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Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

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Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#251

Post by gerdesj »

bpizzi wrote: post #232
gerdesj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but everything you can do in VB6 you can do in powershell Excel modules? OK not quite exactly the same but close. I wrote a finite capacity planner system for a factory a fair few years ago in Excel to replace a huge number of Lotus 1-2-3 thingies with a vast amount of copy n paste from text screens and random sheets and what not. I started with an automated forecast. We used an (memory may be fading) exponential fi…

Thanks for sharing, absolutely interesting! I'm pretty sure that if you partner with someone that can package your food supply chain knowledge into a nice UI/UX experience (or doing it yourself, idk), you could produce and sell a decent piece of niche software for planning in food plants. At $work we are into software for managing plants (not in the food industry), and the demand for tailor made planning functions is…

I'm a PHB these days but I'm 2/3 the way through building a Prusa 3D printer so all hope is not lost. Also, unlike most other MDs, I have a soldering iron and a fair few ESPx devices on my desk ...

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#252

Post by Pxtl »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #23
kjaftaedi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only problem is that Powershell as language is pretty bad. I wouldn’t want to write my vB6 projects in Powershell.

Yeah, I write a ferocious amount of PowerShell it's an amazingly bad language. I use it for its API, but its language design is a nightmare.

I'm not talking about its unorthodox syntax - that's the least of its problems. The language is hellishly inconsistent and has an inexcusable number of legacy issues for being so young.

And the quality of the standard library is poor. More and more often I find I have to drop down into .net commands to work around showstopper bugs in their PowerShell wrappers.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#253

Post by richardcrossley »

dirtydroog wrote: post #235
trent_lott wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training? 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…

Same. My brother brought home an illegal copy of visual studio and I was hooked pretty much immediately. We had no internet at the time so I found myself using the MSDN knowledge base articles for potential explanations. It really annoyed me that I couldn't get nice bitmaps in menus so I eventually learned about Ownerdraw. That changed my life. Having to hook into the wndproc and all the other windows api calls intro…

Books! I read one that was all about custom controls, must have been about 300 pages and at the end presented code that provided subclassed versions of all the MS Windows 3.1 controls with 3D effects.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#254

Post by pcdoodle »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #163
trent_lott wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training? 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…

I understand that nostalgia. You might enjoy playing with gambas: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html Or maybe Xojo: https://www.xojo.com/ I think Xojo was known as "RealBASIC" in the late 90s/early 00s and was really in the same spirit (but more cross platform) as VB6. HyperCard occupies the same spot for me that VB6 seems to occupy for you. Today for stuff I'd have used that for in the 90s, I just stand up a…

Xojo is amazing and there are tons of commercial plugins to do stuff Multiplatform. Yea its not free but I don't mind paying to make life easy.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#258

Post by tjalfi »

lostmsu wrote: post #21
kjaftaedi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can even mix powershell and C# together in the same script. What feature are you referring to?

[0] has an example of inline C# code.

[0] https://dandraka.com/2018/11/12/powershell-how-do-you-add-in...

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#259

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

ptx wrote: post #246
Ididntdothis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision to make the console output as the return value of a function alone almost destroys it for larger scripting projects. It’s a really bad decision and they could still fix it by adding some environment variable that disables this “feature” while staying compatible with old scripts.

This behavior? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/suppressing-return... It seems like it might make some kind of sense, since it doesn't output directly to the console but rather to a pipe. Bash functions sort of work the same way since they don't have complex return values (aside from exit codes) other than the function's output stream.

Yeah, keep in mind that the output is a fully-fledged object, it is not the text you see. The text is generated by the PowerShell host if the returned object makes it back there and the host is set up to present that object to the user that way.

Take the following in PowerShell:

ls | sort DateTime -d

ls returns an array of objects, sort then sorts the array by each object’s DateTime field (and here I’m asking it to sort in descending order with -d). The point is that sort isn’t depending on any text output, so it works with any array of objects regardless of the command that returned them.

The other cool thing this enables is auto-complete awareness in the shell. If I typed:

ls | sort

then the shell knows what makes sense in auto-completion here as ls has an actual return type and in this case it will give me a list of available fields that I can sort on.

For those unfamiliar: ls and sort here are shortened aliases to more wordy verb-noun commands. These (as well as a large bunch of others) are given to you by default.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#260

Post by hoistbypetard »

pcdoodle wrote: post #254
hoistbypetard wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that nostalgia. You might enjoy playing with gambas: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html Or maybe Xojo: https://www.xojo.com/ I think Xojo was known as "RealBASIC" in the late 90s/early 00s and was really in the same spirit (but more cross platform) as VB6. HyperCard occupies the same spot for me that VB6 seems to occupy for you. Today for stuff I'd have used that for in the 90s, I just stand up a…

Xojo is amazing and there are tons of commercial plugins to do stuff Multiplatform. Yea its not free but I don't mind paying to make life easy.

Eh. VB6 was paid too. IIRC it used to be on the order of $600 to get the standalone version.

I downloaded Xojo and kicked the tires. It was absolutely cool to see that an environment like this lives on. It really does feel like a successor to VB6.

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