/ blog / archive — 8 entries
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Field notes from 35+ years in the trenches. Mostly C# / .NET / Avalonia,
some Rust, rants about OOP, retro emulation, and whatever weird thing has me up at 2am.
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visual-basic
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2026 // current cycle
0x16
2026.05.23
What's new this week: The calm before Build
Build 2026 is ten days out, and this edition is the calm before. VS 2026 18.6.1 patches a hard ARM64 debugger blocker, System.ClientModel 1.13.0 ships breaking credential changes, GitHub Copilot pushes a pre-cutover changelog flurry, and the Musk v. Altman verdict closes a story two editions in the making.
0′
0x15
2026.05.21
VB on Avalonia: the VB6 form-and-handler model, cross-compiled to Linux from Visual Studio 2026
I spent a weekend proving the VB6 loop is alive outside Windows. Visual Basic on Avalonia 11, .NET 10, Visual Studio 2026, two update patterns side-by-side, and the same VB source publishing to a 47 MB self-contained win-x64 .exe and a 47 MB self-contained linux-x64 ELF. No first-party VB template for Avalonia, so the .vbproj is hand-rolled. Everything downstream behaves normally. Full source and two build guides on GitHub.
7′
0x13
2026.05.16
What's new this week: Avalonia, .NET, Visual Basic, and the Microsoft choices that hit developers
A weekly look at what shipped, what shifted, and what Microsoft decided this week in the corner of the ecosystem I actually work in: Avalonia for cross-platform UI, .NET 10 in production, Visual Basic still refusing to die, and whatever decision out of Redmond is going to land on a working developer's desk on Monday.
11′
0x12
2026.05.14
Why learn modern system design if the old ways still work?
The old ways do still work. WinForms in VB.NET 10 on Visual Studio 2026 is a perfectly modern stack. Modern system design is not asking you to give up forms, events, or any of the tools that already serve you well. It is a small set of techniques you can add behind them, when a project starts to want them.
6′
0x0A
2026.05.04
I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
Starting a long-form history of Visual Basic on EvilGeniusLabs.ca. Chapter 1 covers the BASIC dynasty Microsoft had been running since 1975, the California developer Microsoft bought to put a face on it, and the launch pitch Bill Gates seeded in BYTE Magazine eighteen months before VB shipped. Six articles, focused on the parts of the story that don't get covered.
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0x0E
2026.05.02
What's new this week: Avalonia, .NET, Visual Basic, and the Microsoft choices that hit developers
A weekly look at what shipped, what shifted, and what Microsoft decided this week in the corner of the ecosystem I actually work in: Avalonia for cross-platform UI, .NET 10 in production, Visual Basic still refusing to die, and whatever decision out of Redmond is going to land on a working developer's desk on Monday.
10′
0x0D
2026.04.30
What did you love about VB6, and what frustrates you about modern .NET?
Two open questions for anyone who shipped real work on Visual Basic 6 and is now writing C# against modern .NET. What specifically did VB6 get right that you miss? And what do you find frustrating about the modern toolchain that VB6 didn't make you fight? I shipped about a hundred VB3-through-VB6 line-of-business systems between 1995 and 2010, and I'm trying to get to the root of what was actually good before too much of the institutional memory leaves the room.
4′
0x06
2026.04.27
Visual Studio 2026 still ships the form designer Alan Cooper drew in 1987
Every UI framework Microsoft has shipped since WinForms (2002) was sold as its successor. WPF, Silverlight, UWP, MAUI, Blazor desktop. Twenty-four years on, WinForms is still there, on modern .NET, with a designer that any VB6 developer would recognise on sight. The Cooper and Geary form-designer architecture from 1987 is still the path of least resistance for a working line-of-business app in 2026, and that is not an accident.
12′