Hey all,

It’s been a while since my last post. As promised, I’ve spent the time tending to a variety of personal matters which I neglected during my seclusion producing ModVB Wave 1. One thing I got to do thankfully, was my semi-annual trip to Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond, which I say is for PAX but is really just an excuse to reconnect with my many friends there. I was super happy to see as many of them as I could in that limited time and to catch up with what’s been going on in their lives and catch them up with what’s been going on in mine.

I’m happy to share more of my personal exploits later but most relevant to this post is an individual interaction I had with a friend about my efforts around ModVB. Specifically, he asked (paraphrasing), “Is there are general theme to your future work? Is this all building around one big feature or what?”. Or, in my words, “Where’s this all going?”.

Which is an excellent question. I’m a mysterious hermit who lives in the woods of the South Side of Chicago and periodically I just show up and say some ominous stuff and then disappear. This summer I dropped some language features on you and crawled back into my hole for a bit. All fun, but maybe not as comprehensive as this effort deserves. Fortunately, I have (and have had for years) a massive itinerary (just outline of the language improvements is 10 pages to date) in my head and in OneNote and in Word docs that I’ve been building and following that could easily take a hundred or more of printed pages to detail so I’m not at a total loss for an answer.

It’s just a matter of giving you the forest and not the trees and so I set about sitting about and distilling that roadmap into this post. Hopefully it gives a better idea of the scope of things to come.

This is waaaay overdue, I know. So here’s what happened. That little bit of scope creep I decided to take basically reset the whole sprint. I didn’t have to throw away any of the code but it did expose every assumption that was in code and multiplied my testing matrix by like 4-5x because I’m supporting many more use cases than before. I’d say the effort has been 40% new code, 60% testing.

Also I took a week off due to prior commitments away from my keyboard with friends and family.

So why did I decide to increase scope so late? Precisely because of how disruptive this change has been. If I didn’t do it now I’d be compelled to do it immediately after Wave 1 and it would interfere with waves 2-3 which are entirely different feature areas. All of the assumptions would be more entrenched and there was a good risk of shipping things that were wrong in subtle little ways–I definitely had to withdraw certain functionality that was overly specific. And aside from the “happy path” experience which was originally designed, I had to design and test a whole “graceful failure” path. This is essential work for tooling anyone else is going to use. Nothing has been wasted in this effort.

So where are we at? I’m writing more tests. I admit I’m not nearly as fast a tester as I am a dev and switching hats makes me miss the days of having dedicated QA. I’m fixing minor bugs. Don’t have an exact release date but “soon” ™.

Regards,

-ADG

P.S. I’m going to publish what’s in Wave 2 BEFORE it starts. I appreciate that the suspense is problematic.

After due consideration I’ve decided to delay today’s release to next week. I’m concerned that rushing testing/stabilization will only hurt … everybody so I’m giving it more “bake time”. Additionally, I’ve relented on some critical (minor) scope creep in the same areas being tested/stabilized now; it’s beneficial for a lot of reasons to do it now instead of as part of Wave 2. This new work is thematically consistent with what I had planned to release today, very important to the broad utility of that feature set, was half-implemented already–it was designed for from the beginning, and I’m kind of excited by it in an ice cream on top of pie kind of way.

Regrets,

-ADG

Just leaving a quick note for readers curious about my progress. In my last post I said I was working on an initial preview release of my mod with some new features. I’ve basically been heads down coding since I wrote that post and I finally punched through and end-to-end spike of an initial set of use cases.

Now comes the fun part, rigorous automated testing of 100+ test cases and more bug fixing. Making sure that not only do things work the way I expect where I expect but that they don’t work in other ways where I don’t expect and that everything that does work does so for the right reason(s) and that nothing crashes. The bar is far higher for even a preview of a mod than for my past prototypes so I have to really go at things with hard pipe-hitting, blowtorch- and pliers-wielding permutations now.

This bug bashing is what I’m up to for the next 48-hours then on Friday (just in time for the weekend) I plan to publish some bits to play with. I also have to script and record a brief video explaining what to actually play with.

