OK, before you rush to comment and tell me that there is no such date as March 46th I know that. What I was referring to is a comment made at VS Live! in San Francisco that the next betas for Visual Studio and SQL Server would ship in March even if it was March 32 or March 45. Well by my math today would be March 46 and I just checked the MSDN downloads site. There are entries for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2. Be prepared to download for a while and possibly incur the wrath of your ISP. The ISO image for a DVD of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Beta 2 is 2.85 GB. The estimated download over a T1 is 4 hours and 22 minutes. It looks like there will be a lot of people very busy this weekend downloading and installing the latest bits.

[16 April 2005]

I didn't see the betas for SQL Server 2005 last night but I assumed that they would be posted and up tonight. I checked and not only are they not there, the Visual Studio 2005 betas are not showing up either. I am now wondering what happened to the downloads?

Scott Hanselman and Rory Blyth have produced another funny video about going to TechEd this year. I was laughing as I watched it. Now I am just wondering what they will have for snacks. If they start passing out red KoolAid I think I will have to hunt around for the bottled water.

I also couldn't help thinking (must be the parent in me) that they must have left a red stain on some carpet wherever they filmed this one. I will have to try to remember to ask Scott the next time I see him.

It is with great sadness that I mark today, March 31, 2005, as the end of free support for Visual Basic 6.0. I am relatively new to the whole VB experience. I started with VB4 and even then was not all that impressed becuase I had been using PowerBuilder and it was so much easier to use a DataWindow to bind to data than anything in VB but management had changed at a long time client of mine and the new management made it clear that everything was going to be developed in VB so if we wanted to stay there we had better become experts in VB. Well many years and many VB projects later I now like VB a lot more. I am impressed with some of the VB .NET features and can't wait to begin working with the new stuff in VS 2005 full time when it finally ships.

So what does that mean to you if you are still developing or maintaining VB6 applications? (There are some people who are doing this because I answered a VB6 question just this morning.) Well for one thing the VB runtime is part of the operating system and will be supported for many years to come. There have been 6 service packs and Microsoft has committed to continuing to publish any security related patches. All it really means is that if you need support on VB6 that can not be answered by the community or by any of the available resources like MSDN developer center then you will have to pay for the support. You can get more details at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/support/vb6.asp.

In this video Scott and Rory are trying to design software. I am sure it is all done in jest but the message seems to ring true. How many times have you been so heads down on a problem that you start thinking that pasting to PowerPoint and e-mail are good solutions only to have someone look at the problem with fresh eyes and come up with a better solution. I think TechEd and most other training you go to will help you expand your developer toolbox so you can be the one erasing the jumble on the whiteboard and writing up the simple, easy solution.