Announcements
- Long-time VB MVP Cory Smith has set up a Visual Basic Discord server for all dialects of VB including VB.NET, Classic VB(6), VBA, and VB Script. All are welcome! Please consider joining today!
- Several supporters have mentioned that Patreon is blocked in some regions of the world and that would be supporters would appreciate an alternative. I thank them for bringing this to my attention and am investigating additional platforms for crowdfunding, though more importantly I’m planning for more ways to contribute.
- VB support for consuming C#
required
members has been implemented and is expected in VS 17.7!
Intro
Hey all,
You’re loooooooong overdue for some updates so let’s get to it. So far this year has been an adventure and I’m going to give you a whole rundown of events in the second half of this post but first I want to talk about some changes (good I think) I’m going to be making to be more transparent as well as help capture and accelerate momentum for ModVB and related projects in the near future. The project isn’t vaporware, I just suck at scaling (I apologize) and I’m pivoting to address that.
What’s going to happen moving forward
I’ve been giving tremendous thought to how I can better scale. This ModVB project is important to me and a (slowly) growing number of followers and it deserves more than it’s been getting. Also a few of community members, including past community contributors to the Roslyn project, have reached out offering to pitch in. Taking on more contributors has always been in the cards and we’re rounding the corner to the right time to do so. One consideration to doing so has always been my own bandwidth for working with contributors and testing and reviewing code coming into the project. I’m not going to loosen up on my quality bar for the project, but I am readying myself mentally and practically to function in the role of project manager, tester, and code-reviewer. I also respect that simply having more hands involved in the work will lead to more steady progress and build confidence for would-be adopters that this project is a safer bet.
Here are some more concrete steps that I’m working on:
(Finally) publishing most of compiler/language/runtime backlog
I’ve frequently mentioned the 11 (now 12) page outline of language changes I have for tracking planned and potential modifications to VB. I know I’ve been pretty secretive about this list so far mostly just to avoid feedback flooding but also showmanship and other reasons. Those days are fast coming to a close. And I’m not going to just publish the outline as is but a true to form Anthony-style “Wall of Text” laying out each feature, key design points, motivating scenarios, and in even my thoughts on what the “demo script” for the feature would look like. This will go waaay faster than my current approach of waiting to do everything myself and revealing things only with a < 5 minute YouTube video and will empower others to go after the low-hanging fruit in parallel with my own work. In fact, one VB community member already has implemented a feature that I’m very interested in pulling into ModVB.
I’m putting this post together to inspire both contributors and supporters with my vision for the future of the VB experience that I truly believe is exciting and achievable by the community, completely independently. This document will be the basis for both project planning and myriad strategic and design discussions I’m literally aching to have so … I’m really excited to finally be preparing it to share! I sincerely hope that finally seeing most of the big picture will put new winds in this project’s sails.
Setting up the repos for more contributors (than me)
- Setting up repos and testing infrastructure for
- Compiler/IDE (Roslyn)
- Runtime
- Compiler extensions (e.g. JSON literal/XAML literal bindings)
- Project templates
- More…
- Setting up docs for contributor success
- Licensing
- Contribution guidelines
- Compiler tutorials
- Feature speclets and full specifications (over time)
Timeframe
The timeframe I’m targeting for most of this is early-mid summer, so, either late June or sometime in July and just in time for the 1 year anniversary of my announcing ModVB.
And the XAML literals + top-level code work is still coming. It’s not vaporware, it’s just approaching release asymptotically while I’ve been juggling other projects and life events. Which brings me to…
What’s happened so far
When I decided, a year ago, to take some time off to kick start this ModVB thing, I imagined (and planned, and saved for) 5 months or so. Basically a nice self-funded sabbatical to dedicate myself wholly to a creative endeavor that truly matters to me. I want to re-emphasize that number: 5 months. I figured that was enough to get through the first couple of waves and parachute into a new job somewhere. SPOILER ALERT: The mass layoffs, various hiring freezes, and general contraction of the tech sector starting right about when I was supposed to deploy this metaphorical parachute quickly showed me the error of my presumption. So, when I write to you a year from the start line you can understand that at least 7 of those months of unemployment were completely unplanned for. I’ve basically been operating in survival mode since last fall and the great news is that I survived. I survived with a lot of help, from family, friends, clients, and those of my readers who became Patreon supporters.
