November 2007 Entries
Oh, yeah, that's right. We shipped. Hard to believe we've finally reached the finish line...
Most everyone who's steeped deeply enough in the culture of Visual Studio has probably run across some mention of Mort. Mort is one of a triumvirate of personas that the Visual Studio team uses to describe the developers that they are targeting. The other two members of this group are Elvis and Einstein. (I got complaints from internal people the last time I mentioned the personas, so let me take a moment to say that they are open knowledge.) Love them or hate them, the personas have become an integral part of the way that many people talk about VB,...
One piece of conventional wisdom that I hear now and again is that "nobody uses Visual Basic." When someone's giving a talk and asks people to raise their hands if they use VB, they say VB'ers are in the minority. In the buzz-o-sphere, Visual Basic seems to be only discussed when debating whether some other language is the "new" Visual Basic. Even Microsoft has been accused on occasion of seeming to favor C# over VB in things like samples or documentation. We were having a discussion internally about this piece of conventional wisdom and whether the numbers really backed this...