Fingers crossed! We’ve got a long road ahead of us and this first step is tremendously important. See you soon!

-ADG

It’s funny how a tiny bit of feedback can change the nature of a post. I had originally planned to write about modding in the gaming community and the impressive accomplishments independent developers and enthusiasts have had in expanding and extending the experience of games, sometimes vastly, beyond the intent of the original creators (e.g. Breath of the Wild: Second Wind). In some cases, games have come to be defined by their modding culture (e.g. Skyrim) and in others mods have taken on a life of their own to become products that arguably overshadow their base games (e.g. Counter-Strike) or even spawn new genres (e.g. Dota). I had some anecdotes about the first software I ever “modded” (Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing) or twiddling with QBasic games’ source code as a young teen.

That said, I got a bit of feedback after my last post that something maybe a little broader (yet also more direct and specific) would probably be better received so I’m going to try to fumble through distilling at least some of two years of thought and research and—yes, planning—into an elevator pitch. Well, maybe not that short, but still a challenge of brevity.

For starters, let me set a few expectations. Firstly, what I’m proposing is without a doubt going to be a pain in the ass, at first at least. It’s a lot of work. When I say a community-driven­­ path forward, I don’t mean a community-accentuated path forward. I don’t mean community-supplemented or community-enhanced. We need to shift our entire paradigm from being a Microsoft-centric developer experience to one where almost (*) everything we enjoy comes from us. That means features, tools, designers, docs, samples, templates, and even the respect that I mentioned in my last post. These are all things we’re used to getting from Microsoft and lamenting when we don’t get them from Microsoft and complaining to Microsoft about it. That entire inclination has to die and we have to rebuild a community that holds itself primarily accountable for its own capabilities.

Why doing nothing is sometimes the right thing to do

In several of my recent conversations with folks in and out of the community, I’ve shared some things that they found—and a lot of my readers will probably also find—surprising.

A few years back I penned (as I do) a voluminous response, regarding VB, culminating in an open letter. What may surprise you is that after writing it I really didn’t attempt to socialize it much. I shared it on Twitter but in my experience that’s not actually a VB community hotspot at all. I had initially planned to make a bigger fuss but as I considered next steps and took counsel with those I trust I came to realize that the cycle of inaction-fire-response was just as likely to produce a terrible outcome as a good one (if not more so). Also, I was sleeping a little easier.

You see, in my first 2 years post Microsoft I wrestled with (among other things) two different anxieties regarding VB. I feared that:

1. The C#/.NET org wouldn’t do anything.
2. They would do something and it would be horribly wrong.

And every few months I’d peek in on vblang and find neither an announcement that they weren’t doing anything nor any announcements that they were doing anything in particular. And strangely I’d feel relief for both.

As a side note: if either had happened in 2018 or 2019 I genuinely wouldn’t have been mentally healthy enough to handle it so “do nothing, say nothing” in this case worked out well for me at least.

The Anxieties

In my 8 years at Microsoft attending VB language design meetings and product planning meetings I was constantly pushing back against the idea that the ideal for VB.NET was to “just do what C# does”. “That’s what the customers said they want! They’ll yell at us if we don’t!” Countless discussions that “co-evolution” never meant copying. It was exhausting but a fight worth fighting and after several years eventually I’d built the credibility to really shake that idea out of the heads of those within my sphere of influence.

That idea is wrapped in arrogance and bias and short-sightedness and genuine ignorance and intellectual laziness and yes, good intentions. But good intentions don’t always yield good results.

I’ll restate this plainly because people don’t seem to believe this about me (and I say this with no malice or insult intended): I experience no jealousy toward anything C# has. C# is a phenomenal language with great tooling, but C# has never produced an end-to-end experience in language or tooling that I have wanted to make my permanent home. The “spirit of the language” is different than mine and it can’t be gently nudged into being a great or even begrudging substitute. C# can add functional features, I don’t think the F# community will ever be like, “Yeah, good enough! I’ll switch” and I don’t think adding more imperative/mutable features to F# would allow one to wholesale lift-and-shift the C# community over to F#.

