It's coincidental to have this announcement come on the same day Bill Gates announced he is resigning from the Microsoft board (I'm sure completely unrelated). Microsoft was founded on the idea of writing Basic interpreter by Gates so a legacy of 45 years from both has ended today.
Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
131–140 of 292 posts
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#132To me, this shows the huge risk of building on a language/platform that depends on a single company.
This even happened earlier. Visual Basic .NET is grossly incompatible with Visual Basic 6, so much so that Visual Basic .NET is essentially a different language and was derisively called Visual Fred http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html ... Of course, it was possible to rewrite software so that would work with Visual Basic .NET, but that completely misses the point. Most people in The Real World have better things to do than rewrite working software just to keep it working. Most of us want to solve new problems, not re-solve the same problem again.
Those who chose to use Visual Basic for non-trivial software got the shaft twice, including the transition from vb6.
But don't worry, I suspect in a few years many people will forget about the risks of tying yourself to a single company and will get the shaft again. History so often repeats itself because people don't learn from history. I wonder how many people will actually learn from this. Maybe the community of software Ddvelopers will learn from this. But I fear it will just happen again. If someone could prove me wrong that would be great. :-)
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#133Delphi > VB
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#134I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one. As long as MS doesn't break my workarounds to run that old IDE or its EXE's, I'm happy. VB.NET was a great stepping stone, but after switching to C# I never looked back. The only thing I miss is global functions that don't need a class qualifier in front of them. And I still find the Edit-and-Continue debuggin…
When MS dumped VB6, I dumped microsoft. Never looked back.
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#135Still hoping Microsoft will open source VB 6. It indeed was a language for the masses back then. There would have been no need for Python syntax or Golang with Visual Basic's simplicity
> There would have been no need for Python syntax or Golang with Visual Basic's simplicity in a windows only world.
Not if they would have made it open source 2001 - or anytime later for that matter.
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#136To me, this shows the huge risk of building on a language/platform that depends on a single company. This even happened earlier. Visual Basic .NET is grossly incompatible with Visual Basic 6, so much so that Visual Basic .NET is essentially a different language and was derisively called Visual Fred http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html ... Of course, it was possible to rewrite software so that would wor…
As an ex-VB6 programmer, my view is that Microsoft has been fairly supportive of VB users.
- The IDE itself was supported for 10 years, till 2008
- The runtime is supported till 2024, which is like 26 years. I think you can get it to work on Windows 10 as well, though I haven't tried it myself. I still see people using VB apps.
My view is that VB.Net should never have been created, since it was closer to C# than it was to VB. Neither should it have been adopted by VB programmers (if they did a fair analysis), but Microsoft messaging around that time may have suggested it's a workable path forward.
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#137I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one. As long as MS doesn't break my workarounds to run that old IDE or its EXE's, I'm happy. VB.NET was a great stepping stone, but after switching to C# I never looked back. The only thing I miss is global functions that don't need a class qualifier in front of them. And I still find the Edit-and-Continue debuggin…
I used to think this too, but everything you can do in VB6 you can do in powershell, and do it better. Try/Catch, windows forms.. literally anything you can think of. You can even mix powershell and C# together in the same script. Once I realized I had a better version of everything I wanted, it became my new favorite.
As someone who works with Windows and Active Directory primarily, PowerShell makes my life so much easier. It's glorious. I love PowerShell.
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#138VB the _language_ obviously has its limitations and frustrations, but VB the _tool_ will be missed. It seems like every alternative mentioned here adds a lot of additional friction for writing simple, one-off utilities.
I don't always want to dink around with the Visual Studio installer to make sure the right version of the MSVC or .NET libraries are installed, or fiddle with code to get a GUI layout to look nice, etc.
Having the IDE, compiler and GUI designer in one big coherent monolith had its advantages.
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#139To me, this shows the huge risk of building on a language/platform that depends on a single company. This even happened earlier. Visual Basic .NET is grossly incompatible with Visual Basic 6, so much so that Visual Basic .NET is essentially a different language and was derisively called Visual Fred http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html ... Of course, it was possible to rewrite software so that would wor…
It's not like they're going to break VB.NET or drop support anytime soon. Existing software will keep working. At this point there's no real point in continuing to add to it -- new stuff should be written in C#. It's better.
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#140make it open source.