No dogfood for us
To wit: can anyone tell me, for the ten years (give or take) between the introduction of VB 1.0 and the introduction of VB .NET 7.0, how much of the Win32 APIs or the COM APIs were written in VB?
Of course the answer is: none, to my knowledge. In fact, the VB team itself did not use VB in any meaningful way in its own product. The VB runtime functions were all written in C/C++. The VB forms package was written in C/C++. All of the VB controls were written in C/C++. Beyond the VB team, every major Microsoft product and operating system was written using C/C++. Every. Single. One.
And he says that last bit as if it's a good thing. What it indicates is either a severe weakness of VB, or a severe lack of vision by the VB team. The product either:
- Isn't good enough to write decent controls in
- The VB team wasn't smart enough to see the value in eating their own dogfood
And now they are "shocked, shocked" that people consider them to be a second class citizen of .NET? They shouldn't be surprised that VB was looked down upon for years, even given its popularity - the VB team itself implicitly told people that nothing of real importance should be done in the tool itself - "serious" work needed C++ in the past, and C# now.
Now yes, the runtimes (VM) for VW and OST are written in C. However, most of the environment is written in itself. Maybe VB just doesn't have that power...
