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Ari Bixhorn on Visual Basic .NET
Microsoft product manager Ari Bixhorn talks with Matt Nicholson, Jon Honeyball, Tim Anderson and Simon Bisson about the rate of Visual Basic .NET uptake and how Microsoft wants to make upgrading easier for individual developers. They also discuss the state of the third-party component market, issues with dependent classes in the .NET Framework and more.
Author: Matt Nicholson
Last updated: Jul 2002
Ari: Worrying, you say? Simon: Yes, because they’re having to deal with
distributed computing issues from the ground up, and to be honest they’re
not issues that are widely considered in the computing industry. Ari: Such as? Simon: long transactions, secure transactions over non-private
systems. Ari: Well, it’s interesting. A lot of the VB developers
I’ve been talking to recently have been more concerned about the
lower-end development. A lot of them have been saying ‘we’ve
just been hearing about Web Services and this whole visionary stuff for
the last year and a half – now what’s in it for me?’.
A recent study we did showed that about 62 per cent of VB developers are
building Web applications. The vast majority of those are not just building
rich client applications, they’re building client-server applications.
Matt: It always seemed to me there are two types of
VB developer, there’s the ones who just do the straight client-based,
procedural programming – and there’s the other set who get
right down beneath that, handling API calls. It seems to me that they
face different problems. The procedural ones - who I hesitate to call
amateur - are suddenly faced with the .NET Framework, which is not just
masses of new classes, but a whole set of new concepts. They realise they
have to get to grips with it, but… Jon: I don’t necessarily think that’s true.
There are a lot of people out there who have been hanging on to VB 2.0,
VB 3.0, going to databases, VB 4.0 going to 32-bit, who finally got on
to VB 5.0 or 6.0, and now all of a sudden Microsoft has come along with
this .NET parade. These are the people in corporations, spending years
developing little hackamatic tools, lab development, business stuff, very
effective, very quick, good turnaround, and customer-facing inside the
company. But then the management comes around screaming “what has
Microsoft done for us?” Ari: When we first started talking about .NET and even
after the launch and in the last couple of months, there has been a perception
in newsgroups about what kind of task VB developers face when they move
to .NET, and what kind of concepts they are going to have to learn. We
haven’t been seeing a move to Macromedia or other tools by these
developers. In fact, if you look at the numbers just a year ago, in terms
of VB developers building Web applications and actually using VB to do
so, then compare that number to today, it has actually increased. Tim: Is this with Web Classes? Ari: No, this is actually people who have started using
Visual Basic .NET, primarily. If you look back a couple of years ago,
people were using DHTML to access ActiveX components, Web Classes and
so on. There were more VB developers who were using another tool to build
their web applications, so I think we’ve done a good job of positioning
.NET over the past year. Tim: No Matt: No Jon: No sorry, you tried, and you nearly got us believing
it, but we don’t. Tim: I think the move to classes in VB 4.0 was possibly
the worst, because many programmers didn’t make the move… Jon: What was in it for them? Tim: But previous changes were optional, you could ignore
the class move. Ari: With the move from VB 3.0 to VB 4.0, if you look
at the number of people who were actually adopting it, it took some time
after the launch to see a spike and I think a good portion of that had
to do with education. Certainly, any time you’re going to make a
transition like that, some people are going to stick behind and stay with
the tool they’re accustomed to, but if you want to see the largest
spike we’ve had in VB tool usage, it was the move from 3.0 to 4.0.
Now that move didn’t take place until about six or eight months
after the launch. If you look at the numbers of people moving to .NET
now it seems a steady climb, similar to what we saw happen with VB 4.0.
As more and more people are coming to conferences like this, as more and
more people are starting to experiment with this, I think we’re
going to see another spike. Jon: Yes, VB .NET has gone very sterile, and unfriendly.
It’s lost its cuddliness for a lot of people. Tim: I think what Jon is saying, which I agree with,
is that VB 3.0 while very simple was a very appealing tool; VB 6.0, although
theoretically a much enhanced and improved tool, lost some of that user
friendliness on the way. Jon: There was a lot of attractiveness and reassurance
in simplicity, and what we ended up with in VB 3.0 was something that
was really simple and straightforward. You could use it with a hangover
and not much coffee, and still roll out a decent package. .NET is very
grown up and we’re always reminded how serious it is. Simon: The language I find it closest to in its way
of working is Java. Tim: How’s that? Simon: Particularly with the introduction of explicit
exception handling. That and some of the new syntax is very Java-like.
