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Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

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Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#191

Post by 2fast4you »

cloudwizard wrote: post #134
rkagerer wrote: post #6

I 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.

Why not double down and make it an inseparable part of your code base? That’s what my company did

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#192

Post by 2fast4you »

bluedino wrote: post #127
banana_giraffe wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VB6 and VB.NET are barely related. 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 ht…

>> but it seems like a ton of work for a vanishing market. That market isn't going anywhere anytime soon, though. There are a lot of XP machines out there running critical VB code...

You can run VB6 on Windows Server 2019. I should know, it’s in production right now

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#193

Post by ak39 »

beholder1 wrote: post #184
ak39 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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. Great question. And I agree with the sentiment. My opinion for "why is it so hard today": it has to do with the way .NET evolved right after its birth. .NET was a response to Java by Micr…

You write: > ...astounding achievement from Redmond. It boasted interactive tools to create GUI drag and drop features users were accustomed to in VB6 but glaringly missing in the Java world. This was with Visual Studio 97 Thay were not "glaringly missing in the Java world" in 1997 when Visual Studio was released. By that time at least these 2 IDEs with "drag and drop" were released and used already: Symantec Visual…

Correct. I myself used "eclipse's" parent (Visual Age) in the early days but the point I was making was not so much that "drag and drop" was missing - it was just too cumbersome and difficult even in that! In VB6, it was trivial to get a form to look the way you wanted it to look. Gridbag layout on Java Swing maimed many, and those that got off the VB6 boat soon realised that Java land was much much harder even with their GUI drag and drop tools.

BTW, I used JBuilder extensively. What a topnotch tool from Borland. Pity they didn't survive the virulent competition during those IDE wars period. I still remember settling an argument with a colleague about his insistence to use the newly arrived Netbeans, while I fired up my JBuilder IDE (Yellow Porsche splash screen IIRC), created a gui, added jdbc data controls, coded a few lines and hit compile - ALL while his Netbeans was still loading with that dastardly progress bar.

(These comments have been much needed catharsis for me.)

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#194

Post by signaru »

VB classic was my first programming language since it was so easy to spit out GUI programs that looked like any other program you use.

I'm afraid current popular languages like python and javascript do not offer that "instant gratification" and is scaring beginners. With only terminal or webpage output, they might get the feeling that what they're coding is far from what "pros" use to write desktop software that is all around them.

Csharp is great, I use it everyday, but is not a real successor. First, it is a massive install which can be an issue with others just starting out. The few things I dislike with Csharp are that executables are dependent on the dot net (or mono) framework and are not native, i.e. far easier to reverse engineer.

Lazarus/Delphi might be the next best things to a classic VB experience. There are efforts to make something similar for Freebasic what Lazarus is for Free Pascal. But they are nowhere close, and the next best alternatives are not free.

I have no right to complain, and I fully understand, but I could be happier if Gambas had native Windows support.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#195

Post by Joeri »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #60

I loved VB. I don't think I've ever been as productive as I was in VB - I could literally knock together a complete desktop application in an afternoon. It wasn't perfect. There were lots of problems with it. It would never win prizes in CS competitions. But man you could build shit with it fast.

Delphi is still around and just as fast to knock something together in. I switched from VB4 to delphi when that was released and never used VB again.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#196

Post by ak39 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #186
beholder1 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You write: > ...astounding achievement from Redmond. It boasted interactive tools to create GUI drag and drop features users were accustomed to in VB6 but glaringly missing in the Java world. This was with Visual Studio 97 Thay were not "glaringly missing in the Java world" in 1997 when Visual Studio was released. By that time at least these 2 IDEs with "drag and drop" were released and used already: Symantec Visual…

In 96 there was also Xelfi which later became Netbeans. The original version was an attempt at Delphi for Java and I liked it far better than Netbeans later, but I came from Delphi to Java so that makes sense.

>>but I came from Delphi to Java so that makes sense.

Same. But I have remained with Delphi. I think we are now known as the lost generation. :-)

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#197

Post by peter_retief »

I started with Visual Basic 3 which I loved. Other programming I was doing at the time was with PIC micros. Never really got into VB6, got into Linux and used PHP, Ruby, Java, C/C++ and Python. Drifted in and out of electronics, chemistry and software. What a time to be alive.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#198

Post by cm2187 »

hermitdev wrote: post #124
ripley12 wrote: post #43

My first real job was on a .NET stack that was 1/2 VB.NET and 1/2 C# for legacy reasons. It was weird at first, but I mostly stopped noticing after a few months - the two were completely interoperable and they both compile down to the same .NET IL. In practice, coding in VB.NET was 99% the same as coding in C#, just with a slightly more verbose syntax. Not my favourite language, but much better than its dismal reputa…

Not completely interoperable. At least initially (and as far as I'm aware ever). VB.Net never could understand the unsigned integral & char types. If you used unsigned types in C#, those members wouldn't be BCL compatible and at sufficient warning level, you had to annotate members with [BCLCompliant(false)] if my memory serves correctly. There were other language constructs at the time that werent 1:1 parity at v1.0…

Well another one is case insensitivity. If you have a property and a function in C# which name only differs by casing, will be a problem to consume in VB. Not that it is good design in the first place.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#200

Post by cm2187 »

jeswin wrote: post #136
dwheeler wrote: post #132

To 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 w…

On the other side the reason VB.net broke backward compatibility was to correct things that were obviously bad design decisions in VB6. Like parameters being byref by default, having to use the Set keyword for objects, inconsistent 0 or 1 based collection structures, etc.

If VB was meant to survive and move the XXI century, these things had to be fixed.

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