Keith Franklin

Keith Franklin

Keith Franklin is the Chief Software Architect of a leading .NET consulting firm in Chicago. Keith is a Microsoft MVP, a regular speaker at VSLive!, DevDays, Microsoft launch events, and the Chicago .NET Users Group, which he founded and directs. His close relationship with members of the Microsoft .NET teams, publishers, speakers, and user group community led to his appointment to the Board of Directors of the International .NET Association (INETA) in September 2001. He authored one of the first Visual Basic books devoted to the .NET Framework. He has also authored numerous articles published by leading .NET and Visual Basic publications and is a member of the .NET Developers Journal editorial board.

Articles Authored

  • Oh My!! - A Look at the My Namespace in Visual Basic 2005

    Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2004 - September/October

    Productivity is one of the major goals of Visual Basic 2005 and with "My" Microsoft may just have hit a home run.Although Visual Basic .NET is just as powerful as C# for building business applications, it did not get the initial push that C# did back at PDC 2000 when Microsoft unveiled .NET. This was not meant to slight Visual Basic and Visual Basic developers, but rather represented the state of the Visual Basic .NET language which was not as far along in the development process as C#. Opponents to the Basic syntax took this and ran with it. Microsoft has tried to attack this misconception but has also caused some of the problem, initially by pushing .NET for Web services development so hard that many developers and managers incorrectly got idea that .NET was primarily for Web services. With Visual Basic 2005 the power of the .NET Framework is fully exposed and the true power of Visual Basic is once again starting to take form and that power is productivity. Whereas C# is about language first and foremost Visual Basic is about language and tools to make the development process faster.