I know that’s a lot to do with the underlying architecture of the
CLR, but I had an interesting argument with a friend of mine who is a
serious Java-head, and he was arguing that C# is on the Java-killer front.
I showed him some of VB .NET and said ‘no, there’s your Java
attack’. Ari: So we do know where we want to go, right? When
you talk about maintaining the soul of VB and making a comparison between
VB .NET and Java, structured exception handling is something a lot of
our programming languages have now. The introduction of that doesn’t
disallow VB developers from using pre-existing alternatives though. Simon: Well, I personally believe it encourages better
programming practice. Ari: Yeah, there’s a lot of features like that
in Visual Basic .NET. Jon: I do agree that a lot of the features being forced
on VB developers are things that ought to be forced on VB programmers. Simon: In fact, I was very disappointed with the release
of Visual Basic .NET when I saw that strong typing was removed. If you’ve
got the Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Edition of Visual Studio .NET, great,
you can force your developers who are using the Professional Edition to
use it, but by default it’s turned off. Ari: Well it’s a fine line. The way I see Visual
Basic over the years is like a rubber man - pliable with a lot of room
to grow. By the time you got to VB 6.0 you could say we’d stretched
that rubber man further than originally intended. In this way VB .NET
gave us a really great opportunity to take a step back and look at everything
we’d done over the past ten years and say ‘how are we going
to let these guys be the best programmers they can be for the next ten
years’. We want to provide them with this great new innovation but
at the same time we want to keep the soul of what VB developers expect,
such as Option Strict not being on by default. Jon: But you’re saying that VB is becoming a big,
grown up, quality IDE, which is something the VB community is crying out
for – and now you’re saying, “lets make it look like
the old one again?” Ari: No, that’s exactly not what we’re saying.
Because we have such a wide variation in the developer community –
you’ve got middle and high-end VB developers who’re saying
‘yes, this is exactly what we want’, and then you have the
low-end hobbyists who are saying ‘yeah some of the stuff seems pretty
cool, but I want the look and feel that I’m accustomed to’. Jon: I’ll give you a suggestion: package a separate
low-end version and call it Quick BASIC. Quick BASIC was very simple,
it was aimed at the hobbyist and it had all the powerful stuff without
any of the really scary stuff. It’s ideal for hobbyists, they don’t
care about VJ+, they don’t care about C#, they don’t give
a damn about all the rest of the stuff. Wrap it up, charge 99 Euros for
it, call it Quick Basic. Simon: There’s actually a tool that could form
the basis of that now, in the shape of Web Matrix. Ari: Have you guys have a chance to check out Web Matrix
yet? Simon: Yes, it’s a great tool. Jon: Now I accept that Quick Basic was well before your
time at Microsoft and only us really old farts remember it, but I think
it sets the scene quite nicely. I don’t think a return to Quick
Basic would screw up the message about Visual Basic .NET, because you
market it as doing “just what it says on the tin”. You really
don’t want Visual Basic .NET revision 2 having an option ‘dumb’.
To me that would just upset everybody and still not give you what you
want. Ari: There’s always been the option of putting
in more options, but what we’re trying to do now is move away from
that. We want to cater for this massive audience that has vastly different
skill sets and vastly different needs. Jon: When you ‘create new project’ in VB
.NET, you have 149 options for things you can do. Simon: this is exactly the argument about Web Matrix
being so useful. If you want to do VB .NET development in ASP .NET, then
download that and it’s got targeted Wizards, targeted projects… Ari: It has basic functionality that targets just what
you’re looking for. Now imagine a future version of VB .NET Standard.
If you look at past versions of Visual Basic and compare the Learning
Edition, to the Professional, to the Enterprise Edition – there
is a much bigger difference between them. And in future versions we’re
going to target this broader audience by differentiating these versions
a bit more, and add a Standard Edition that really targets the hobbyist.
