Tech Ed, Conclusion.

VBTeam

June 1st, 20040 0

Posted By: Alexandre Moura, Visual Basic QA, compiler

Well, back in the rain in Redmond after a waiting list scare at the airport – with my first TechEd behind me, it’s time to recap:

The main thing I’ve brought from this exhibition is that most people are extremely interested on the work we’ve done and are doing in vb – The new features have been very well received, and we have quite a few people that can’t wait for Visual Studio 2005 to come out.

More specifically on some of the features:
– Local Data was well received – I had at least one person looking for a way to have data stored locally more compatible with an sql database – local data will probably help. The general reaction was that this is a cool feature.
– Click Once seemed to be universally loved – while David did most of the demos here, everyone I talked to seemed to like the feature.
– Error correction surprised a few people – reactions varied from the “looks nice” to the “very cool”
– Surprizingly, edit and continue drew relatively lukewarm reactions (not that people didn’t like it, but seemed less enthusiastic about it than for other features) – mostly it seemed to incite some envy on non VB programmers – not sure if the way I demoed it was at fault, but a couple of comments I got were along these lines: “this was already in vb6, right?” and “You guys got edit and continue back after we got used to not having it…”
– The new language features were also well received, although again some of the reactions seemed a bit less enthusiastic than I expected – Some people liked having the windows forms designer code hidden in a partial class, most people seemed to like the generic collection, but some people seemed to not care so much about operator overloading, for example. Again, maybe I just have some way to go in getting to be a good demo’er.

In balance, this was an extremely positive experience – I may have given the idea that people didn’t care much about some of the features, but it’s mostly a relative thing – there wasn’t a single thing that wasn’t well received, it’s more the enthusiasm balance for some features when compared to others that surprized me. Also, on a personal level, this was also a great experience, getting to see how people appreciate the work we’ve done in VB.

Finally, I’d like to tip the hat to David Guyer and Jay Schmelzer for their work at the booths – they did an excelent job at demoing the new features and getting people excited about VB.

Alex signing out.