Not feelin' the VB love from Microsoft...

In the last two days, I’ve encountered at as many instances where certain members within Microsoft just ain’t showin’ us VB users any love.

• The latest Microsoft Download Notifications email states:

Download the Complete DirectX SDK

This software development kit includes the DirectX Runtime and the software you need to create DirectX-compliant applications in C/C++ and C#.

• The Updater Application Block: Downloads: Home on GotDotNet.com states:

There is no Enterprise Library 2.0 Design tim (that’s an exercise to the reader), there are still .NET 2.0 compilation warnings and we’ve only ported the C# version.

I can somewhat understand no love from the DirectX team. I can hear what they would say, “The numbers don’t reflect VB developers as being people who are asking for DirectX”. Well, if you don’t provide support for those users, target that audience, how are you supposed to hear from those users?

I’ve been told by a friend that works at a major game company that portions of the Xbox Developers Kit is leveraging VB. I’m not sure what portions and I haven’t been able to get acknowledgement from anyone at Microsoft as to the validity of this information; however, I have no reason not to take my friends word for it. Given that developers within the walls of Microsoft are leveraging VB for tools like the XDK; where exactly are they getting their information stating that people like US don’t want some love as well.

As for the Updater Application Block… no excuse. Previous releases contained code targeting VB and C#. Sure, I could convert the necessary portions over to VB to utilize the assemblies from my application; however, since the effort involved and the fact that I would of had at least 4 assemblies to include with my main assembly, I decided not to bother and roll my own. Don’t get me wrong, if there would have been working examples in VB (not the whole thing, just examples… working examples… “ported” to .NET 2.0), I’d probably have utilized it even though the additional assembly issues just to save me some development/debugging time.

Why do I point this sort of stuff out? ‘Cause I’m pretty sick of hearing from the C# guys… “Everything coming out of Microsoft is in VB.” Well, you know what… your wrong… wrong… wrong…