We’re doing a series of studies that target these various Visual
Basic communities and find out exactly what it is that the VB hobbyist
wants to do in this new world. Are they wanting to get involved in component
development, do they still want to build controls? This way we can target
future versions of all the editions at specific audiences. Tim: The bit that I find difficult here is that while
VB .NET is still Basic in some respects – you can make it user friendly
to some extent - there are aspects to VB .NET that are never going to
be that simple. Probably the foremost example of is actually designing
Object Oriented applications. VB and Windows Forms still encourage you
to some extent to just design a form, double-click a button and start
writing loads of code, which is a particularly sub-optimal way to develop. Ari: but that’s the way VB developers have always
been doing it. Tim: Isn’t it worth trying to create a tool that
promotes a better approach to application design? The classic criticism
of VB as a tool is that is has encouraged lots of bad programming. Jon: Well I’ll tell you exactly where it comes
from Tim, and you’re absolutely right. If you want to write a 10,000
line VB program you’re supposed to start with some nice grown-up
programming structures and so on; a bit of workflow and so forth. But
the fact is that we never did it that way, and there are thousands of
applications out there doing some really quite scary big stuff in the
banks in London and on trading floors, which haven’t been written
that way either, which by their very definition are perfectly good stable
applications. Simon: there’s nothing wrong with writing procedural
code in an object oriented environment. In fact if you go and look at
a lot of Java code out there, it’s procedural. The point where you
shift into thinking in an object-oriented manner is when you realise your
data structure is part of your code. Tim: In the professional environment that means when
you start to talk to other bits written by other people - other components
and so forth. At that point the whole thing changes, but that doesn’t
really apply in this space. Ari: How do you mean? Tim: There’s nothing wrong with designing a form
and plugging in the ok button, and slapping in ten lines of code, but
small apps invariably become big apps and often they fall apart. Ari: That’s what I think VB .NET really has to
offer right now. It still allows you to do procedural programming if you’ve
got a small application. Then if you need to you can take a step back
and say ‘we need it to interact with this component, we need to
talk to that mainframe’, the app begins to grow and it gives you
the room to do that. Simon: One of the things I’m starting to see coming
out of the programming community (it’s mainly the C# community)
are really small .NET apps that are rich clients for Internet services.
I’m seeing a flurry of .NET tools for working with RSS (the newsfeed
standard) starting to appear. Tools that just sit in your toolbar and
take feeds from all the main news sites. Great tools, and tiny. Very simple
form designs, very lightweight: they’re leveraging external objects,
they’re doing things the right way. Ari: A lot of efforts we’re seeing right now are
these grass roots efforts. It’s probably the same kind of excitement
we saw with VB 1.0. Up till now we’ve been targeting the enterprise
with our message, but these projects are the rich-client applications
that VB programmers have always known and loved. They’re targeted
at folks who’re doing VB in their spare time and want to build a
simple windows-based portal for themselves, they might want to build a
music player, or they might want to build a simple game in Visual Basic
.NET. Simon: I think that begs a side-question. You’ve
got the main .NET site, which focuses very strongly on C# and Object Oriented
development within the Visual Studio environment, and looking very much
to the enterprise. You’ve got the ASP .NET site, which is very strongly
focused on ASP .NET, C# and VB .NET, and front-ends to web applications.
Why isn’t there a VB .NET site for the community? Ari: Have you seen www.windowsforms.net? Simon: No, I didn’t know it existed. Ari: It’s very similar to the ASP .NET site, they’ve
got a lot of cool projects up there and a lot of the things we’re
working on will be going up there too. In addition to that, we’re
working the community site for VB developers into the gotdotnet web site
right now. Simon: It’s good to hear that you are thinking
in those terms, because I personally believe one of the reasons there
has been good uptake of .NET has been the community sites. Tim: Well, one thing you could do to help VB 6.0 guys
is a new grid control. The current one is very complex and it only operates
in bound mode. It’s also quite difficult to do things like different
column styles. It’s generally very difficult to get it to do what
you want, so anyone who used to work with the old VB grid control is experiencing
difficulty. Simon: You didn’t like the old grid control, did
you Jon? Jon: Well, I went through Sheridan’s grid control,
I went through tons of others, and the Formula One grid control which
you could initially Databind but then it was changed so you couldn’t
Databind it any more - there’s some historical pain there.
