argument many times to my peers (almost always without code in hand as they are mostly arguments over cups of coffee) this post actually has an example using the two languages and nobody can dispute the differnce in complexity that the C# sample has.

This also illustrates a point I always try to make.. It rarely makes sense arguing VB vs C# except in certain scenarios. This is one of them... In most cases choose the language you are comfortable with and start coding. It just happens that VB is that language of choice for me..

India Stock Quote Component version 1.2.0 Released

Ok, finally finished the basic things I wanted in place for the 1.2.0 release. Checked in the code today morning and have also created a release for this version.

New Features

1. Create a Interface that will allow you to just switch websites from where you want to get the quote. Out of the box, this release supports, Yahoo India and NSE India sites.
2. Added the NSE India provider. This only supports quotes as of now as the NSE charts are based on java applets.
3. So reorganization of code to make it more maintainable and some additional comments to help you, if you are looking at the code.

India Stock Quotes Component

I had written a small component as a part of my Vista Gadget attempt sometime back to get the stock quote for Indian Shares from the Yahoo Finance Site. I kind of left that out in my blog for a long time and then this week I wanted a similar component for something else.

So I just took the old component and then cleaned it up and created a CodePlex project for it. I will be updating this component based on what I need and then updates will depend on feature request.

India Stock Quotes (from Yahoo Finance)

Update: I updated the component over the weekend to also send the Chart images. This feature is not available in version 1.1

Good Vista Tips

Ed Bott has 10 tips and tweaks for Vista experts. These are quite good and more advanced than the first set of tips he had.

Last month, I published 10 tweaks for Windows Vista RC1. It got a good response, but it also drew some complaints. "Too basic," said some critics. "And hey, those aren't all tweaks."

OK, fair enough. To satisfy the critics (you know who you are), I present 10 expert tweaks for Windows Vista RC2. No beginner-level stuff here, and I've clearly labeled which are tips and which are tweaks.

A few of these like the Snip and the Mobility Center Feature, I had not seen before. Very Cool...

Do note, these are based on Vista RC2, which is not publicly available. So if you have an older install, you may not have all the features working on your machine.

VB.NET - Attracting the VB developer

When MS announce .NET and talked about two languages that was going to be part of it, C# and VB.NET, there was a lot of debate on why the two language approach as well as "VB is better than C#" and vice versa.

There has been hours of entertainment provided by the VB vs. C# debate. There was even one very recently on the internal Indian MVP lists too..:-)

But one of the most debated issues has been that of how many VB developers would prefer to move to C#, rather than VB.NET, as they were re-learning a new language anyway. I have mostly argued that it is not a question of learning a language, but rather a developers comfort with the structure of the language that is going to count. A VB developer would surely feel more comfortable working with VB.NET than all those curly braces in C#. So he will be more productive moving to VB.NET.

Now looks like that is happening. VB.NET seems to be picking up quite nicely compared to C# according to this new survey from SearchVB.

In our poll, VB.NET language use measured at 52.9 percent, while infant C# use is at about 30 percent [See Figure 2] From this, one might judge that VB6 to VB.NET migration is well underway.

VB Team's Visit to Chennai

Steven Lees and Alan Griver from the VB team visited Chennai last Friday. They did a session on the new features coming up in VB 2005. I was unable to attend that due to another session I had to do for Microsoft at the same time at one of their partners. But I went down there later in the evening for a discussion group on VB6 and migration to VB.NET.

I was quite suprised when I found that even thought people extensively use MSDN for finding solutions, they still do not know some of the areas in MSDN like the architecture center, VB movies etc. It looks like the size of MSDN is its shortcoming too.

This meeting with the team also started off a train of thoughts on why I love VB so much. I have programmed using a lot of different languages in my life: VB, Power Builder, FoxPro, COBOL on Mainframes, C etc. But VB still remains the language I love the most. It may be because Basic was the first computer language I learnt on those DOS machines (does anyone remember GWBasic and Basca anymore). Or it maybe because of the length of time I have been using VB, from 3.0 onwards. Or it may just be that I like the readability and productivity that VB gives, which I do not find in any other language, including C#.

Refactoring out of VB 2005

Well, a real sad news indeed. Refactoring goes out of VB 2005.

I am not sure if this will hit the productivity with VB.NET, unless refactoring is part of your process. But this sure gives a lot of fodder to the C# better than VB group. That too now that the C# group has added EnC support to C#.

Generics Article

My article on Generics has been published in DotnetD2D.

Introduction to Generics

My first VB 2005 Bug

A Generics bug I found when using VB 2005 Express now into Product Feedback Center.