Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

VB6 got me into programming as a kid.

I mostly use python for stats stuff. I sorta understand how to run up a GUI using tkinter, but it seems like a huge pain in the ass.

I'm sure Visual Studio offers the ability to do whatever VB6 could with a GUI, but it isn't obvious how to get there.

VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand them in Windows. Why the fuck is it so hard nowadays? VS isn't intuitive - it's a firehouse of information and I feel like you need training to use it. That is a bummer.

I just want to Lego-assemble a cute GUI-based program that I can make into a binary and email my wife to use. But I need to dedicate 70GB and two weeks of study to get there, I guess.

But, ignoring that, almost any app of any complexity in VB6 land will rely on bugs, quirks, and implementation details. (Also, I was never clear if the binary format for editing forms was actually documented somewhere). Someone could implement their own VB6 parser, but it seems like a ton of work for a vanishing market.

All of that said, while typing this, a quick search revealed https://www.radbasic.dev/ , so maybe someone's trying. Well, it's a Kickstarter, so maybe someone just has an idea. Dunno.

I haven't used any of these tools in probably 20 years but in addition to VB6, I also liked Delphi and C++ Builder quite a lot back in the day. Delphi was probably my favorite of the bunch. Embarcadero still sells both Delphi and C++ Builder but their pricing is far too expensive, I think.

Anyway, thank you, VB, and thanks for all the fish.

At the time it was very capable as lots of software titles opened themselves up to automation via COM - that's why you could have Classic ASP pages that invoked Office Excel to generate charts dynamically.

Unfortunately it was all a mess, but it was also something beautiful because it meant that a desktop/server OS was more than just a place where heterogenous applications could live: they could truly interact with each other regardless of their programming language or runtime platform.

That grand vision - itself an extension of OLE from the early 1990s - died down with the rise of .NET (this wasn't intentional - Microsoft just had a lot of reorgs around that time and COM was more-or-less feature-complete, and no-one was really using DCOM) - but with Windows 8 and the "WinRT" API I was hopeful that COM would be back and new ways of automating applications would come around, and that Microsoft would have a great system for non-programmer users wanting to build workflows like they can with Apple's macOS Automator and AppleScript.

This also ties-in with the do-as-little-work-as-necessary being done for VBA support in Microsoft's products. While we all wish Microsoft would allow modern JavaScript as a first-class COM automation language - the Office VBA runtime only supports its own VB6-dialect (the VBA language), and while Active Scripting supports JScript (a snapshot of JavaScript version 3 from 1999-2001) it doesn't support static typing nor is any of the tooling inside Office compatible at all. - so instead we have JavaScript, but only for "Office Apps" which don't offer anywhere near the same kind of integration or control over Office applications (or things like filesystem access) that VBA does. It's like it's 2008 again and everyone's excited about the new iPhone OS App Store and thinking about all the cool iPhone OS system extensions they'd add, like a Today screen or a camera app that can record video by using low-level camera hardware APIs - only to be discover Apple will only let-in apps using nerfed and siloed high-level APIs that take away all of the fun from extending an OS.