Visual Basic Community

[KathleenDollard]

I am all about community. As a community, we can improve the experience of Visual Basic programmers.

What does that mean to you?

How do we best do that?

[KathleenDollard]

@AdamSpeight2008 said:

A wiki / use of the projects feature on this repo would be a nice addition, may also attract contributor to pick off outstanding tasks.

...
Hints and Tips / Documentation.
Writing VB Analyser
Writing VB Code Fix
Parsing
Semantics
Binding
Lowering

I'm fine with a wiki here for this, if you convince me that's where people will find it.

Are you interested in contributing to the documentation? It's OSS in GitHub and is one of the things considered for MVP. If you are interested in being an MVP and you want my suggestions, I'm happy to help. I offered to do that when I was in the community, and don't see a reason to change (I can't magically make someone an MVP. You make yourself an MVP, but I can help you not be overlooked.)

[KathleenDollard]

Who is the Visual Basic community?

Is it a few hundred people trying to do cutting edge stuff frustrated by a language that doesn't have as much support as C# and hundreds of thousands of people working on legacy apps they are afraid they will break if they change anything?

(To reassure, I am not asking this question in the context of strategy, but in the context of how we build and support community)

[ocdtrekkie]

@KathleenDollard I can only speak for myself, but VB6 was the first language I learned, and despite having worked in C#, PHP, and C++ before, when I think of how something works, my mind thinks it in VB, and then I translate. So when it came to my hobby project... Visual Basic was just the most natural choice. (And the ability to convert everything to C# if the language gets abandoned is certainly a big plus.)

Personally, I wrote a home automation controller slash personal assistant thing. It also now runs in my car. I am bad at programming, but my project is fun. ;)

[AdamSpeight2008]

There is the classic joke

Visual Basic programmers like their family and want to spend time with them.
CSharp programmers don't.

[AdamSpeight2008]

@KathleenDollard

I'm fine with a wiki here for this, if you convince me that's where people will find it.
I've added a new directory to add further documentation. See PR #253

The sections will in time be filled with more information.

[KathleenDollard]

@ocdtrekkie What platform (what .NET) did you use?

[Bill-McC]

Trust, stability, longevity, adaptable, empowering.

I personally believe the biggest issue facing VB is it simply not working with Microsoft's evolving vision. That's a huge problem and in many ways is happening as we speak. The question is how do we future proof VB ? What levels of adaptability does it need to work and continue to work across the plethora of .net ?

[ocdtrekkie]

@KathleenDollard WinForms targeting .NET Framework 4.5.2 at the moment. My attempts to do things with WPF tend to end in failure, and it's not super dependent on UI to begin with. (I originally hoped to factor out the form entirely and make it a service, but the version in my car is super dependent on a textbox at the moment.)

[bandleader]

@KathleenDollard I am all about community. As a community, we can improve the experience of Visual Basic programmers. What does that mean to you? How do we best do that?

1. Keep VB up-to-date with features developing in the programming world, so VB stays relevant as a powerful and efficient language more modern development.
   (C# features in particular, since they've already been vetted for .NET, and also can probably be implemented more easily while/after doing so for C#.)
   Past examples: interpolated strings, Async/Await, ?.
2. Pioneer more great features/extensions -- @AnthonyDGreen always raised great ideas, along with many others here. We can pave the way for the rest of the world; we don't just have to copy-cat!
3. Ensure VB can be used wherever .NET runs: ASP.NET, Xamarin, etc.

More on 2

In fact, we are uniquely positioned to offer new features, especially those called "sugar." This is because VB's advantage (to beginners and pros alike) has always been its position as a concise, expressive, highly readable language. (Even from its BASIC roots. Think of our For loops vs. C-style for loops). Therefore, our devs love sugar, request sugar, and are very good at introducing sugar.

More on 3

If this cannot be done properly, then the next-best solution would be for .NET to allow inclusion of VB code in non-VB projects. That way, project templates and emitted designer code would be in C#, but we could write the app-specific code in VB. (This was being discussed in #211, but can most simply/feasibly be done with separate *.vb files, not with compiler directives.) @Bill-McC This may be a solution to your comment.

[bandleader]

@KathleenDollard Who is the Visual Basic community?

Speaking for myself:

• Learned back in the VB6 days. Was absolutely overjoyed with VB.NET: real OOP, amazing as-you-type compile experience, great upgraded WinForms controls and designer, great .NET BCL, etc. etc. etc.
• Was even happier with ASP.NET, even happier when MVC came out to make things cleaner, even happier when NuGet provided access to a great .NET open-source ready-to-use package ecosystem...
• Things looked wonderful. New language features made me more and more productive. They also let VB do anything C# could; plus, for people like us, it was much more readable, expressive, and concise. And it looked like it was only getting better.
• Was extremely excited when .NET Core was announced, as .NET would be doubly powerful as cross-platform (and stay relevant against Node), and just as importantly, triply as attractive an ecosystem being open-source. Also Xamarin looked really exciting -- no longer would .NET be 'excluded' from the mobile platforms.
• But then something seemed to happen at Microsoft, and it seemed VB was slowly getting left behind: few language features being added; new features coming only to C#; sub-par VS support for some that did get added; and near-complete exclusion from new technologies such as ASP.NET Core and Xamarin.
• Then, MS confirmed our fears in a blog post by @MadsTorgersen.
• At this point, because I don't know where VB will be in a few years, I have often been starting new projects in C#, which is sad because I vastly prefer VB's superior syntax.
• Moreover, for the same reason, I have unfortunately stopped recommending that beginning programmers learn VB -- I would rather they learn something they can get a job in down the road.

Thank you

...for this initiative. I think a lot can be done to build up the community.

[bandleader]

@KathleenDollard Is it a few hundred people trying to do cutting edge stuff frustrated by a language that doesn't have as much support as C# and hundreds of thousands of people working on legacy apps they are afraid they will break if they change anything?

The "community" here on Github is the first group. Possibly the hundreds of thousands of maintainance-only devs you refer to indeed exist; they're just not active members of the community.

That said, the more important questions are, IMHO:

1. Can we iterate on and improve VB without breaking existing code? (Of course; in every issue we discussed how not to break -- @AnthonyDGreen did a great job at ensuring this.)
2. Is the first group significant enough? Or at least, could it be again, if VB would get the attention (and $) it needs to be viable against both C# and Node? (Yes, but see 3.)
3. Assuming the VB team explains things, would Microsoft be financially interested in changing the VB story, and giving it the resources it needs to compete in today's world?

...Only you have the answer to that.

[Bill-McC]

@bandleader Yes. I think addressing the issues of #211 is probably the most important thing to give VB an extended future.