10-4 Episode 9: Visual Basic 10 | 10-4

Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?

Wow.

But when will VB start to innovate? We have seen all this before in Ruby, for instance.

JasonOlson

Good question. But the same could be said of C#. You could even say that Ruby didn't even innovate. Smalltalk was doing all of that OOP goodness _long_ before Ruby came along Smiley

. I'll try not to continue talking about Smalltalk though or else I'm going to have to put a quarter in the "Smalltalk jar" that my boss keeps on his desk Tongue Out

.

Though some people might argue, you could say that XML Literals were pretty innovative at the language level. I'm not saying I agree with the feature, but it certainly brought something interesting and powerful to the table. And VB was capable of doing dynamic dispatch long before C# introduced (well, is introducing) the dynamic keyword.

Rhapsody
In Metal We Trust

Nice video again.

Unfortunately I don't see the (all) new features as an improvements.

Ok, not having to use the line-continuation character is nice as well as the auto properties, but things like (multiline) lambas just make the code more difficult to read.
The same with 'anonymous types'...
Maybe it is because I haven't seen a good example where the features mentioned above are usefull.

But ofcourse it's up to the programmer to use it or not.

joechung

Love the new array and dictionary literal syntax! Thanks for the video, Jason!

Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?

In reply to JasonOlson

#Feb 18th @ 4:18 PM

Good point. XML literals was a very good feature which I certainly hadn't seen before.

spivonious

Two things,

You can initialize an array in VB9 on one line: Dim scores() as Integer = {42, 59, 72, 100}

You can't have default property values, but you can have a default value for the member variable that the property wraps.

Also, I fail to see the usefulness of automatic properties. How is it different than just declaring the member variable as public?

luksan

Is VS2010 going to include the feature where all your tool windows may decide to randomly cascade all over the screen upon entering debug mode? Cause I must say, I need this feature. What else would I do with my spare time if I didn't have to sit there and re-position 300 tool windows?

JasonOlson

In reply to spivonious

#Feb 19th @ 7:42 AM

Yes, Array Initializers worked w/ VB9, but not Array Literals, the difference being type inference.

So with Array Initializers, I could write "Dim scores() as Integer = {1,2,3,4,5}", but I couldn't write "Dim scores = {1,2,3,4,5}" and have the type of scores inferred for me.

You bring up an excellent point of auto-properties, and one I have been thinking about as well. Semantically, properties are there to help support encapsulation by not having external code depend directly on the implementation (the backing field). So, in the future, the implementation can change without effecting the end-user (the other developer). Auto-properties make this more simple (the common pattern of having a backing field that is exposed via a property).

but honestly, for simple data structures, I'm not entirely convinced you have to have properties rather than exposing public fields. This is more of a pragmatic decision or tradeoff. For instance, if I create a Rectangle class, I may expose a BottomRight property that returns a Point. While it may be implemented directly as a backing field of a point, it allows me to change the implementation in the future without breaking consumer code. Perhaps I want to change the Rectangle implementation from storing two points (TopLeft and BottomRight) to storing the TopLeft point and an Extent of how wide and tall it is. If I change it, I can change the property from an auto-property to a realized property where the Getter is calculated based on the TopLeft and Extent (rather than BottomRight).

JasonOlson

In reply to luksan

#Feb 19th @ 12:35 PM

I hear you. That is still my #1 annoyance. Arg, I hate when that happens. There have been a few times where I've seen that happen with some of the newer builds and I'm submitting bugs for them.