That’s not to say that I dislike capabilities that come to C#. There are many things I’ve wanted before C# even thought of them, and things they’ve gotten that I’ve only been grateful to have missed, and other things I’ve wanted in a very different way than they’ve appeared in C#. But there is nothing that I want because it’s in C#. But the problem is that “everybody” thinks that’s what I would or should want and frame decisions in that way.

You know, I’ve been waiting to use this title on Valentine’s Day for two years. I realized after I posted my exhausting list of differences post that that would have been the perfect title but by then it was too late so, naturally, I’ve just been waiting for February 14th to roll around again… and again.

Anyway, it’s even better now because Valentine’s Day this year falls the day after a very special anniversary. Yesterday marked TWENTY YEARS since the release of Visual Studio .NET 2002 and with it the first release of Visual Basic .NET! That’s a long time.

To commemorate the occasion, a good friend shared with me this book he’d acquired way back in the day with a title that perfectly sums it up:

Just WOW. When this chapter… or section, in the history of VB started I was a junior in high school. I hadn’t even truly discovered the .NET flavor of VB yet but a few years later that changed and my career changed forever.

I’ve been giving lots of thought to the next chapter. But first, I want to try finally putting out that Part II of my list of differences in keeping with the “let me count the ways” title. I tried to get it out by today but it’s been slow going. I’m actually on vacation and hoping to get a good deal more writing done than normal so maybe it’ll come this week. Fingers crossed.

Well, that’s it for now. I vaguely recall encountering or remembering  few extra differences since my first post but I didn’t write them down and have since forgotten them. Hopefully I remember at least 6 more that I can add so I can cross 100 ways I love VB.NET.

Happy Birthday .NET and VB .NET (and C# too); Happy Valentine’s Day everyone and thanks for reading!

Warm and fuzzies,

-Anthony D. Green

This post was written in reverent memory of two colleagues who have passed away since I worked with them, Kieran and Howard. Rest in Peace.

Today’s post is written (in part) from PAX West 2021 in Seattle, which jives well with today’s topic: Enthusiasm. Much of the best parts of my life revolve around enthusiasm. Conventions like PAX, Star Wars Celebration, and BlizzCon are—more than just marketing events—celebrations of enthusiasm. My closest friendships are built around a common currency of enthusiasm for topics and activities. We talk often and at length about our favorite games, movies, TV shows, books, and technology. My preferred YouTube content is from creators with enthusiasm for literature, health, teaching, or just knowledge in general. The online communities I participate in are powered not by organizations but the enthusiasm of their community members. I remember my favorite time of year as a Program Manager on the VB team was MVP Summit because of how exhilarating it is to just be around others who are enthusiastic about programming in my favorite language on my favorite platform. I realize that though across a wide range of domains, at my core I’m an enthusiast. In fact, when Microsoft first approached me about interviewing for the role of PM of the VB.NET compiler back in 2009 that’s precisely how I signed my email accepting the invite. Not “Professional IT Solutions Consultant” or “Enterprise Software Architect” but “Visual Basic Enthusiast Extraordinaire”.

In the beginning of this year, I mentioned taking a break from social media to get some quiet, so to speak. I’m happy to say one of the words to tumble out of that quiet was this: enthusiasm. Not fandom. Not fun or favoritism. Not ego. Not even love or passion. I’d been thinking about my reasons for continuing to think about VB and in VB and those other words while certainly undeniable to various degrees didn’t feel super defensible to me as a case for why anyone else should care what I have to say, how I feel, or what I do. Not defensible to these imaginary critics, btw, but defensible to me. But unlike loving what you do, or having a fun job, or being a fan of your tools, I think it’s pretty difficult to argue that a life, professional or otherwise should be carried on devoid of or without regard to enthusiasm. That doesn’t mean that every single day I sit at my desk and laugh hysterically and post on Instagram videos of my saying “Isn’t this so fun!? My desk is the happiest place on earth today!” but there’s still a general enthusiasm (what defines and encourages that enthusiasm is a topic for later) for the field taken on the whole that I believe is absolutely worth fighting for.