Jon: Is this an apposite time for me to ask whether
you have actually agreed to what we’ve said the last four times
we’ve met, and put out a CD with VB 3.0, 16 and 32-bit 4.0, 5.0
and 6.0 on it? I know what the answer is but I just want to upset you
again. Ari: Did I ever…? Jon: You agreed. Ari: I don’t remember agreeing. Jon: I can find the tapes. Ari: Can you remind me why you want this CD? Jon: We’ve got all this 16-bit VB code out there
that we have to migrate from, still. There’s still some really scary
code out there, and we can’t do it because we can’t get hold
of VB 3.0 16-bit. Ari: I’m not sure who ‘we’ is? Jon: Developers, corporates… Ari: No, no, no, the vast majority of people are building
on VB 5.0 or VB 6.0. There’s a very small percentage of people out
there who are making any existing applications in previous versions. Jon: I agree, but there are applications that are line
of business that are still 16-bit out there. Jon: In some cases they still have the source, and in
some cases they’re running as Windows 2000 applets in a 16-bit subsystem
– because they did the work and they’ve kept going. Unfortunately
some of them can be quite big and we now need to migrate forward. Unfortunately
we’re out of VB 4.0 16-bit and VB 4.0 32-bit builds. That’s
why I’d like to see a CD that’s got VB 3.0, VB 4.0 on it and
other legacy stuff. Ari: Do you see a lot of folks that are after this stuff? Jon: How much is this going to cost you? Simon: For years you’ve had the archive option
on MSDN Universal, which allows you to get old copies of software. So
it couldn’t be too difficult to get old copies of the software Jon
is talking about, and change the name to the Legacy Application Migration
Kit, or something. Jon: You can slap a license on this to say this is part
of MSDN Universal, you are not licensed to build executables, this is
purely for migration. A piece of paper, three old files, everyone is happy.
And we’ve been asking for this for years. Ari: People really use VB 3.0? Jon: yes Ari: You’re the guy? Jon: I’ve never claimed the request isn’t
unusual. But I can tell you there are places, in the city department for
example, which has a program for moving its training information from
London to New York, and that’s written in DOS FoxPro. That’s
not a joke: written in FoxPro for DOS. Ari: Well, it sounds like a great application. I don’t
see why you would want to update it. Jon: Do you really want to be running a line of business
application on the DOS subsystem of .NET Server? How much testing has
that subsystem had? Ari: So you see these guys taking their VB 3.0 applications
and upgrading them to full .NET apps? Jon: They’ve got to if they want to go forward
with the code. You can’t even load the VB 3.0 source code into VB
6.0. Ari: So you don’t see a lot of people doing it,
actually. People who’re in a situation like that, may have an application
that’s very functional, but they see the fact that it was written
however many years ago and say “we want to take a look at doing
this the right way, moving forward so it’ll be great for the next
ten years”. And what they end up doing is not a version by version
by version port, but they look at wholly re-implementing it in VB .NET. Jon: I had this happen to me about twelve months ago
with an application. We had a problem with a VB 3.0 app and they said
to me ‘here’s the source code’. Well, they had some
real, line-of-business, business intellect inside that source code. Now
I can’t get VB 3.0, so that I can load that source code and say
‘oh that’s how that sub-routine works’. There was some
really complex maths in there and I didn’t want to rewrite it. I
go around jumble sales and crap like that trying to find a set of VB 3.0
disks. Ari: So you’d prefer to upgrade version by version
by version than to take a step back and re-implement the application in
VB .NET? Jon: Yes, and we can’t do any of it. Matt: The actual source code is text, isn’t it? Jon: No, it’s binary. Matt: I thought it was just the forms. Jon: Everything is binary. Matt: Well that is a problem then isn’t it? Ari: The percentage of people who are in that situation
is miniscule, and we have to look at what’s feasible for the vast
majority of our customers. Matt: But what Jon said is such a simple thing to do.
Okay, there may be a small amount of people, but it just takes one significant
user. Jon: Well it only needs one of the London banks to turn
around and squeal at Microsoft UK. Ari: I think had we heard anything like that we would
be burning a CD for them straight away. But we haven’t heard that,
so… Jon: Don’t you think it’s a matter of policy
that if you’re supporting a developer community long-term, you can’t
just forget about it. You don’t have to change a single byte of
the source code; you don’t have to change the compile setup program;
you just lift it off Bill’s server, put it on a CD and say ‘look,
there it is’. Ari: I tell you what, the first customer that I hear
saying that, I will personally rip the CD for them. Jon: Well I’ve asked you four times! Ari: You being a customer? Well I’ll rip a CD
for you! Jon: Right, sorted. I’m happy. Tim: well, you’ve got your VB 3.0, what about
the grid control? Ari: The grid control? I can say that good things are
coming. Matt: what’s happening with the third-party component
market? There was a quite vibrant VBX and OCX market, so what do you see
in the .NET commercial third-party market? Ari: One of the things that we’re doing - speaking
of burning CDs – is a CD that will be shipping shortly, containing
a host of third-party components. These are from vendors large and small.
