The revolt of the VB6 developers!
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[From a mailing list] http://classicvb.org/petition/ [^] [My reply] This merely reflects how negatively people react to change. If MS hadn’t brought out VB.NET, VB would have died a not-so-slow and rather painful death as far as VB people were concerned. VB.NET itself is a weird syntactical contortion of a language that’s natively unsuitable for decent OO programming and I suppose MS would either deprecate VB.NET eventually or keep changing it constantly until it resembles C# to such an extent that it’d be hard to tell them apart. I understand the problem that VB programmers now have no means to write unmanaged apps. Maybe the workaround for that should be a VB.NET compiler that compiles to native code (which’d mean a native VB.NET library has to be written, since native code shouldn’t be dependent on the BCL). But other than that, continuing VB6 would be an utter waste of time, resource and money as far as Microsoft it concerned. And Microsoft is a corporate company that exists to further its financial base; it’s not a charity organization. My 2 cents. Nish
My response on my blog... http://spaces.msn.com/members/rcassick/Blog/cns!1pXjHq-RqqMSQdLvn5n4gdnw!111.entry[^] Yeah, I started a blog...
Paul Watson wrote: "At the end of the day it is what you produce that counts, not how many doctorates you have on the wall." George Carlin wrote: "Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things." Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote: If the physicists find a universal theory describing the laws of universe, I'm sure the asshole constant will be an integral part of that theory.
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My response on my blog... http://spaces.msn.com/members/rcassick/Blog/cns!1pXjHq-RqqMSQdLvn5n4gdnw!111.entry[^] Yeah, I started a blog...
Paul Watson wrote: "At the end of the day it is what you produce that counts, not how many doctorates you have on the wall." George Carlin wrote: "Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things." Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote: If the physicists find a universal theory describing the laws of universe, I'm sure the asshole constant will be an integral part of that theory.
I know VB6 very well (I was forced into it -- honest), and I still don't think it's a real language. :) I couldn't resist. Jeremy Falcon
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I know VB6 very well (I was forced into it -- honest), and I still don't think it's a real language. :) I couldn't resist. Jeremy Falcon
:-D I never want to have to work in VB6 again either.
Paul Watson wrote: "At the end of the day it is what you produce that counts, not how many doctorates you have on the wall." George Carlin wrote: "Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things." Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote: If the physicists find a universal theory describing the laws of universe, I'm sure the asshole constant will be an integral part of that theory.
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:-D I never want to have to work in VB6 again either.
Paul Watson wrote: "At the end of the day it is what you produce that counts, not how many doctorates you have on the wall." George Carlin wrote: "Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things." Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote: If the physicists find a universal theory describing the laws of universe, I'm sure the asshole constant will be an integral part of that theory.
I know what you mean. I would've thought the C++ community would have a harder time switching to .NET than the VB one. Of course, I say that and I haven't yet fully decided if a project I'm about to embark on will be in C# or to stick with C++. Go figure. :) Jeremy Falcon
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I know what you mean. I would've thought the C++ community would have a harder time switching to .NET than the VB one. Of course, I say that and I haven't yet fully decided if a project I'm about to embark on will be in C# or to stick with C++. Go figure. :) Jeremy Falcon
Exactly. All I heard for years from the VB people were crys to make VB more OOP and to quit treating the language as a kid. Now that MS did that they are crying about it. The VB community needs to grow up I think.
Paul Watson wrote: "At the end of the day it is what you produce that counts, not how many doctorates you have on the wall." George Carlin wrote: "Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things." Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote: If the physicists find a universal theory describing the laws of universe, I'm sure the asshole constant will be an integral part of that theory.
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I know VB6 very well (I was forced into it -- honest), and I still don't think it's a real language. :) I couldn't resist. Jeremy Falcon
Jeremy Falcon wrote: I still don't think it's a real language Heck, its predecessor, BASIC, was never intended by the author to be used as a programming language. It was supposed to be an instructional pseudolanguage for illustrating the concepts of procedural programming in an academic environment. Then some moronic business school dropout ported it to run on the Altair 8800 microcomputer and it has valiantly resisted a well-deserved demise for several decades since. The funeral is long overdue, as the corpse has become frightfully gamey. X| "If it's Snowbird season, why can't we shoot them?" - Overheard in a bar in Bullhead City
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: I still don't think it's a real language Heck, its predecessor, BASIC, was never intended by the author to be used as a programming language. It was supposed to be an instructional pseudolanguage for illustrating the concepts of procedural programming in an academic environment. Then some moronic business school dropout ported it to run on the Altair 8800 microcomputer and it has valiantly resisted a well-deserved demise for several decades since. The funeral is long overdue, as the corpse has become frightfully gamey. X| "If it's Snowbird season, why can't we shoot them?" - Overheard in a bar in Bullhead City
Frightfully ! Well put. ;) A company I used to work for long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away actually licensed that pseudolanguage for an imbedded application. Looking at the actual code was truly astonishing and I don't mean that in a good way. Amazing how far one can go if you find the right BIOS code to rip off isn't it ?
