The dark side sneaks another base....

Posted Wed, Dec 5 2007 20:22 by bill

Some where, some time, the dark side managed to take hold of the MSDN documentation.  In 1.0 and 1.1 the documentation was pretty much language agnostic.  Constructors, where listed as Foo Constructor.  Now it seems the dark side has taken hold and they are listed in C# syntax, e.g: Foo . 

For those who don't realize, that's a C# language peculiarity. In IL they constructors are named ctor and cctor.  In VB, they are named Sub New.

So why choose the C# syntax over VB or IL ?  Well it's just another case of Microsoft giving VB folks the finger, sadly this time from the documentation team. 

The dark side continues to expand like an untreated cancer :(

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Comments

# re: The dark side sneaks another base....

Wednesday, December 05, 2007 4:37 PM by Roger Jennings

Bill,

Yeah, check this out at labs.live.com/.../issues.aspx:

One of the benefits of Volta compiling to MSIL before the destination runtime, rather than source-to-source translation, is that developers can use multiple .NET programming languages to build Volta applications and controls, including C# and Visual Basic. However, currently you will encounter several limitations when using Visual Basic, including:

Late binding is not supported.

Services from My (such as User, Computer, etc.) are not supported

There's more, too.

--rj

# re: The dark side sneaks another base....

Wednesday, December 05, 2007 7:10 PM by bill

Hey RJ,

I think that's understandable for Volta.  It's attempting to translate to Jscript in places, and having to support VB's extra functionality adds a level of complexity. So it's understandable that they haven't included that extra complexity in the first preview.  Unlike other teams such as the XNA team who just said f'off to VB, even though it can actually support VB today, or the Health Vault team that basically said they are only interested in customers using C#, the Volta team has included VB and provided equal support for it as C#.  Yes that does mean a subset of VB is supported, but at least the team is including it.

Those other teams on the other hand continue to give VB'ers the finger, and sadly, the documentation team also is doing the same :(

# re: The dark side sneaks another base....

Monday, December 10, 2007 11:29 AM by Alun Jones

Of course, if you go trawling around as a C# user, you notice just how many samples are written in VB.Net, without a corresponding C# version.

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