21–30 of 184 posts
I 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.
Open the web version in your browser: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/
EDIT: Found it. "Enhance your security on the web" option in Edge makes it significantly slower. Disabling the option fixes the performance issues.
My 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.
Downloaded vb3 from an AOL warez chat room, received hundreds of emails each with a fraction of the zip.
Ampersands in button labels don't create an accelerator (e.g. &Go does not underline the G).
In true VB6 you could plop down a Label control and just start typing to change it's contents. Here you have to focus on the input field first (and you can't just click the "Caption" heading, you have to click within the input column). To maintain fidelity, one of the rows in the Properties grid should always be highlighted when a control is selected on the GUI designer (for Labels this defaulted to Caption, and I believe for controls without a specified default it defaulted to Name).
When switching to a different control with a property matching the name of the currently selected one, VB6 would maintain the selection on that property. This made it quick and easy to update for example the Tag property a bunch of controls in sequence with minimal clicks.
Obviously the menus for Debugging, Save, Help, Add-ins, etc. are missing implementation.
A working Build button that spits out an "exectuable" that runs in the browser would be killer!
My nitpicks are born out of love ;-).
Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.
It turned out that focusing on a splashy and idiosyncratic brand not only excited prospective new users but inhibited them from going elsewhere since it made transitions more awkward and frustrating. That made more money, more easily, than focusing on user efficiency and feature distinctions as had been the trend before then.
The technology then trailed behind this fashion and invested its complexity budget in style customizability, animations and type rendering enhancements, etc and gave up on trying to encourage a standard design language that publishers and users could both build fluency in.
Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.
This is fairly similar to how Interface Builder in Xcode works for macOS and iOS apps. Like others have said, it works well until you need to support different screen sizes, layouts, animations, touch interaction, etc.
It was frankly, a shock to see how easy this model was and then see the monstrosity that came to pass for HTML and CSS positioning. Baffling.
Everything you just listed was easy in VB 6 IMHO (well, touch wasn't a thing exactly).
Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.
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 made this app in under 60 seconds:
Open the web version in your browser: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/
That's extremely fast on Firefox and Chrome while it comes to a crawl on Microsoft Edge (Chromium) for some reason. EDIT: Found it. "Enhance your security on the web" option in Edge makes it significantly slower. Disabling the option fixes the performance issues.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/enhance-y...
How 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.
A related missing-but-important one is a proper TabView. I don't know who first passed off a row of plain buttons as a TabView (probably Apple), but it's trash because (like the lack of GroupBox) it does not demarcate what controls below it are ON the selected tab's view! I mean... duh.
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 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?