Communities document

[KathleenDollard]

I would be fine if the VB community wanted to create/maintain a document like the community document for C#

(Note: the community also maintains the C# doc)

[bandleader]

More importantly, should we make a Slack/Discord/Gitter for VB? I'm not aware of any...

Also @KathleenDollard, is there any way to tell VB users that we really need them to be active in the community? Something like having the next version of VS show a popup when you create a new VB project, with links to vblang and any other community meeting points?

[paul1956]

Why wait until next version why not put it on startup screen? I don't know if the startup screen knows what I have installed but if it doesn't that would be a nice enhancement for a future release, 90% of what I see doesn't apply to me or what I have installed. Just filtering out the stuff I don't care about would make the stuff I do standout, maybe with an option to show all or more.

[zspitz]

I suspect that VB.NET has inherited the silent majority of bus driver programmers from VB6; and even after all this time is a good characterization of VB.NET programmers in the aggregate. (@KathleenDollard do you have access to internal MS statistics that might confirm or deny this hypothesis?) Such a majority is highly unlikely to coalesce into a community.

[bandleader]

@zspitz That's fine; the "bus driver" programmers don't really care where the language goes, as long as we don't remove features, break their code, or take away On Error Resume Next 😄

Our goal should be to attract toward the community people who have an interest in the direction of the language, because they are thinking programmers who use its features to improve their productivity as well as their code safety and maintainability.

[AdamSpeight2008]

Just because new feature are added that you are forced to use them,
You could still drive the omnibus or you could drive the future bus