We’re going to be distributing a bunch of these CDs free to the
VB community. This is one of the things we’re doing to help get
that excitement around the type of development that VB developers want
to do. Matt: Are these demo versions or commercial products,
on the CD? Ari: It depends. Different vendors have different policies
on that. We’re working with each individual vendor based on what
their policies are. Matt: What trends are you seeing in the market? Are
you seeing the third-party component market growing? Matt: The feedback I’ve been getting is that the
market’s struggling. There’s a barrier for many people, particularly
in the corporate space, in that customers want the source code. They’re
not that keen on buying outside businesss logic controls. User interface
controls have a history that’s been really good, but getting people
to buy business logic is proving problematic. Jon: Just buying widgets and stuff is what VB programmers
do to get them out of holes. I’ll tell you why the VB component
market is faltering – as VB has got more powerful you can do more
wonderful stuff with it. The risk assessment of ‘just how stable
is this OCX’ or whatever, becomes really quite overpowering, and
we have a history of companies who continually ship inept code. It’s
continually buggy: they don’t check new bug fixes before releasing
the next package, but just introduce a whole class of new bugs. I’ve
been burned by these companies so many times. They’re not only killing
their own future, but the whole marketplace for third-party components. Simon: I guess a side question is if you’re a
responsible corporate, do you trust your line of business to a third-party
component to handle your business logic. Tim: Or the .NET Framework, for instance… Jon: Yes it’s exactly the same thing, but it is
a whole different risk analysis. If you find a fault with the .NET Framework,
Microsoft will fix it, and get down to it very quickly. When you buy third
party components, especially royalty-free components, what comeback do
you have? Ari: I can just tell you that from my interaction with
the control vendors and the component vendors, they’ve been very
pleased with the uptake they’ve had with their ASP .NET stuff and
Windows Forms products. I think that we’re going to see even more
of that as we continue to target the semi-professional communities. That’s
exactly what they want - controls that they can just drag and drop onto
their app. Everything that we’ve seen has been very encouraging. Matt: Do I get the feeling that you’ve been putting
all your attention on the corporate market, and are now beginning to devote
more attention to the small business and hobbyist market? Ari: If you look at what we had to do, Microsoft had
to really reposition itself as a player in the Enterprise market, and
I think we succeeded in doing that with the launch of .NET. At the same
time, we have an absolutely massive community and we want to keep targeting
that entire community. Matt: The focus did shift off the non-Enterprise developer
for a bit. Ari: I wouldn’t say that it shifted off, but I
would say that now we have established ourselves in the enterprise market,
and as a leader on the Internet. Now that the bread and butter developers
– the slower moving developers – are really getting interested
in the technology, we’re providing them with information and looking
at their feedback too. Tim: Do you know why the documentation with .NET often
states “don’t ever use this class in your code”? Ari: I’m not familiar with that. Simon: I’ve heard that explained. It’s to
do with dependent classes; classes which support other classes. Tim: Yes, that’s what I would have expected, but
it doesn’t seem to be applied very sensitively, because you often
find problems that require writing code which calls those very same classes. Simon: Yes, but they mean ‘in general’ not
to use them. A good similar example is in Python, in PyXML libraries.
There are something like 140 classes, of which you are only supposed to
use 36, because the others are all dependent classes. Jon: Regarding VSA it’s all gone terribly, terribly
quiet. Are we going to be seeing VSA magically leap out and reappear as
something far more exciting? Or is VSA just an implementation of a concept
that was a good idea at the time but has now largely gone away? Ari: It’s definitely something we see as continuing
to be important. In fact I’ll be talking about Visual Studio macros
in my next talk, and how they’re implemented using this kind of
technology. There’s definitely still a need for it. Well, I have
to go to my next talk now, and I’ve got a CD to burn for you, Jon. Jon: You certainly have.
Simon: One of the things that worries me is that VB developers
are having to move into a whole new world.
Microsoft has been trying to realign
itself into the enterprise market with .NET. Now we’re planning
to work more closely with the VB developers who say ‘talk to me
more about windows, talk to me more about deployment’, and things
like that. So what we’re working on now is an education strategy
that really targets the bread and butter developers. We’re talking
about how .NET helps them do the tasks that they’re doing today,
but more effectively.
