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Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

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Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#261

Post by ChicagoDave »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #208

I’m fairly certain that the only way to originally purchase VB 1.0 was an 800 number posted in Dvorak’s weekly PC Info magazine column. It was $99 and I borrowed it from my manager. I still have the original manuals and 3.5” disks. It was almost like Microsoft was sheepishly waving it and saying, “maybe you’ll think this is cool,” while not directly challenging their C++ audience.

I just want to add that as popular/cool as Visual Basic became, the first few years it was derided by most “real” developers as a crappy shortcut. PowerBuilder was king for awhile and even Delphi was ahead until VB 6.0 crushed all the competition.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#262

Post by dsagal »

fatneckbeard wrote: post #243
dgb23 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People still use VB and Filemaker to make applications along with very complex Excel spreadsheets. It’s way more common than the general sentiment here implies. In fact, I get handed stuff made with tools like these somewhat regularly in order to develop a web app. At some point they become unwieldy and limiting. I think it’s wonderful that anyone with some technical curiosity can make useful applications with these.…

yup its like two different worlds that don't know each other exist the excel tribe and the open source programming world tribe

There is overlap! I've spent the last 8 years working on Grist, which tries very hard to improve on Excel while keep its best aspects, and is open source.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#263

Post by tomcam »

CharlesW wrote: post #255
tomcam wrote: post #27

Was a huge fan of the product. Joined the VB team as a PM in 1996 and worked for a few years while my health declined. The whole division was beautifully run. The people were, to a person, amazing human beings. I honestly think I stumbled into the best team Microsoft had before or since. The Microsoft campus was verdant and tranquil. Everything you sort of imagine Apple would be to work at was true on that team, and…

> Everything you sort of imagine Apple would be to work at was true on that team, and has never actually been the case at Apple. I'm glad to hear your Microsoft experience was amazing. But as someone who worked at Apple during that time, this assertion is untrue and seems unnecessarily mean-spirited.

Agreed, and I apologize. I should have said I never met anyone who loved their experience at Apple. Thanks for catching that, and for doing it so civilly.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#264

Post by sussmannbaka »

djhworld wrote: post #64

Visual Basic was so good. Growing up all I knew was Windows, so being able to create fairly reasonable looking GUI apps at the time seemed like magic. I remember building a "web browser" in VB, I put that in quotes because it was really just an IE webview/control wrapped in my own custom UI with features like not recording browser history. I remember making a "virus" and sending it to a mate, and when he opened it, y…

> I remember building a "web browser" in VB, I put that in quotes because it was really just an IE webview/control wrapped in my own custom UI with features like not recording browser history.

Don’t sell yourself short, that’s how everyone seems to build browsers nowadays.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#265

Post by tedyoung »

Beta testing "Thunder" (code name for VB 1.0) was one of the most exciting things in my career. As a long time QuickBASIC user, looking longingly at those C++ developers writing Windows apps, I was floored when I got my hands on VB. I was finally able to create a graphical Windows app without having to learn C++ (which I later did, because I wanted to write VBX controls).

I did what I often do with new languages: write a stock charting and technical analysis application. Microsoft loved it and asked me if they could use it for demonstrations. They showed it off during the VB road show because they could show Microsoft's stock (up) vs. IBM's (down).

The early VB community was fun to be a part of and VB3 was the pinnacle for me. VB4 was a mess and it took until VB6 to finally get things right again, but at that point I had given up on C++ and was writing Java applets.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#266

Post by zanethomas »

In the early 90s I was working in downtown Seattle. The manager of the project I was on was married to a product manager at Microsoft. One morning he showed up with a beta copy of VB 3.0.

There was a young, brilliant, programmer, James Shields, who was my partner working on a project. We took one look at VB3 and both immediately saw the potential of vbxes.

At lunch we came up with a couple of initial ideas for custom controls, wrote them, and began selling them on Compuserve for $5 each.

Soon I wrote some controls for working with the just-released Sound Blaster card, which gained some interest on Compuserve's music-related forums, I actually traded messages with Jerry Garcia one night.

But our first big hit was Message Hook which I wrote to overcome some of the limitations of using the Windows API when using VB. That lead to Mitch Waite (publisher of many popular computer books in those days) contacting me to revise the Visual Basic How To. The result was the Visual Basic 3.0 How-To, which was almost all entirely new material.

My approach to writing that book was to think about the things that one would want to program in Windows apps but could not easily accomplish with Visual Basic ... and to solve those problems. Message Hook featured heavily, a copy was included with the book's diskette.

Soon enough the internet came online and I wrote a number of internet controls which allowed thousands of Visual Basic programmers to add, primarily, email and ftp to their programs, however there were controls for more obscure protocols as well.

