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Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

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Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#61

Post by recursive »

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?

A text editor and index.html with

You can get everything you need without paying any money or even driving to Circuit City.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#62

Post by lukan »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #49
rietta wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML has a fieldset that looks like that. But too many CSS frameworks wreck it. I actually like the look. To prove it to yourself, place the following in a empty HTML file and see how it renders. Frame1 HTML CSS JavaScript

or see here for the lazy https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_fi...

And here for the w3 haters (if that is still a thing):

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/fi...

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#63

Post by epcoa »

mattmanser wrote: post #19
Onavo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Just want to add to what other people are saying, not only did VB6 support relative positioning

Did it? I know .NET WinForms does with Control.Anchor, but that is VB.NET, not VB6.

It’s been many years but I don’t recall any method for that in VB6. As someone else noted you could handle the resize handler and move things around yourself.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#64

Post by epcoa »

ok123456 wrote: post #8
Onavo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows Forms didn't use absolute positioning for everything. You could anchor things relatively to other controls or components. You would test how things behave when you maximize and resize windows, similar to how Devtools tests reactive designs now. If it were a very simple window or dialog that always showed the same amount of information, you would disable maximize, resize, and position it absolutely. This allow…

> You could anchor things relatively to other controls or components.

I don’t believe this was a feature that came out of the box in VB6. There is Control.Anchor in WinForms that is post VB6.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#65

Post by galkk »

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…

Same thing was with random turbopascal libraries and, later, Delphi’s vcl controls.

Damn Borland with their in-between library version incompatibilities. To this day I think it was the reason of their downfall.

> which taught me basic win32 programming to do things like have an icon in the status area next to the clock,

On one of programming Fido groups one guy literally had tagline “to put an icon in the area where the clock is you should use ShellNotifyIcon”

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#66

Post by signaru »

wiseowise wrote: post #2

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

Having built both desktop-native and browser-based apps, I think there is an efficiency in doing the widget layouts textually via code/markup once you get over the learning curve. I believe Qt and wxWidgets also have automatic layout features, but doing this on top of C++ maybe makes the experience less smooth. So far form designers in Visual Studio require manual pixel layouting, which becomes tedious as the GUI evolves to be more complex. This is great for beginners as dragging and dropping controls is so easy to learn. But as soon as you have a dozen or so controls, you start to notice the time spent manually dragging/aligning/sizing that is absent in markup-based or procedurally generated GUIs that do the layout calculations for you.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#67

Post by girvo »

twism wrote: post #54
bluedino wrote: post #52

Man, that 1995-2001 era Windows UI was like, peak Windows. It was so crisp and clean. Visual C++ and Visual Basic of the time were far from perfect, but they let you just get things done(tm) XP was right around the corner and it's been downhill from there.

Nothing beats a clean windows 2000 install

Gosh it was so fast. And only the drivers I needed (which was a bit of a pain but half the fun). And it was tiny on the HDD.

I played so much Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, CS1.5 and more on 2000. I miss it daily.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#69

Post by Lammy »

twism wrote: post #54
bluedino wrote: post #52

Man, that 1995-2001 era Windows UI was like, peak Windows. It was so crisp and clean. Visual C++ and Visual Basic of the time were far from perfect, but they let you just get things done(tm) XP was right around the corner and it's been downhill from there.

Nothing beats a clean windows 2000 install

Almost clean. One trip to Start Menu settings to disable the awful “Personalized Menus”. One more trip to Folder Options to disable “Hide file extensions for known file types” and to enable “launch folder windows in a separate process”.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#70

Post by Stratoscope »

So nice to see this!

I was one of the original developers of the "visual" side of Visual Basic.

It was called Ruby at the time (no relation to the programming language) and was going to be a customizable shell for Windows 3.0. The idea was that individual Windows users would create their own personal desktop using our visual editor and "gizmos" (later called by the much more boring name "controls") to make their own personal environment.

Microsoft, probably wisely, realized that this was more suited as a developer tool rather than an end user tool. They combined Ruby with Basic to create Visual Basic.

If anyone here ever created VBX custom controls, you can blame me for that terrible API!

And if anyone wonders where the phrase "fire an event" came from, you can find the answer in Retool's article about VB:

https://retool.com/visual-basic

(Content warning: drug reference)

As they say, "AMA".

If I may indulge in a bit of shameless self-promotion, I am looking for work. My team at IBM was hit pretty hard in their recent round of layoffs, as we lost our one exclusive customer, McDonald's.

I know a lot about a lot of languages and frameworks, but I don't know everything. Does anyone?

I love working with customers to understand their needs. Like every programmer, I enjoy coding, but it is just a way to make my customers happy.

If anyone is curious, you can find me here:

http://linkedin.geary.com/

http://resume.geary.com/

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