Aw, it's not so bad being a Mort...

Mike Harsh mentioned the "Mort" personna that MS uses for VB.NET developers, saying that "In summary, the Load event is about convenience". Julia expressed some tongue-in-cheek alarm over being a Mort.

So, "Mort" sounds kind of pejorative, right? Well, as always, you have to look at the alternatives. The equivalent personae for C# and MC++ are "Elvis" and "Einstein" respectively. Interesting people, for sure, but they're (hedging here) almost certainly dead. And I'm not sure you'd want them on your development team anyway. You sure as heck wouldn't want to sit them down with your users! Users, for those C# and MC++ developers out there who don't typically meet them in the corporate world, are the people who actually have the business needs that keep our industry humming - or sputtering - along. For sure, we formally call them "actors", but don't let them know that, OK?

So, if the Load event is targetted at "Mort" (which, for record, Mike is not an example of, prepositionally speaking) and it's all "about convenience", I'm cool with that. The alternative, obviously, is inconvenience. And I'm happy to leave that to "Elvis" and "Einstein".

2 Comments

  • This is funny, because Ken Getz talked about this last night at our meeting. He didn't mention "mort", but also said that this was the reason there was a form load event-- for the VB6 programmers who, someone at MS thought, just wouldn't be able to deal with it's disappearance. Problem with that is, since it's there, guess what, we WILL use it. Duh! <g>

  • Julie, its not that anyone at MS thought you wouldn't be able to deal with the loss of the Form Load event, its that you shouldn't have to. Using the Form Load event is a very handy and convienent shortcut to get basically the same behavior as putting code in the Form's constructor. I use the Fotm Load event all the time.

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