Community vs Team

[ghost]

My last topic on the subject - promised. This is also inspired on the topic #250 "Visual Basic Community"

In #250, @KathleenDollard is looking for the VB community. In this thread I am looking for the VB Team.

I am working in a very small company (my own company), and I always worked in very small companies. So I have difficulties understanding how big companies like Microsoft work. In a small company, you deliver a product. If something is not working 100%, you have to fix it. No excuse that it is someone elses job - the customer buys 1 product and doesn't care that it consist of different (even external) parts. For the customer it's just 1 product. But I already learned that it doesn't work this way at Microsoft.

As I get the answers in several threads, there is no such thing as a VB team; there is a VB language team, and a visual studio team. This covers the compiler and the editor. What I am still missing is the VB content team (who makes the VB content, like templates, example projects, documentation), the VB support team (who talks with the users) and the VB Promotion Team (that tells everyone how awesome VB is).

In this thread I'd like to meet the people behind VB, what they do in the team, what they want for VB and how they see the communication between the VB community and the VB team(s). What I also like to learn in this thread is how the different teams work together, or are they working in tiny islands (as it seems to be: "This is not a VB issue, this is an editor issue, please try there and there")

How can we learn from each other and how can the community support the team(s) / the team(s) support the community?

[ghost]

Looks like the team is non-existent or has no guts to reveal themselves ....

[ocdtrekkie]

@tverweij Beyond the somewhat hostile tone here, I want to highlight that you opened this issue, asking to speak to Microsoft employees, on a Friday (end of work week), and are closing it on the Tuesday morning after a national holiday (start of new work week) and seem surprised or upset nobody got back to you in that time.

[ocdtrekkie]

The closest thing to a response you probably have is here: https://github.com/dotnet/vblang/issues/251#issuecomment-365391888

"The language team members are welcome to introduce themselves if they would like, but they won't all be answering questions here because that's just not how the team works."

That being said, if you are hoping they will introduce themselves here, closing the issue with the suggestion they have "no guts" after a holiday weekend is not likely to get the response you hoped for.

[gafter]

You've posted your message on the repo for VB language design. Through that you're only likely to reach the language designers and compiler developers, when they happen to come to this repo to look for new content. The other groups will likely not see your request.

[mairaw]

Hi @tverweij! You mentioned that you wanted to know who is the VB content team and so I'm part of that team. Our team consists of myself, @BillWagner, @rpetrusha and @JRAlexander. We're responsible not just for VB content, but .NET documentation all up including C#, .NET Core, .NET Framework, etc. You can find us at the following repo: https://github.com/dotnet/docs We welcome contributions and feedback there, and you can find VB issues tagged as Area - Visual Basic Guide!

I hope this helps.

[AnthonyDGreen]

The entire team on dotnet/roslyn is part of the VB team. They own the compilers, IDE, protect systems (different repo actually) and more. The vblang repo is just for language design but the actual implementation happens on roslyn, mostly.

[ghost]

@ocdtrekkie It is not meant to be hostile, but I need to know / be sure if VB.Net is future proof. As I see messages that VB templates will not be made because nobody at Microsoft want to commit themselves to VB.Net, I feel really deserted by Microsoft. That's why I want know who the VB team is, and if they are really committed to VB.Net.

[ghost]

@mairaw Thanks for your introduction! I am going to follow your repo too.

[ghost]

@AnthonyDGreen Clear. But again that deserted feeling when they do everything for C#, VB.Net is barely mentioned at Roslyn,

[KathleenDollard]

@tverweij

I believe that Visual Basic has been "future proofed" by incorporating Visual Basic into the various teams. Throughout .NET and .NET Core and Visual Studio, Visual Basic is part of all the teams, not a separate team isolated from advancements at Microsoft.

[MPCoreDeveloper]

Hello Theo,

Nice to see you here! and nice to see that you are also comitted to VB.Net

IMHO the problem for us VB people is what was stated on MSDN "we are moving to where our community is" and thus everything was moved to github, euhmmm I am active here since yesterday And without my converstation with Anthony on LI, I would not have looked here at all .

And I was once a top contributer in the old NNTP newsgroups for Visual basic and VB.Net and I am the owner / founder of VBDotnetCoder LOL . My point thus is ,,, "Our" community is probably not here .

Another problem is that we are not shiny , new and have te bling factor that C# and F# seem to have for people willing to spend there spare time to create the community driven tooling for it .

As I work as a Senior Developer for a Hutchison owned company ( www.ckh.com.hk ) I can tell you thus that VB is not only for small companies in my Schiedam based office everything is done with VB.Net 2017 , and MSSQL 2017 and yes we are talking about web development , Desktop development , App development ,and we are talking about production systems that service thousands of people , and data amounts in the multiple billions of reccords ( no this is not a typo billions not millions).

