LINQBridge

Neil Whitlow — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 02:35:36 GMT

What a glorious little library from some sharp guys.

We've been able to use the Framework 3.5 for back end processing, but have about 4,000 tablet PCs in the field infrequently connected by the most anachronistic, bandwith-challenged 56k modem, proprietary dial up hell you can imagine. Of course, these machines aren't allowed on the internet at all by the lockdown imposed by the security gestapo..their only connectivity is the sluggish modem.

No matter how I break down the framework 3.5 silent install, chopped out the prerequisites included in the MSI that are already on the tablets, there's just no way to get 3.5 on those tablets and we're gonna have to live with Framework 2.0 for the near future.

Well, I have a plan finally. We can move up to Visual Studio 2008 later this year for our apps that target these stranded framework 2.0 machines and, compile against 2.0 and use LINQBridge to provide the missing functionality for LINQ.

LINQBridge

RealBasic For Cranky VB6ers?

Neil Whitlow — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 16:17:00 GMT

Probably old news by now (expires April 15, but I found it humorous.

On the heels of the classic COM VB petition, RealBasic offers a free version for disgruntled VB6 programmers until April 15.

Of course, you'll have to learn the differences between RealBasic and Visual Basic 6.0, so why not just spend that time learning VB.NET or C# instead.

Some of the RealBasic community is beginning to build some RealBasic .NET namespace lookalikes. You can run, but you can't hide :)

Nice, but no thanks, if I want to play with cross-platform, I'll stick with C#/Mono Monoppix in a VMware session.

Heck, I coded VB since 1.0 and QuickBasic 4.5 / Basic PDS 7.x before that, but I didn't have a problem with C# and .NET. I mean, I prefer C# to VB.NET as a framework language simply because I still have to work with VB6 and it creates less confusion. 40% VB6 legacy stuff, 60% C# new development. When I have to flip flop between languages in the same day, I'm not confused with the similarities between VB.NET and VB6. When I see curly braces instead of a lot of THEN, END, DIM etc, my mind shifts gears for me.

That's my suggestion to VB6ers, keep coding in VB6 when you have to, and take the opportunity to make a clean break to C# when you want to code .NET framework stuff. With Windows forms designer in .NET, why not C#?