Comments

Supposing the 60K for LAN Manager was permanently resident in memory: that would be almost 10% of the machine's physical memory for an OS component.  That is a serious reduction in space available for user programs.  Come to think of it, when IBM designed the PC in about 1982, they figured nobody would ever make an application that would need that much memory.  Then the desktop computer adopted all of the generally accepted principles of mainframe design (paged virtual memory, multiple CPUs)  and adopted a few more (graphical user interface, object-oriented programming) and the problem went away.  In his way, Bill was right to complain.  The machine wasn't up to the task of handling LAN Manager.

The blurb sez "how that'll help you in your Visual Basic development," but I disagree.  I see that definition of a class can be done piecemeal -- a fraction here, a fraction there -- and that that would be convenient, for example, in automated code generation scenarios.  The code behind of a form contains code generated by the IDE and code written by the end user programmer.  Those two pieces are easier to handle when separated.

But, to return to the main point, Amanda showed me how the mechanism works, but not how it will HELP ME.  What does it buy ME?

This is really, really good.  Can't wait to get my hands on it.  Probably is no technical reason to delay its release until Windows 2005 Server.  Hope against hope that the user doc is really good, too.

BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.  It originated at Dartmouth University in the 1960s.  Visual Basic's roots are in BASIC.  For example, in BASIC the DIM statement declares an array and DIM is short for "dimension."  This has been artificially extended in Visual Basic to be the generic initiator of any declaration including the instantiation of an object which concept had not been conceived in the 1960s. 

BASIC is important in the history of Microsoft in that it was the first product the company ever sold.  Some fantastic productivity features, such as Forms, first made their appearance in Visual Basic.  Rapid Development and Deployment is possible in Visual Basic.  Unassisted Windows development in C, and MFC in C++ do not admit to rapidity.   MFC is a contortion and sometimes the opposite of helpful.  Then we get to the .NET Framework, CLR and C#, which are works of art, in my humble opinion.

Visual Basic is fine for people who have become used to used and have become productive with it.  It isn't block structured and it is tied to BASIC which turn some people off.  I prefer C# because it is a modern language and a viable alternative to Java.  In any case, it is a relatively simple matter to hand translate Visual Basic snippets into C#.