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The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

forestmoon.com

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Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an older relative who is still cashing in nicely on his VBA skills. There was a "demand vs pay" graph for tech skills going around awhile. VBA is low demand, but among the highest paid of the technologies.

From a cost perspective it's easy to see this. I've made plenty of trivial VB scripts in large/bureaucratic companies to automate tasks that a customer service person(or a whole department) had been doing for an hour a day for the last decade.

Yeah, the weird thing is how large and critical these VBA applications are that he works on. Lots of local banks and small businesses have, essentially, their entire business wrapped up in an old VBA CRUD app. Not that there's anything wrong with continuing to use the old technology, but all we hear about is the latest and coolest.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#53

VB was about getting stuff done. Ugly, awkward, convoluted, nowhere near a real programming language. But, the things you could build. Fast. In no time, you had something that worked, installed anywhere, no approvals, no app-stores, no complicated deployments. Microsoft miserably failed to scale it to the web, and with some efforts - to mobile. They just drove developers away, and till today we do not have a similar…

> Microsoft miserably failed to scale it to the web

They did, in form of the abomination called ActiveX. Back in the heydays, it was the Java and Flash in terms of exploits and 0wnage.

Obviously the worst thing was that ActiveX applets allowed raw access to the win32 API (or any other external DLL which could be used with the FFI of VB). No one signed their applets and everyone clicked "accept and run"... and on DOS-based OSs like win95/98/98SE/ME or XP (which set up the primary account as admin) this basically meant local r00t on the web.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#54

VB was about getting stuff done. Ugly, awkward, convoluted, nowhere near a real programming language. But, the things you could build. Fast. In no time, you had something that worked, installed anywhere, no approvals, no app-stores, no complicated deployments. Microsoft miserably failed to scale it to the web, and with some efforts - to mobile. They just drove developers away, and till today we do not have a similar…

> Microsoft miserably failed to scale it to the web They did, in form of the abomination called ActiveX. Back in the heydays, it was the Java and Flash in terms of exploits and 0wnage. Obviously the worst thing was that ActiveX applets allowed raw access to the win32 API (or any other external DLL which could be used with the FFI of VB). No one signed their applets and everyone clicked "accept and run"... and on DOS-…

I think many did sign their applets.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#56

Is there something that replicates the VB experience for the web? Something really easy for a new developer to pick up and build a form based business application without worrying about HTML/CSS/Javascript, etc?

Asp.net web forms, my favourite web framework. It's bundled with visual studio.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#57
post #9

It's an interesting story but it's told as a "person A did this, Person B did that, and Person C had this idea, etc." Maybe it's a consequence how my brain works but any time I read that type of recap, I forget everyone's name and the other trivia 5 minutes after I'm done reading it. When revisiting technology history, what tends to stick in my mind is the context and industry forces prevalent at the time and the sto…

I'm a corporate neckbeard. Probably the opposite of everyone here. And a lurker, so hello! I work for a company that ignored the industry trends, we picked a winner with "Petzold style" win32 as you put it. We have a 800kloc 20 year old codebase for a LOB product that hasn't had to be rewritten four times due to the abstraction of the hour being changed. No VB, MFC, no ATL, no Winforms, no C#, no WPF, no ASP, barely…

Please visit jira.reactos.org (registration on reactos.org required) and fill bug reports for your problems.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#58

Is there something that replicates the VB experience for the web? Something really easy for a new developer to pick up and build a form based business application without worrying about HTML/CSS/Javascript, etc?

Asp.net web forms, my favourite web framework. It's bundled with visual studio.

Thanks. Is it free or requires a paid license?

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a corporate neckbeard. Probably the opposite of everyone here. And a lurker, so hello! I work for a company that ignored the industry trends, we picked a winner with "Petzold style" win32 as you put it. We have a 800kloc 20 year old codebase for a LOB product that hasn't had to be rewritten four times due to the abstraction of the hour being changed. No VB, MFC, no ATL, no Winforms, no C#, no WPF, no ASP, barely…

Please visit jira.reactos.org (registration on reactos.org required) and fill bug reports for your problems.

Will do!

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#60
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...it's just a less powerful... ...c#..." How so? I use both (my largest C# project was Nokia Maps, largest VB.Net project is my own database + sync engine, at ~110kloc, spread across Windows Desktop, Windows Phone and WCF sync engine). I've not come across any shortcomings in comparison to C#. Granted I'm using the free editions of Visual Studio, and avoid any third-party components or code. What am I missing?

I think you can probably achieve the same results with VB compared to C#, but at the cost of writing more code or slower performance.

VB.Net is about as verbose as C#. There can be no perf differences because they both compile to the same bye code. Assuming the dev knows what he/she is doing when optimising for perf in either language.
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