VB is here to stay :)

Here's what S. Somasegar (Vice President of the developer division at Microsoft) had to say about the future of VB (and all the comparisons goin' on between VB.NET and C#):
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2004/08/01/204540.aspx

A breather, huhn ;-) ??

All you wanted to know about late binding in VB.NET (and probably more than that)

I came across this blog post by a former Visual Basic Compiler developer which talks all about how late binding is accomplished in Visual Basic as it happens now in .NET.
http://blogs.msdn.com/cambecc/archive/2004/06/01/145309.aspx
Revealing, isn't it? yeah..I thought so too (although at first it was more confusing than revealing :-S) It does give a pretty good insight into what goes on (which apparently is a whole lot!) behind late binding in Visual Basic. From there I was led to this blog post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/cambecc/archive/2004/06/27/166868.aspx
Here, Cameron Beccario - the guy who wrote the first blog post as well - lays out an abstract specification for Visual Basic late binding. Its kinda big but I guess it makes sense since that's what the purpose of the post is - to lay out in detail a specification for various late binding scenarios. Beware - might take a while to get through the whole thing :)
After reading both these posts, you can pretty much tell why late binding incurs such a performance hit as compared to early binding. Gives you something to think about when using late binding..Ofcourse, with Option Strict On, VB.NET throws up a compile time error when using late binding which does help a lot. It would be an issue only with Option Strict Off.

A9 - Search by Amazon

Checkout the new search site by Amazon - www.a9.com I think its going to give google a run for its money..what do you think?? Some of the features on A9 are pretty cool..First of all - it saves all the searches in the form of a history which gives you quicker access to what you've already search instead of trying to remember each search you make..Also, you can just drag the links from the search results page itself (yes - drag and drop :)) and drop it into the bookmarks frame..The best part - you can access the history and bookmarks from any computer ! Atleast I find that really useful - many a time I'm searching something say at work and find something really useful after a long hard search which I'd want to access from home for a further look only to realize that I've forgotten the search keywords I used and all the links that I went through to get to that useful website :-( I could email the link to myself but as you might've already guessed I'm awfully lazy and I wouldn't want to work for something any more than the task rightfully deserves - it just doesn't seem right to be emailing myself everytime I want to use a bookmark that I saved at work from home or vice versa. Anyway..looks like we're drifting away from the subject of this blogpost :-) Its got a few other features such as Discovery (something similar to google's adsense but this works more generically rather than targeting commercial websites), Diary (take down notes for a particular website and save it with the website - haven't used this feature though) and your standard toolbar more or less like google's. I love the column feature too - you can view different results/views in columns - gives you access to more information on a single page. Overall, I really like A9. Note one thing - the search engine behind the scenes (for web and images) is google itself ! http://a9.com/-/company/whatsCool.jsp
I had gotten so used to google that I thought there could be no search engine so good that could make me move away from google...but looks like I could be way off the mark :)

Online .NET Framework Object Browser (sort of)

Its sort of a namespace/class hierarchy viewer for the .NET base class library. Here's the link for framework v1.1:
http://www.vb2themax.com/dotnetbrowser/showassemblies.aspx?ver=11
and here's the link for framework v2.0 beta:
http://www.vb2themax.com/dotnetbrowser/showassemblies.aspx

Its pretty good - its also got a search feature (haven't tried it out though). The good thing for v2.0 beta is that it lists what is new in v2.0, what has changed since v1.1, what has been deprecated from v1.1, etc. That should definitely save some time for people moving from v1.1 to v2.0. Check them out..

More on the Garbage Collector and Collection

These are the actual links that I had in my previous post (just for completeness):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/1100/GCI/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/1200/GCI2/default.aspx

Also check out this blog post by Chris Lyon (A Tester at MS for the .NET Garbage Collector):
http://blogs.msdn.com/clyon/archive/2004/09/14/229477.aspx

Its got a very comprehensive list of links to more information about the garbage collector and/or collection. I haven't had the time to go through all of them but I think those would probably be the most interesting ones to read through about this stuff.

Garbage Collection Internals

Ever wondered what's the whole fuss about Garbage Collection? Ever confused what the Garbage Collector actually does and how it does what it does?!? Yeah - I've been there too. I found these 2 excellent articles on MSDN on GC (actually just one - in 2 parts) which gives a significant insight into the workings of GC. I found them pretty interesting - learnt quite a bit out of them. At first, you usually don't care about GC and stuff - you're more concerned about your syntax, that your program compiles and actually does what you are expecting it to do :) However, further down the road, its always good to know a little bit more which'll give you a better idea of exactly whats going on. Here are the links:

Part 1 of the article
Part 2 of the article

Hope you like them as much as I did..or else..well..you can curse me for wasting your precious time ;-)