Visual Basic 3.0 was magic! It was an entirely new idea and several companies, including Mabry Software which was founded by me and my programmer buddy, had a good business until .net blew up the entire ecosystem.

I think it's probably fair to say that VB 3.0, and our internet controls, made a significant contribution to the evolution of the internet.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#267

Post by narag »

bazoom42 wrote: post #254
narag wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had no control over other vendors' programming tools. Borland Delphi used a more difficult language, but generated compiled, autocontained faster binaries, had a better out of the box library, similar third party components market (same language for programs and libraries, unlike VB that often used C++ controls) and was starting to develop a version for Linux. Microsoft had been poaching most of Borland's talent…

So .net was a deliberate ruse to trick Borland into delivering a sub-par product? It’s weird because a very common complaint towards .net was that it didn’t allow you to build self-contained stand-alone applications the way VB6 and Delphi allowed. So possibly Borland could have attracted a lot of disgruntled VB6 developer who migt have found Delphi more familiar than VB.net. > FUD was spreaded that Microsoft will eve…

Sorry for the delay, very busy lately. In case you're still there and interested in the answers:

So .net was a deliberate ruse to trick Borland into delivering a sub-par product?

Not exactly, they wanted to create a walled garden, more similar to an app store. Drivers and some specialized programs that require high performance would still need to be native. But most everything else they wanted inside .NET ecosystem. That would eliminate any competitive advantage that Delphi had.

Given the the dominace of Windows was because of the available software (and Microsofts dedication to backwards combatibility was legendary) I dont see why anybody would belive that.

And yet in the Borland forums at the time there was a very vocal faction, including many of the official evangelists, that bought it.

Borland was caught in a trap that Joel Spolsky described perfectly:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

Microsoft offered access to docs. The bait. Also the price structure of Borland had gone horribly bad. The insisted in selling to the enterprise market because, they said, there's no money in reasonably priced dev tools. But that was just not true. JetBrains filled that gap. I believe Delphi still exists but it costs ten grands or something like that.

Edit: another couple of factors why the wanted everything in .net were security (native is uncontrolable) and possibility of instantly disassembly the applications of any potential competitor. Yes, I know it sounds paranoid, but...

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#268

Post by bazoom42 »

narag wrote: post #267
bazoom42 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So .net was a deliberate ruse to trick Borland into delivering a sub-par product? It’s weird because a very common complaint towards .net was that it didn’t allow you to build self-contained stand-alone applications the way VB6 and Delphi allowed. So possibly Borland could have attracted a lot of disgruntled VB6 developer who migt have found Delphi more familiar than VB.net. > FUD was spreaded that Microsoft will eve…

Sorry for the delay, very busy lately. In case you're still there and interested in the answers: So .net was a deliberate ruse to trick Borland into delivering a sub-par product? Not exactly, they wanted to create a walled garden, more similar to an app store. Drivers and some specialized programs that require high performance would still need to be native. But most everything else they wanted inside .NET ecosystem.…

> they wanted to create a walled garden, more similar to an app store

Clearly this didnt happen - you can still run native executables on Windows, here 25 years later. Indeed this is why Windows was and remains popular - the amount of software you can run on it, including decades old native binaries.

.net was a reaction against Java which was considered an existential threat to Microsoft because it promised platform-indepentent software. (Turned out it was the web and javascript MS should have been worried about, but they realized that to late.)

Delphi was never a threat to Microsoft. Microsoft was just happy when people developed windows native software. Selling windows was strategically much more important than selling dev tools, so they probably wanted delphi to be succesful.

Java and the web is what killed Borland.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#269

Post by narag »

bazoom42 wrote: post #268
narag wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the delay, very busy lately. In case you're still there and interested in the answers: So .net was a deliberate ruse to trick Borland into delivering a sub-par product? Not exactly, they wanted to create a walled garden, more similar to an app store. Drivers and some specialized programs that require high performance would still need to be native. But most everything else they wanted inside .NET ecosystem.…

> they wanted to create a walled garden, more similar to an app store Clearly this didnt happen - you can still run native executables on Windows, here 25 years later. Indeed this is why Windows was and remains popular - the amount of software you can run on it, including decades old native binaries. .net was a reaction against Java which was considered an existential threat to Microsoft because it promised platform-…

Clearly this didnt happen...

No, there's a Windows app store that nobody wants to use, obviously.

Delphi was never a threat to Microsoft.

Microsoft clearly saw Delphi as a threat: they proceeded to hire as much talent from Borland as they could and only relented because the suit.

Java and the web is what killed Borland.

That's difficult to believe. There are other companies that succeeded selling dev tools that didn't come close to Delphi. They just shot themselves in their foot.

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