While pondering this idea several people come to mind, some as counter examples, but I’ve decided today to focus on the positive. Specifically, two immensely respected past colleagues with inspirational careers who have since passed on and I’d like to talk a bit about how they’ve influenced my thinking on this topic.

The first of which is a man who I didn’t interact with very often personally but who was one of several role models for me at Microsoft. When I joined the Visual Studio (Managed) Languages team I was advised to get a few mentors and I did. My peer mentor’s mentor was a man named Kieran. Kieran said something that I’ve never forgotten and which I think summarizes what I mean when I talk about enthusiasm, “I always want to run those last few steps to my office in the morning”. And whenever I remember Kieran, that’s how I picture him, hustling to his office toward whatever the day’s challenges were. Not that every day was a trip to the amusement park but that, on the whole, he was going somewhere he very much and wholeheartedly wanted to be. That’s the example he set for other PMs and for me and his loss 3 years ago no doubt left the world dimmer for a lot of folks for a lot of reasons.

Another person who’s been on my mind is Howard. I worked with Howard a little over a decade ago in Chicago. When he joined the company I was then at, he was already in his mid-60s. He was the most knowledgeable person I knew about business process orchestration and far from thinking about retirement he was always thinking about what was next. His enthusiasm for his work was inexhaustible. I ran into him a few years into my time at Microsoft and he was still at it as of last year in his mid-70s. I think of Howard as an example of a long and wholehearted career. Sadly, when I went to look Howard up before writing this post, I learned he passed away late last year. I left my condolences with the family through a page they set up and I repeat my sympathies here. This loss to his family is of course beyond my comprehension and words and I will always cherish his time in my life as a respected, amicable, and resilient colleague and as an inspiration.

I could go on listing individuals near and far who “worked” in their fields in their 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s and beyond, from Sir. C.A.R. Hoare in computing to Dr. Anthony Fauci in immunology, other members of public service, entertainment, and industry. I mention all of this to say… I’m 36 (37 in exactly 1 month). When I think about some of the brilliant and tireless minds I’ve worked with on the Roslyn team and the length of a career there’s a very real possibility that I’m not even halfway through mine. There could be another 40+ years of me giving a damn in the general vicinity of computers and programming in some form or fashion. How do I want to spend them? Rolling out of bed in resignation or running those last few steps?

Something happened to me, y’all. I once referenced fighting to stay on a platform, but I realize I’m in a fight for my very enthusiasm for what could be a longer period of time than I have been on the Earth. Will I be silent? Will I connect with others? How? Do you know how many times someone I know or who knows someone I know has contacted me and said “I want to get started with programming, where do you recommend I start?” and I genuinely just had emptiness in my heart and nothing to say? This has been true for several years now, at least 4. I lost something vitally important because I let externalities convince me that my own enthusiasm didn’t matter. That it was immature, trivial, or irrelevant. At times in the last 5 years, I’ve thought of myself as on a journey looking for the soul of something and this year I’m realizing that my soul is at least part of what I’m looking for.

What’s the impact if I give up on that search or if I bow out of that fight? The impact for me personally? The impact on others, or the lack thereof because I never share what I’ve learned along what has been a rich career (that’s not even half done yet). And this has made me think about what enthuses me about our industry and what definitely does not (and it’s not precisely a particular tool or product, btw). Anyway, in this time of silence I’ve resolved that while I might face a lot of criticism no one can ever tell me that it’s wrong for me to fight for my enthusiasm for the next 40 years of my career and my life. Not just as a clinically depressed person but as a human being I believe that’s however narrow the odds, that’s always worth fighting for!

Regards,

-ADG

P.S. My next post has been titled “Two Anxieties and an Unarticulated Need” but I’m on the fence on how soon to post it. I’ve been holding on to it for over a year and I’ve sort of lost track of whether it’s important to say it now. I’m leaning yes but thoughts change. I’m at least leaving you the title, so you know there is a next post. There’s always a next post.