Imagine this. It’s Halloween. You’ve got a costume party to go to at 7 but there’s one small hiccup – you’ve got no costume. As a VB programmer you’re used to coming up with nick-of-time solutions to all manner of complex business problems but all your coding skills won’t help you now. After all, you can’t just code up a costume – or can you? Here’s a little number I cooked up two years ago (before I joined the Developer Ghouls division at Microsoft) called the Opensourus Hex costume.

First, make up a short but interesting VB program and write it out (in carefully color-coded marker) on a white t-shirt like so:

Don’t forget to include your license:

Get yourself a box and throw in some art supplies – string, tape, construction paper, beer cans, whatever – label it “SDK” or “Developer Tools”.

Print off some reference materials:

And then let all of your friends at the party go nuts interactively creating you a costume (while asking you to explain all the 1337 VBisms written on your chest. It may sound silly but trust me it’s fun (for you AND your fellow party-goers). I actually did this with an old friend of mine two years back and he kept the project going for two years in a row. Take a look at some of the things his friends came up with:

Opensourus Hex v1.0

Friend (Eric) wearing costume next to then dev lead (Me)

Opensourus several iterations later:

Opensourus v2.0

That’s the best thing about the Opensourus costume – every year it’s different.

In my next post I’ll show you how to use VB lambda expressions as a last minute substitute to an undercooked Thanksgiving turkey (or will I?).

Happy Halloween and Happy Coding!

Anthony D. Green
Program Manager
Visual Basic & C# Languages Team