Updated "Overview of Visual Basic 9.0" Stealth Post

Microsoft recently published a February 2007 update to "Overview of Visual Basic 9.0" by Erik Meijer, Amanda Silver and Paul Vick as a Visual Studio 2005 Technical Article. The update's timing obviously is tied to the Orcas March 2007 CTP release, which occurred in late February. The first reference I've seen to it was by Beth Massi (a.k.a, DotnetFox) on February 9, 2007 in the Hooked on LINQ wiki, although it's possible that the reference could be to an earlier version.

I use the term stealth post because none of the authors or the Visual Basic Team has mentioned the updated version publicly, as far as I can determine. Following are the results of searches I ran to find references to the February 2007 version:

• A Google blog search for an "Overview of Visual Basic 9.0" returned 11 hits, of which two (a pointer by Mitch Wheat to a reference in Bill McCarthy's blog and an entry by Duncan (Merrion) Rantz) were dated February 2007 or later.
• A more targeted blog search with ms364068 (the document ID) turned up only Jim Wooley's VB 9.0 documentation post, which is the subject of the later "Issues with the February 2007 Version" section.
• The word overview or ms364068 doesn't appear in the last 22 items of Paul Vick's blog (which cover September 30, 2006 to March 11, 2007 and include March 2007 Orcas CTP, now with cool VB features! on March 1, 2007.)
• The word overview or ms364068 doesn't appear in the last 29 items of the Visual Basic Team's blog (which cover September 13, 2006 to March 23, 2007.)
• Searching the Web for ms364068 returns only 19 relevant hits, but one is dated November 3, 2006, which indicates there was a previous version with the same document ID.
• Searching the Web with "Overview of Visual Basic 9.0" "Erik Meijer" returns 21 relevant hits, but the hits duplicate previous ones or refer to Erik's presentations with this title.

Note: Jim and I discovered the February 2007 version from the link in Bill McCarthy's blog of yesterday.

Updated documentation for the language extensions to Visual Basic 9.0 is important, at least to VB programmers, although the Orcas March 2007 CTP include VB-specific topics for anonymous types, object identifiers, and query expressions, as well as a substantial number of LINQ-related online help topics.

The lack of links to the Overview's February 2007 version is surprising, considering that one of its authors, Paul Vick, is an active blogger and Amanda Silver posts to the Visual Basic Team blog occasionally. Could the reason for the lack of links be that the authors aren't proud of their work?

Issues with the February 2007 Version

Jim Wooley takes issue with some of the content of the February 2007 update in today's VB 9.0 documentation post:

I took a couple minutes looking it over and it does give a quick glimpse of the basic underlying concepts that hopefully are coming. Unfortunately, there are a number of items in the documentation that don't appear to be included in the current [Orcas March 2007] CTP. I am definitely hoping that they do make it in the next drop. The features that are discussed but not yet included are: Joins, Lambdas, and [shorthand DateTime? syntax for] Nullable types. In addition, the samples seem to use an Auto-Implemented Property syntax as introduced in the current C#, but reading more closely, they are just using a pseudo code syntax. [Emphasis added].

Jim then adds details about the three missing features.

Comparison with and of Previous Versions

The February 2007 version contains the following topic list:

• Introduction
• Getting Started With Visual Basic 9.0
• Implicitly Typed Local Variables
• Object and Array Initializers
• Anonymous Types
• Deep XML Support
• Query Comprehensions
• Extension Methods and Lambda Expressions
• Nullable Types
• Relaxed Delegates
• Conclusion

The previous version was first published as a Microsoft Word file by the same authors in September 2005. The LINQ May 2006 CTP contained an updated May 2006 version of of the September 2005 release. The topic lists were the same for both versions:

• [Getting Started with VB 9.0]
• Implicitly typed local variables
• Query comprehensions
• Object initializers
• Anonymous types
• Full integration with the Linq [sic] framework
• Deep XML support
• Relaxed delegates
• Nullable types
• Dynamic interfaces
• Dynamic identifiers
• [Conclusion]

The primary differences between the two previous versions, determined by running a compare operation between the two .doc files with Microsoft Word, were minor syntax changes and adoption of the C# syntax/sequence (From ... Select) for LINQ queries. There were 127 deletions and 117 insertions, most of which were one or a few characters.

Jim Wooley's Converting from VB LINQ to Orcas post documents the manual changes required to make his LINQ May 2006 samples run with the Orcas March 2007 CTP LINQ implementation.

Update 3/28/2007: Beth Massi, who's taken a new job at Microsoft "writing content for the Visual Basic Developer Center and promoting the Visual Basic language in the community," notes in a comment that the What’s New in Visual Basic 9.0? link on the main Visual Basic Developer Center page links to the updated post. However, it's my recollection that this link formerly pointed to earlier version(s) and there's no indication that the information was recently updated. Beth says there will be pointer to the doc in a future VB Team post.

Technorati tags: Visual Basic 9.0, VB 9.0, LINQ, Orcas March 2007 CTP, Orcas