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Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

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Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#81

Post by rd07 »

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…

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 at a bookstore. I was overjoyed at that time, and immediately tried it on VBA to be dejected because the code didn't run at all. I still remember how I several times, until I swear that if the last trial I do also didn't run, I will give up. Fortunately, it does run!!!

Turns out, I didn't know that the VBA on MS Word in my computer is based on VB 6 while my book is about VB.NET. The code is a little different, and that's why my code didn't run.

After that, I bought every book I can find about VB 6. I also somehow stumble upon a VB 6 IDE installation on my relatives CD stash, and installed it on my computer.

And till today, I still think that VB 6 GUI Builder is the best I have ever tried.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#82

Post by happyweasel »

signaru wrote: post #66
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 evo…

mfc has resizable ui layouts called Dynamic layouts (since the 2015 update?), and for wxwidgets there is wxformbuilder. Most stuff for mfc can be set in the dialog builder wrt to resizing, or in code. I cant remember doing manual pixel layouting ever, there are dialog base units or sth like this. People have been setting the ui to 120dpi from the 96dpi standard already decades ago. And the dialogs automatically readjusted without recompiling.

I also recently found out my mfc tools are per monitor high dpi aware without any interference from my side.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#83

Post by personalityson »

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

Windows NT 4.0

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#84

Post by ygra »

magicalhippo wrote: post #42
rkagerer wrote: post #24

It's an awesomely inspirational vision, but within 2 minutes of trying it out I found it's lacking a lot of little features (at least on the web build)... e.g: 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 clic…

> Ampersands in button labels don't create an accelerator This is a feature of the Windows common controls, not anything VB specific, so perhaps why it was missed.

Well, VB subclassed the Windows common controls for the most part (and their class names all's contained Thunder, so when I wanted to know whether an application was made in VB, I looked at a button with Spy++).

That being said, technically the controls and VB of course don't have to be linked that closely. In this case they're Avalonia controls anyway that just expose different properties.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#85

Post by teo_zero »

Contrary to the original one, this editor doesn't automatically capitalize keywords. It was a sort of syntax highlighting that I haven't seen on contemporary editors and IDEs. Does anybody know of a plugin to do that for common editors?

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#86

Post by ygra »

ericb wrote: post #26
RandallBrown wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't speak to Interface Builder, but in VB 6 Hooking resize was SO easy, and the math you do inside it was so easy, too. It took maybe 5 minutes to do almost any layout. 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).

Having done a few such forms in the past, it was easy enough for a simple dialog with a list, two buttons and a text field, but it quickly got unwieldy.

Which was okay back in the day. Everyone had low display resolutions, so simply scaling a window's controls when resizing was okay. No need for responsive layout and even too fancy layouts, I guess. But what we got later with anchor in WinForms, layout panels in WinForms or WPF, layout managers in Swing, and CSS layout die help reduce the math you'd have to do yourself, especially for more complex layouts or even when the layouts change due to different requirements.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#87

Post by kosolam »

abrookewood wrote: post #53

Slightly off topic, but this was built using Avalonia, which I have never heard of. Has anyone used it? The promise sounds impressive (beautiful, cross-platform applications from a single .NET codebase), just wondering whether it actually delivers? https://avaloniaui.net/

Yes. This is the most interesting part for me here.. check out the web version https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#88

Post by 0xmarcin »

When you dig into the code you can see that the author did the bare minimum to have a nice demo. For example only 2 functions are supported: MsgBox and InputBox: https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/blob/383a005...

Still it is impressive to create something complex like this in a matter of 4 days (looking at the commit history). And it is a good start to develop a full fledged IDE.

The more advanced features like syntax highlighting & autocomplete unfortunately are missing. I did not run it (I am on macOS) but I also expect there is no debugger.

Now I also want to share my childhood story: I started my dev journey first by using Turbo Pascal and then by switching to Delphi 7. Delphi was pretty much like VB6, you designed an app by dragging and dropping components on a form. My first app that I have created was a Notepad++ clone, I still keep the code for it but it is so awful that I cringe every time I try to look at it.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#90

Post by Dwedit »

Stratoscope wrote: post #70

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…

Any relation to the MS Dialog Editor?
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