So I'm working on VB.NET for next week, last week I taught the *old* VB 6 course from Microsoft in Bakersfield. The samples for that course are on my site, along with the stuff from the ASP.NET course in Boise 2.5 weeks ago.
You will find a wonderful .NET regular expression repository here.
It's nice to be home though, taking the week off. It gives me time to do what I think I do best: scour the net for goodies.
Joel is busy again. After coming back from what must have been a restful vacation he is back to prolific writing:
Platforms - August 30, 2002
He also wrote about "Architecture Astronauts" about a year ago. Timeless!
Speaking of Joel, last week I got into a conversation with a student that pertains to something else he wrote. She asked a simple, pivotal and nearly unanswerable question:
"What *exactly* is ActiveX?"
As Joel said in his piece, the real answer to the question is marketing gone mad. Or, as Dan Appleman said, there are two types of products released at Microsoft - one from actual software development teams, and another from marketing teams.
My short answer is that Microsoft took an existing technology they had, OLE, and rebranded it as ActiveX. But to confuse things, ActiveX was an implemenation of a new standard they released called COM. So people started referring to identical types of programs as ActiveX, COM components, or OLE Servers. For a person who is new to Visual Basic, this presented quite some confusion.
We then did some proofs of concept:
1. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/activex. It takes you to http://www.microsoft.com/com.
2. In order to create a "COM component" in Visual Basic 6, one uses the ActiveX DLL/EXE/OCX templates.
But this is all old hat. Now people are asking me another simple, pivotal and unanswerable question:
"What *exactly* is .NET?"
The best short answer I've found is from Francesco Balena:
"... you can think of the .NET initiative as the convergence of several distinct but loosely tied goals, the most important of which are overcoming the limitations of the COM programming model and finding a common programming paradigm for Internet-related applications."
He expands on this for about 50 pages, but his initial definition is concise and useful.
The worst answer I've found is from Microsoft's marketing department, who are calling everything .NET.
8:51:25 AM 
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