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Questions

  1. So Rocky, tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do and how you have been involved in the .NET community for the last four years?
  2. You are best known for your "Visual Basics Objects" book, which I know has gone through a couple of revisions. Are we due for another revision probably soon?
  3. I've got to ask the question, now you have started to dabble in both VB and C# with the new edition of this book coming, where do you sit with respect to this whole Visual Basic - C# language war? What exactly do you think is going on with all that? Is this still worth debating or should we just move on and get past it?
  4. Do you think that predilection of Visual Basic towards business development is ingrained more in the culture or in the platform itself, the language itself?
  5. Do you think there is a danger that the Visual Basic and the C# communities might, because the VB guys are starting to learn C#, and the C# guys are starting to learn VB, do you think that there may be a danger that the two communities might homogenize a little bit, will start to see the blending of the two cultures into one plain vanilla culture?
  6. So you think the distinction between the two languages is right and necessary?
  7. Bill Gates flies out to Minnesota, shows up at Magenic Headquarters and comes to your cube and says, "Rocky, you are clearly the best person on the planet who understands Visual Basic as a business developer language. Tell me what the VB team has to do to make Visual Basic the perfect language for developing business applications, business logic, business whatever. Tell me what we have got to do, tell me what we have to do to fix it." What do you tell him? What does VB need?
  8. Are there any features of the CLR then, or the base class library, that you think VB needs, or is it purely something that is language centric?
  9. You and I are together in the guidance about Patterns And Practices along with Keith Pleas, Billy Evjen, and Chris Kinsman and a couple of other guys. What attracts you to the notion of Patterns And Practices, and what do you think the community as a whole has to learn from the Patterns And Practices folks?
  10. But what about COM, remember part of the whole point of COM was this language interoperability to write code in C++ and VB, what happened with that?
  11. Okay, but, going back to .NET now, we are taking about the Common Language Specification and the fact that beyond a certain subset, languages, can sort of go off in their own direction. So, for example, VB still does not have support for unsigned integers, whereas C# does, and so forth. How is that any different from what you just describe as the flaw in the COM model?
  12. Isn't that again just sort of a reflection of the languages themselves, the idea that, I only want to interoperate at the edges of my component, and the rest of the time I do not want to be straight jacketed by CLS compliance, where nobody will ever call me from anything that is not C#?
  13. So you are a big objects guy, you have been talking a lot about business objects and so forth, that has been your space for a while, and inquiring minds want to know, how do objects fit in with this whole new orientation towards services and SOA style applications? Where do I draw the boundaries between objects and services and vice versa?
  14. The next question on the objects question list is object relational mapping layers. The whole, I want to take my object and without having to see the SQL push the object in a state off to a relational database and back again. Where do you sit with some of the object related mapping stuff?
  15. So Rocky, thanks for your time, and looking forward to seeing the next edition of the book in C#, and whatever else is coming off of your writer's fingers from there.