Leave it to MS to come up with the phrase Runtime Agility, but the concept, if I’m understanding it right, is very intriguing.
The post is here, but to summarize, Paul Vick is a lead on the VB team, and is discussing some of the items on the block for VB8.
He off hand mentions this…
“Runtime agility. The ability to compile without a VB runtime, or targeting another VB runtime.”
Now, if I’m reading that right, this would seem to be huge. The idea of VB being able to “compile in” the runtime is something I know I’ve been asking for since VB3. Does it waste a little space? Sure. But it means you can truly have a single EXE “copy and deploy” type scenario.
And does this mean the .NET runtime bits that are necessary will get baked in as well? Too early to tell, I suppose. Still. Something very interesting to watch in the coming months.
One Comment
Waycool! I also have dreamed of a special "standalone exe" compiler mode.
The easy way out would be to include the runtime DLL’s as an internal resource file, then extract them at runtime. It’d be nice to (optionally) bundle up all externally referenced controls and include them as well. I believe there are commercial packages that claim to do this exact thing.
But from scanning the article, it appears he’s only talking about the compiler itself, part of the dev environment. I’m a bit confused…