VB Silver Anniversary

This week is turned to be to mark the 25th (“Silver Anniversary”) considering that Visual Basic (VB) 1st debuted to the world. A celebration so comprehensive it is also a marathon.  VB has the journey across each era, from VB 1. to VB6 to the early days of VB.NET to Roslyn

Despite much of the hate VB has gotten over the years, it served an insanely important purpose in the rise of internal business software. Itz amazed at how much of their world still runs on VB6 applications. Something like 1/3 of insurance software still does.

The transition from VB6 to VB.NET was a really sad one as it lost a lot of people - .NET is a lot more difficult than it was.  The result is that an entire group of people simply stopped making software and now we have businesses running on applications that are more than 20 years old that some random person in the company threw together over a week.

There's a huge gulf between building a VB6 app and throwing together a web app today and despite much of the progress that  has been made, we've taken some big steps back in terms of accessibility.

The difference between VB.NET and C# is pretty superficial, but I sincerely hope that someday people can experience the magic that something like VB6 offered.  A lot of people got their start in programming using Visual Basic.

Google IO

Google I/O is an annual developer conference at which the company announces new hardware and software, hosts educational sessions pertaining to its various products and services, and broadly tries to build hype and warm feelings in the hearts of creators and fans who watch online.

The event begins with a keynote. This year, the host will be Google CEO Sundar Pichai. We expect him and his colleagues to make a number of announcements, like giving an official name to its new mobile operating system, revealing more of Google's plans for augmented and virtual reality, and detailing how Android would work on the desktop.

How to watch

Starting time: 
San Francisco: 10AM / New York: 1PM / London: 6PM / Berlin 7PM / Moscow: 8PM / Beijing: 1AM (May 19th) / Tokyo: 2AM (May 19th) / Sydney 3AM (May 19th).

Sessions live-streaming : 
You can also watch sessions throughout the two-day event right here.  Google's live stream is available via the company's own website.
https://events.google.com/io2016/schedule?filters=Live%20streamed#day1/

Live tweeting: 
Follow @Verge on Twitter for the latest headlines and specs as they emerge.

Stay tuned for more updates from google

Incremental Design

Last Saturday (May 7), I took part in Design Workshop, conducted by ThoughtWorks Chennai division.

Theme of the workshop was "Incremental Design", which is considered as the chance to validate the participant's software design/coding skills.  This session was hosted by GM Sivsu with around 100 coding participants.

Over a period of 4 hours, the participants found out how Incremental Design works by solving the given Retail use case.  It is allowed to have either pair with a fellow participant or work solo on a given problem statement in any programming language of your choice.  A series of check points during the course of the workshop will ensure that we pause, observe and learn to design the right way.

Personally, I learnt the below Top 5 key items on solving the given problem statement.
1. Understanding the User
2. Functional Coverage
3. Stability
4. Defining Core features
5. Extension

1. Understanding the User
Usually Personas are created and validated through User Research in the field.

2. Functional Coverage
Functionality is covered with the basic/strong test cases and the matching result set.

3. Stability
At any point of failure cases, App should be stable with graceful way of exit/error.

4. Defining Core features
Inevitably when building a product, teams are constrained by time, money, resources, etc and can’t build everything they want to at once. At the end of the workshop the solutions are compared with the different feature ideas they had come up with, to select the best.

5. Extension
As the core theme of Incremental design, the later change requests should be adoptable to extend further.

With the interesting hands-on mode of learning, signing off this week activity.

Microsoft Azure

In the latest Forrester Wave report for Big Data Hadoop Cloud Solutions, Microsoft Azure came on top beating both Google and Amazon Web Services.

Microsoft specifically was called out for having a cloud-first strategy that is paying off. Tiffany Wissner, Senior Director Product Marketing, Data Platform mentioned the following in a recent blog post,

Our goal is to make big data processing and analytics simpler and more accessible to bring big data to everybody. We do this through the Cortana Intelligence Suite which offers a fully managed big data and advanced analytics solution in the cloud.

Within Cortana Intelligence is the Azure Data Lake which includes HDInsight, a managed Hadoop service that runs Hortonworks Data Platform, Data Lake Analytics, a new service built on Apache YARN that dynamically scales your big data jobs, and Data Lake Store, a single repository to capture data of any size, type, and speed. We also offer IaaS images in Azure Marketplace that deploy any third party Hadoop distribution (Hortonworks, Cloudera, and MapR).

After 37-criteria evaluation, Forrester recognized Microsoft Azure as a leader in their Big Data Hadoop Cloud Solutions.

Forrester Ref: https://www.forrester.com/report/The+Forrester+Wave+Big+Data+Hadoop+Cloud+Solutions+Q2+2016/-/E-RES126541

VS Code Differentiation

On swimming in .NET world for last one decade, the first obvious question strike in my mind was 'Why do you need to use Visual Studio Code?'. Existing Visual Studio is pretty much sufficient for my development activities.

Hmm.. Visual Studio Code is completely a separate product from Microsoft. Itz not that powerful compare to the traditional Visual Studio but itz not worth to compare them either. However, VS Code has its own advantage.

In my view, 2 bullet points of the product differentiation

1. Lightweight/Lean
2. Cross platform

1.Lean

While Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code share a name, there is little similarity between the two. I won't agree to the point that Visual Studio Code is a "stripped down" version of Visual Studio

Visual Studio Code provides you with a new choice of developer tool, one that combines the simplicity and streamlined experience of a code editor with the best of what developers need for their core code-edit-debug cycle.

Though it is not really user friendly like VS, but it is super fast. The loading time is almost immediate with ultra speed.

Also, it has already integrated a basic GIT client, code auto completion and debugging tools. This lean factor supports the productivity of the niche developers.

2.Cross platform

Visual Studio Code is the first code editor, and first cross-platform development tool – supporting OSX, Linux, and Windows – in the Visual Studio family.

If you prefer a code editor centric development tool or are building cross-platform web and cloud applications, VS Code is the right choice

Though, VS Code is less than a year old technology, the adoption/growth is adorable, as depicted the usage metric of the product.