So yes, we’ve been talking about
Web Services, and next-generation this and next-generation that, and now
it’s ‘Why should I move to Windows Forms from VB 6.0 forms,
what’s in it for me in terms of control development, middle-tier
business logic development and so on’. I just don’t think
we’ve got this message across broadly enough yet, so that’s
what we’re working on right now. We’re wrapping all the new
content to go on our web site. We’re doing everything from whitepapers
on procedural programming in Visual Basic .NET to building business logic
components working more with COM+, talking about remoting and more. These
are things that huge communities of VB guys are asking for.
We’re working on a new style
of the .NET show for programmers, called ‘VB TV’, targeting
the Visual Basic professional and semi-professional developer. It’ll
talk about how to more easily solve the tasks we face today. It’s
interesting because since the launch, we’ve seen an entirely new
wave of people come in and start learning about .NET. Obviously we have
our early adopters who’ve gone through the beta process, but since
the launch there’s been an entirely new wave of people come in.
A lot of them are what you might call the ‘slower to move’
developers who are working in small corporate shops – the folks
who have heard about .NET but never really considered it until the launch
– so these folks are coming up with a new set of requirements from
us.
I know it’s a bit like the Monty
Python sketch with ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’
– without the viaducts and roads and so on. But, these people are
saying ‘I’ve got to get out of VB’, because they have
a look at VB .NET and say ‘head-explode time’. They then go
running like lambs to the slaughter over to Macromedia where they see
something they can wrap their head around. They see nice robust ASP development
tools, database connectivity – all the stuff they want except it’s
coming out on Macromedia. My real question is, how is Microsoft going
to get them back into the fold?
Because we’ve been talking so much
about the Web, we have 62 per cent of VB guys doing Web applications and
saying "wow, now I can use a tool that I know", so we’ve
seen good numbers there. My other thought is that if you look at the transition
between VB 3.0 and VB 4.0, moving up to 32-bit, I’d consider that
comparable to the move that’s happening now.
I
can try and tell you it’s just VB 7.0 and you’ll all just
say it’s another ‘nice try’. But if you look at the
upcoming version of Visual Basic .NET with the kind of things we’re
doing there, you can see a lot of the stuff we’re doing to target
long-term Visual Basic developers. I’ve seen a lot of the stuff
that’s coming along in the upcoming version and I’d love to
tell you all about the details of it right now – unfortunately I
can’t – but I can tell you this: if you look at features that
are going into the next few versions of VB .NET, so much of the magic
of VB is coming back.
If you look at the learning curve
of VB 6.0 developers coming up to speed on Visual Basic .NET Framework,
the fact that it’s hierarchical is very helpful. It doesn’t
have the flat structure of the Win32 API upgrade which left a lot of them
stumbling around blindly in the dark. When it comes to the language and
IDE itself, one of the things that we’re doing right now is putting
together a white paper that talks about getting the IDE look and feel
that we had in Visual Basic 6.0.
I’m going to be doing a talk
in a couple of minutes about customising the IDE and other tips and tricks.
We have this start page that handles developer profiles. Those profiles
move around the tool windows, they change the keyboard mappings –
things like that. If you actually look deeply into customising the IDE
you see you can really make it much more familiar, much more comfortable
to an existing user base. So, I don’t think you’re going to
be seeing separate IDEs in the future but, rather an IDE centred around
the task that you’re doing.
One of the things we started doing
recently in that area is getting the product team more involved in the
newsgroups. We have conference rooms set aside for two hours every day
of the week where we have developers, program managers and product managers
get in there, sit down, go on the newsgroups and start interacting with
the community. I think it’s these kind of efforts that are going
to spawn the kind of excitement that we’ve seen in the past.
They’ve kept it because it’s
worked for years. The system hasn’t changed, the executables are
still around, and if it goes wrong it calls someone’s pager. This
is a sophisticated business application. Now you go along to the manager
there and say "we want to turn this into a VB .NET app" and
they’ll tell you exactly where to go, because they’re happy
with it, the auditors are happy with it – everyone’s happy
with it.
The third-party component market
Ari:
Well, if you check out our partner web site, there is a long, long list
of component vendors. From the very small like Mabry to the very large
like Infragistics. One of the things that .NET offers that we hadn’t
seen too much in the past was this growth market for ASP .NET controls.
By the same token, with a lot of the new features you can use in Windows
applications now, a lot of these vendors who were originally building
ASP .NET controls are now also doing Windows Forms controls. Everything
from Grids to, building sockets and so on - you name it. It all looks
very encouraging.
[Laughter]
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