Archive for September, 2007

The Last Visual Basic Developer Alive (I hope not)

Recently I’ve taken to reading books on software patterns. A few months ago I started the legendary “Design Patterns” aka “Gang of Four”.

Working on the .NET platform, reading books from the C++/Smalltalk/Java dominated time period is amusing in that often such books emphasize some patterns which we take for granted in .NET because the infrastructure supports and encourages them so transparently. As an example, the Observer pattern (GoF) has been really simplified with .NET delegates and events, and the Mediator pattern (GoF) is almost a given in WinForms development. In some cases the CLR allows a more flexible and elegant implementation and this is true on other platforms where different constructs are given first-class status. In other cases it’s just cool to see how patterns are simply manifested in the framework e.g. Iterator (GoF) -> IEnumerable.

The Visitor pattern takes the common orientation of polymorphism and turns it on its side.

September 30, 2007 · Anthony D. Green · No Comments
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I was Never Much Good at Hello’s

Windows Presentation Foundation is a major paradigm shift that, frankly, intimidates me. But lately I’ve been digging in around the edges trying to understand what these changes could mean for the future of .NET solution designs.

I finally caved and got myself a copy of VS2008 Beta 2 and am really excited about it. Particularly, I’ve gotten to play with cool new language features in Visual Basic 9.0. Now, I’d move to VB9 for local type inference and object initializers alone but this weekend another feature piqued my interest: XML Literals.

September 26, 2007 · Anthony D. Green · No Comments
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