RE: VB vs C# is there a auto documenting feature in C#

Ken wrote:
> My problem isn't with C# developers at all, it is with the way MS forces
them to be different.

Well I see it completely the other way around. Users of different languages
provide very different feedback have they have very different priorities.
Microsoft responds. I see plenty of evidence of this throughout the Whidbey
development process. Ponder these aspects of software development in .NET
today.

Fact: the total number of VB and VB.NET programmers of the world dwarfs the
number of C / C++ / C# programmers of the world, like by an order of
magnitude.

Fact: all those VB (.NET) programmers are not writing large, complex
enterprise-level middle tier goo. They tend to write small to modest size
applications that solve a problem they have today.

Fact: in the grand tradition of object-oriented systems, C# programmers tend
to think of code reuse as being based on aggregation and inheritance. VB
programmers tend to think of code reuse as based on cut-and-paste. You doubt
me? Look at one of the premier VB features in VS2005: code snippets. A
couple of hundred nearly correct code samples that you can simply paste into
your code.

Fact: these audiences want to differentiate themselves. VB6 programmers, by
and large, hated having object-orientation forced on them in VB.NET, an so
enter the My class and other facades designed to ease the pain of thinking
too hard when all you are trying to do is solve today's problem. These are
the people who previously *consumed* COM components. C# programmers, who in
large part came from C++ and Java, are the populations who previously
*wrote* COM (or J2EE or CORBA) components.

It's not so much the languages that are different: after all, all managed
languages just surface the CLR in different ways. It is the audiences for
those languages that are different.

Microsoft did a lot of study and soliciting feedback from different
audiences in deciding what to focus on in Whidbey. VB.NET folks prioritized
Edit-and-Continue (E&C) very high on the list; C# developers put E&C much
lower down. Then a strange thing happened: some C# developers were outraged
(circa PDC 2003) that VB was getting E&C and they weren't. It turns out that
the VB team solved a lot of problems to make E&C works, which made it much
easier for E&C to be implemented in C# than they had originally anticipated.
So now E&C will be available in both VB and C#. I offer this little story as
one example that it is not Microsoft "forcing them to be different;" it is
different developer audiences forcing Microsoft to meet their own distinct
needs.

Cheers,
Stuart

Stuart Celarier | Fern Creek | www.ferncrk.com