Interestingly it also downloads Java for the antlr grammar support.
Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#
11–20 of 184 posts
Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#
#12Oh my GOD I have to comment. This is how I learned to program as a kid.
I found a copy of "Write Your Own Adventure Programs" (1983 - Usborne: https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/Write%...) as a kid in my primary school's bookshelf. I remember the code was written in BASIC and my family didn't really own a computer back then.
Fast forward a few years later I saw this "Visual Basic" thing and thought it would be similar ... it was, but only sort of. I had no book to learn from at first so I remember clicking through every single menu and button available to see what it did. Then I remember using our dialup to download every possible 3rd party VB form control and throwing them in a Form to see what they did. I don't know why I found this entertaining enough to keep doing it.
Eventually by copy pasting and changing stuff I was able to write some basic "homework helper" programs: calculate the area of a circle and stuff like that. Soon after I tried to look up tutorials which taught me basic win32 programming to do things like have an icon in the status area next to the clock, and then hiding my window to run in the background and make annoying sounds so I could build a silly little prank program to install on my friend's computers which was fun but often would fail because they were missing some .dll file which wouldn't fit on the same floppy.
It could be frustrating at times but also I feel so blessed to have lucked myself into learning programming this way and my parents pretty much just letting me do whatever I wanted to this expensive device that probably was not a small thing for us to afford at the time.
Even tutorials felt more fun at the time, it'd be "hypnoMan37's windows registry tutorial!!! HEyyeyeyy Guuyzs :-)))) gzgzgz to my irc channel #blabla on EFNet! so first you call RegistryCreateNewKey32(...." because god knows I did not have an MSDN CD either.
Learning via a code camp feels way more efficient but also so much more dry in comparison. I wonder if there isn't a substantial cost to boring the newbies to death.
Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#
#13Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.
The answer is simple, mobile and relative layouts. GUI builders are easy when you can just use absolute positioning for everything (see Retool and the dozens of Retool clones). They become insanely complex when you can't.
I did extensive work in Visual Basic 6. Nearly all of the GUI's I created had resizeable windows that scaled gracefully. It was really straightforward to hook the Resize event.
I considered this table stakes for any thoughtfully-written piece of software. There were of course exceptions for fixed dialogs that weren't interacted with for long and comfortably fit any small screen.
The page or two of hand-crafted code tended to be at least as readable, and often moreso, than the declarative HTML and CSS gooblygook that's common today. And in practice as a user I found the result tended to be more useful than many of the so-called "responsive" websites I see today - which tend to hide content in annoying ways, ignore opportunities to compact whitespace, plaster the screen with outsized ads, etc. - to the point I sometimes request the "desktop" site in my mobile browser in an effort to chase down a more humane experience.
Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#
#14Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#
#15I absolutely loved VB3 thru VB6!
The joy of installing VB4 from something like 20-30 numbered 3.5in floppy disks. Now a patch for a modern game that fixes a typo is 2 gigs.
Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#
#16My first programming environment. Pure nostalgia. Love it!!
Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#
#17My first programming environment as well. Love it.
I once used multiple iomega zip drives to smuggle a copy of this out from my school so I could make things at home.
Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#
#18As a kid I spent summers working in the schools IT department in order to save up to buy VB6 (with a staff discount). This was not cheap back in the day!
Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#
#19Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.
The answer is simple, mobile and relative layouts. GUI builders are easy when you can just use absolute positioning for everything (see Retool and the dozens of Retool clones). They become insanely complex when you can't.
Just want to add to what other people are saying, not only did VB6 support relative positioning, but the history of responsive sizing in applications wasn't because of mobiles.
It was when monitors started changing sizes. Everyone used to have 800 x 600. Then the market exploded.
And different monitor resolutions appeared and became divergent way before the iPhone came out.
There was a period in desktop applications where some apps were absolutely positioned and didn't support anything apart from the 800 x 600 layout. You'd get this huge gutter on the right and bottom of the application window.
It was fairly brief, as changing forms from absolute positioning to relative positioning in VB6 was pretty easy.
Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#
#20How I missed the frame component in modern day applications. They all seem to think that a bold heading and some extra whitespace at the end is sufficient to group things together.