In the “old days” I was working at an IT-department where people were programming in a lot of different languages. There were always holy wars between developers and mostly, it was VB against the rest. VB was a non-structured, “sleur en pleur” development environment in which everybody was able to create some badly coded application.
Since then, a lot has changed. I'm working at an all Microsoft development department and Microsoft has brought us VB.NET. With VB.NET Microsoft has made VB a complete OO-programming language in which you can do same things as all other .NET compliant languages. And the best thing is that if you program the same code in different languages it will all be compiled to the same MSIL, so the are no performance differences. Well...... not, at least according to this article on the Code Project.
It's nice to have a holy war within the Microsoft community. It keeps you fresh and sharp about the tools you use and explore their potentials. So, as the writer of the article says: “this is my oil on the fire“. And of course I'm currently programming in C# ;-)
The Microsoft Patterns and Practices group has launched a
new wiki for patterns. On this site they bring together design patterns from various authors like Martin Fowler, GOF, Eric Evans and (of course) Microsoft. They also try to give insight in the relationships of these patterns by placing all the patterns in a matrix.
If you have a nice pattern of your own (don’t we all ;-), you can submit it to the site.
The site is still in beta (at least according to some of the errors I’ve seen), but has the potential to become a great resource. Some of the patterns also have a reference to a book about it.