And yes corporate has asked my team a few times why we do not work with C#, and every time we show them that we are faster with creating and releasing software as other teams, as people in the field can look over our shoulder and point us in the right direction to solve THERE problems C# is just to cryptic for a non developer and that`s why for inhouse dev VB is the better choice IMHO for sure if you work like us by Erik Meijers "Hacker way" we check in code every day ! https://vimeo.com/110554082

Having said so , we as VB community should thus spread the word , and get involved in these tooling projects , and bent the stigma to the superior inhouse dev RAD ;-)

Regards

Michel

[ghost]

Hi Michel - long time no see! Welcome here! I am living on Curacao now, but my email is still the same - I do not have your contact details anymore, so please send me a mail.

Regards, Theo

[ghost]

@KathleenDollard Hi Kathleen, I just installed version 15.6, and I read the release notes. Can you explain to me why there is a section for F#, C# and C++, but none for Visual Basic in these release notes? (Visual Basic is mentioned only twice, one time for project load times and one time for the Real time test discovery).

[ghost]

My last message on this board - I am finished with it (going to look for an alternative for new projects).

Why? As I mentioned in the previous message, I installed version 15.6. First: the VB team won't even tell us what they fixed and added; by example Protected Friend is working now, but somehow the won't tell us. Second: The background compiler still prevents me from edit and continue; Break, change something, press F5 and in most cases it won't run. Third: After installation of 15.6, None of my projects are debuggable anymore - Rebuild. Start, and all breakpoints are invalid because the source code is different from the executable code (and yes, it is running an old version - messing up an very important third party test for a customer because it just runned without stopping on a breakpoint.). Had to clean the .vs and obj folders to be able to debug again. So this version of VS it was clearly not tested before release concerning VB. I know that everyone keeps saying that VB is alive, but I stop betting on it now.

Wish everyone the best - but I am leaving VB now (will be a very long process because of the amount of code, but I did it before when VB6 died).

@ocdtrekkie : This post is hostile, none of the previous were.

[ocdtrekkie]

@tverweij Again, you asked a question, and just a few short hours later, you ragequit. Dude, you need to chill.

[ghost]

The question was not relevant anymore - as the new VS release was not even tested on VB.

[ocdtrekkie]

It may be worth evaluating if any of the issues closed are worth keeping open for the benefit of other users? It looks like he closed like eight issues and then deleted himself.

[BillWagner]

Thanks for pointing this out @ocdtrekkie

I don't have the answers to all the questions, but I have alerted @KathleenDollard about what happened, and we'll work it out. Response may be a bit slower than normal, due to MVP Summit team commitments this week.

See this image from Kathleen's talk at the MVP Summit (posted with permission).

[KathleenDollard]

I am reopening this because I think there is ongoing value.

@tverweij (now @ghost) is correct that we messed up the release notes for the updates to Visual Basic 15.

This is because of two negative aspects: it is hard to target the update versions and we messed up Private Protected. This led to hesitation on whether to talk about these features, and then the ball got dropped. We are working on fixing this.

But regardless, this conversation can continue

[WolvenRA]

I too think Ghost makes some important points... Mainly about the long term viability of VB. Those of us, like Michel, that have software companies and Millions of lines of application code written in VB DEFINITELY want to see VB keep pace with new developments in C# and even MORE DEFINITELY don't want to see it get abandoned and die.

I was surprised to find VB had been "open sourced". While I recognize that that could be a good thing, it could also be seen as the first step in abandoning and\or destroying the language. Linux is a good example... Do we really want 15 different forks\flavors of VB?

As Michel pointed out, VB doesn't seem to have the "shiny, new, Bling" factor that C# does, and I've never been able to understand that. After all, they both get compiled down to the same thing so, theoretically, there shouldn't be anything you can do with one that you couldn't do with the other. Also, executable performance should be the same. So it basically comes down to which syntax a developer likes to work with and I, like many others, prefer VB's syntax and ease of use\readability.

As I've stated before, I also think there is a disconnect between language\compiler\system programmers and business application developers. Language abilities that are extremely useful for application developers are things that system developers don't need or use and consequently they don't see why anyone would want such a thing or how it would be a valuable addition to the language. That's unfortunate. Hopefully, the VB developers are enlightened enough to recognize who they are developing the language for.... i.e. application developers.

A big thanx to the few (very few) VB "team" people that bothered to post something here. Likewise to Kathleen for reopening this thread.

[ocdtrekkie]

@WolvenRA Just because VB is being developed more out in the open doesn't mean VB is at risk of having lots of forks or flavors. I don't think it's very likely someone will fork VB, and obviously, Visual Studio ends up being the defining factor in what constitutes VB. (And Linux is hardly "destroyed, for what it's worth.)

[WolvenRA]

@ocdtrekkie I wasn't trying to imply that Linux was "destroyed". My point was, I didn't think that having multiple forked versions of VB was what we really wanted. On the other hand, who knows, maybe having competing versions might actually be good. If Microsoft didn't feel like investing the money and effort to keep it current and make it better, maybe a competing group would...