Highlights
I was (briefly) writing a VB.NET book for a popular publisher
That’s right! In the beginning of this year I was approached by a popular publisher about authoring a book on VB.NET, adding to my list of 3 or 4 projects I was juggling at the time. I was excited for the opportunity but ultimately after going through the initial steps of authoring, I realized that in just explaining the feature work in ModVB in the near future I was already committed to writing like a book’s worth of content and that it was insane to try to write TWO books at once while also juggling project work. Maybe next year.
I changed health insurers… and lost my entire healthcare team and all my appointments
I switched to a more reasonably priced health insurance plan which has been a major relief. However, because healthcare is never simple in this country, doing so moved my entire healthcare team “out of network” and basically meant restarting my entire healthcare regimen from scratch with a new primary care person, a new team, etc. I still haven’t really recovered from the switch though fortunately my medications have been maintained.
Stunlocked
Having said that, it turns out that managing a workload of software projects from multiple contracts, managing my (mental) health, and managing ModVB are all full-time jobs on their own. Being one person, I’ve naturally been sucking at all of them.
“Enough about your personal problems, is this XAML stuff ever going to happen?”
Yes. Here’s what goes into a normal feature for me.
- Designing/implementing/testing the feature in the compiler
- Designing/implementing/testing basic IDE functionality around the feature in editor
- Designing a compelling motivating scenario to demonstrate the feature in under 5 minutes and implementing any demoware sample projects that go with it
This is normally like ~2ish months of work. But XAML literals have extra steps because they implement a base pattern in the compiler but to really exercise the feature you need a mature implementation of the pattern. By comparison, the design of LINQ is a very meaty set of features in the compiler but imagine if LINQ couldn’t be coherently released or demonstrated without first implementing several LINQ providers—not just LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework but two or three other implementations. This is where the tail end of development has just been dragging on. I can’t just say voila XAML is implemented in VB now but I need to release it with:
- XAML bindings for .NET MAUI
- XAML bindings for Avalonia
These are important because while they both use the same XAML syntax the way that XAML is translated is wildly different, which is good because it exercises the generality of the feature but I also have to prototype enough of XAML bindings for a hypothetical/prototypical VB Web library which doesn’t yet exist but which we’ll want to start building pretty much immediately after launch. And each of those bindings has to be tested as well. And consider that the feature has to both be tested in a unit test in the compiler which does not import any of these UI frameworks into the compiler test dependencies, i.e. I’ve had to mock compiler extensions representative of all the real scenarios that need to be supported in in the initial release but ALSO have separate automated test suites for each of the real extensions. Right now I’m trying to distill a kind of “VB XAML standard” test profile that can be reused across multiple implementations to hit a set of key scenarios (e.g. object graph deserialization, data binding, styles, templating). It might seem like I’m boiling the ocean and maybe I am but what I don’t want to do is ship an incomplete pattern which then requires me to ship new revisions of the ModVB compiler every week or two as the implementations of compiler extensions uncover and fix more bugs. Now there’s a dependency hell where you need to upgrade the extension libraries AND the compiler constantly to get anything to work. I would like the compiler pattern to be mostly stable and the extensions themselves to do more of the churning.
All of that would be a lot if I weren’t, as always, struggling with mental health issues, and if I weren’t juggling multiple projects with multiple clients that I’m trying to meet obligations with. To put it into perspective, out of the entire backlog this is both the most important and the single largest feature I ever plan to implement in ModVB. That’s why my original (flawed) plan was to do this kind of work during a period where I could focus almost entirely on ModVB. But it’s OK, because soon talented folks are going to be able to help me scale better.
Summary/TL;DR
Juggling lots of smaller contract gigs and personal issues has really slowed progress but there’s more bandwidth on the horizon. Regardless, it’s always been the expectation that ModVB would welcome some additional contributors and that time is fast approaching this summer; preparations are being made, most importantly of which is publishing a wall of text detailing the full backlog for the language so that both contributors and supporters can gauge their interest to chip in. XAML work still incoming, gated by a high quality bar.