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Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

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Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#121

Post by 1oooqooq »

mmerlin wrote: post #116
rd07 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have similar experience with VB6, though I was the opposite. Instead of reading a book about BASIC, I was reading a book about VB.NET. My first interaction with Visual Basic was through VBA in MS Word. The first time I opened it, I know that it was a place to code, but I don't know what kind of code I have to type. I don't know any programming language at that time. And then sometimes later, I found a VB.NET book…

twinBasic.com is a revamp of VB6 using current tech

why all those products keep backwards compatibility with vb6?!?

it's this a niche for some industry? or all those products are aimed at people's nostalgia of running their old programs?

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#124

Post by liontwist »

wiseowise wrote: post #2

Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.

Motif is another great example where every component is focused on functionality. Everything can be driven by a keyboard, there is accessibility features, etc.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#125

Post by liontwist »

alkonaut wrote: post #99
wiseowise wrote: post #2

Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.

At the same time it's common to hear "how does this not support high DPI?" or "How does this app not have a dark mode, it's 2024!" etc. Modern toolkits just do a lot of stuff that older toolkits didn't. Some times at the expense of not being as quick to get off the ground as VB was. The original winforms implementation in the early 2000's was pretty close to VB in terms of efficiency but its warts were numerous, e.g.…

Dark mode would have been trivial with old toolkits because they used standardize look and feel. In fact motif lets you customize the color scheme through a text file.

Which can make each app fit the appearance of the given desktop.

Old guis also had more accssibility features.

The only thing modern ones have going for them is animation and visual customization.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#126

Post by squarefoot »

mkl wrote: post #98
rcarmo wrote: post #89

I’m going to say this again: this UX but using Lua (or Python) instead would be a killer app.

Not enough people agreed. It seems long-abandoned now, but Boa Constructor was it for Python: https://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/ . Lazarus (quite active) is an open source Delphi clone that I would have been all over in 1996: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ . I haven't been keen on Pascal for a long time though. Coming from Visual Basic 6 and Delphi, I was awfully disappointed in "Visual" C++.

Totally agree on Lazarus: it inherited the "Delphi way" of doing thins, and is a joy to use. For those who never used it, it produces native compiled high performance code (on par with C) and the IDE itself can run for example also on ARM boards, no cross compiling needed. Still dreaming to see it support other languages, but I guess adapting all libraries to them would be a nightmare of a task for a Open Source and Free as in beer project.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#127

Post by Pxtl »

wiseowise wrote: post #2

Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.

Because web.

That said, the VB6 drag-and-drop interface was always flawed. 90% of the time you want to lay out controls in some kind of nest of layouts with clearly-defined resize and reflow behavior instead of "drag and drop wherever and YOLO if something changes size". A good GUI framework would nudge you towards that instead of free-form drag-and-drop wherever.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#128

Post by pmarreck »

calimoro78 wrote: post #30
makmanalp wrote: post #12

Oh 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 though…

This! I want my kids to do the same but are really unclear as to how this is done today without BASIC. I am not psyched about tools that help you merely build platformers with WYSIWYG. Any ideas?

https://crystal-lang.org/

Ruby syntax is very nice (I personally prefer it 100x to Python's), and Crystal makes it fast AND adds some typing.

There are GUI libraries for it for things like GTK or LibUI https://github.com/Fusion/libui.cr

The V language also looked ideal for this as it has a built-in GUI but upon investigation I found its internals are... not really fleshed-out or thought-out well, and its main maintainer likes to delete and ban any criticisms regardless of validity on its official forums, so that was out, maybe revisit it in a few years

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#129

Post by rescbr »

makmanalp wrote: post #12

Oh 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 though…

I had the EXACT same experience as a kid. Found a GW-BASIC book on my parent's bookshelf, found out that QBASIC was bundled with Windows and it ran most sample code that were in that book and it went downhill from there.

When I was bored I loved reading the MS-DOS 6 manual cover to cover.

Back when Internet access wasn't readily available the quality of documentation and sample codes were impressive.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#130

Post by shortrounddev2 »

qingcharles wrote: post #27
wiseowise wrote: post #2

Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.

Every version of Visual Studio since this has the same builder. I use this builder every day to build little apps for myself. It is practically 100% identical in the new version of Visual Studio 2022 that came out yesterday. In fact, it's better now because it's easier to line things up and change their properties etc, but the interface is the same. It has literally not changed in 25 years. Here, I booted VS2022 and…

I thought vs2022 deprecated the visual builder for some ui frameworks
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