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: I still don't think it's a real language Heck, its predecessor, BASIC, was never intended by the author to be used as a programming language. It was supposed to be an instructional pseudolanguage for illustrating the concepts of procedural programming in an academic environment. Then some moronic business school dropout ported it to run on the Altair 8800 microcomputer and it has valiantly resisted a well-deserved demise for several decades since. The funeral is long overdue, as the corpse has become frightfully gamey. X| "If it's Snowbird season, why can't we shoot them?" - Overheard in a bar in Bullhead City
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[From a mailing list] http://classicvb.org/petition/ [^] [My reply] This merely reflects how negatively people react to change. If MS hadn’t brought out VB.NET, VB would have died a not-so-slow and rather painful death as far as VB people were concerned. VB.NET itself is a weird syntactical contortion of a language that’s natively unsuitable for decent OO programming and I suppose MS would either deprecate VB.NET eventually or keep changing it constantly until it resembles C# to such an extent that it’d be hard to tell them apart. I understand the problem that VB programmers now have no means to write unmanaged apps. Maybe the workaround for that should be a VB.NET compiler that compiles to native code (which’d mean a native VB.NET library has to be written, since native code shouldn’t be dependent on the BCL). But other than that, continuing VB6 would be an utter waste of time, resource and money as far as Microsoft it concerned. And Microsoft is a corporate company that exists to further its financial base; it’s not a charity organization. My 2 cents. Nish
Well, this does cause us something of a problem because we have an application server written in VB6. Yes, inappropriate technology, I know - the very fact that VB6 requires a UI is causing us a number of problems. It's shoehorned into being a service using ntsvc.ocx[^]. The server has a UI that needs to be stripped out. To gain concurrency the server passes requests to application host processes - the server itself is single-threaded and at present the app hosts are too. VB6's multithreaded 'ActiveX EXEs' lack useful thread pooling behaviour - as far as I can see, you can only set the maximum pool size at compile time, where we would prefer this to be configurable. This layout also provides isolation. The applications are written as in-process COM servers - we've built and distribute Primary Interop Assemblies in order to allow applications to be written using VB.NET or C#. Since the application-to-server interface was written in VB6, there are some artifacts which make it trickier to use from C# than VB.NET (for example, all arrays are ByRef). I mostly fixed the default-ByRef for parameters in this interface before we shipped the first version after I sorted out binary compatibility, but a couple slipped through on later extensions. I don't think this project actually should be ported to VB.NET. There's sufficient misuse of the environment, a poor design generally, and massive scalability problems. I'm normally in agreement with Joel Spolsky[^] on rewrites, but this one has to happen. One of the first things to get rewritten will be the network interface (this server uses a UDP-based protocol). It appears that the Winsock control runs the socket reading code on a worker thread which posts a message to the control window when a packet is received. If the server doesn't keep up with the flow of packets, the Windows message queue just fills up, and the server starts spending more time allocating and deallocating space for the message queue than it does actually handling packets - which makes the problem worse. Our current bodge fix is to close the socket when we're too busy to handle the
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[From a mailing list] http://classicvb.org/petition/ [^] [My reply] This merely reflects how negatively people react to change. If MS hadn’t brought out VB.NET, VB would have died a not-so-slow and rather painful death as far as VB people were concerned. VB.NET itself is a weird syntactical contortion of a language that’s natively unsuitable for decent OO programming and I suppose MS would either deprecate VB.NET eventually or keep changing it constantly until it resembles C# to such an extent that it’d be hard to tell them apart. I understand the problem that VB programmers now have no means to write unmanaged apps. Maybe the workaround for that should be a VB.NET compiler that compiles to native code (which’d mean a native VB.NET library has to be written, since native code shouldn’t be dependent on the BCL). But other than that, continuing VB6 would be an utter waste of time, resource and money as far as Microsoft it concerned. And Microsoft is a corporate company that exists to further its financial base; it’s not a charity organization. My 2 cents. Nish
Does nobody else see the irony of C# programmers mocking others for not being 'real' programmers? "So what you're telling me is that the latest and greatest thing in 2005 will be _yet another_ programming language that compiles into pcode and runs on an o/s written by those clowns at Microsoft?" "Well, umm its not really pcode, and Microsoft have come on a bit...sort of.... A real programmer used to program in machine code and think anyone else was a Nancy. In this day and age programming is a state of mind not knowledge of a language. You can still write poor code in C#. Why do people feel the need to bash VB6? I always think those that raise themselves by downing others must be insecure. C# can speak for itself, its a beautiful language. I've seen some awesome apps written in VB6...honestly! I've also seen some terrible ones, including everything I've ever tried to write in VB6, but I always put that down to my failings. I've had to program in far worse languages the VB6 and I think I'm a better person for it.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: I still don't think it's a real language Heck, its predecessor, BASIC, was never intended by the author to be used as a programming language. It was supposed to be an instructional pseudolanguage for illustrating the concepts of procedural programming in an academic environment. Then some moronic business school dropout ported it to run on the Altair 8800 microcomputer and it has valiantly resisted a well-deserved demise for several decades since. The funeral is long overdue, as the corpse has become frightfully gamey. X| "If it's Snowbird season, why can't we shoot them?" - Overheard in a bar in Bullhead City
Ah, memories... Roger Wright wrote: It was supposed to be an instructional pseudolanguage for illustrating the concepts of procedural programming in an academic environment And it accomplished that task well, and deserves IMO a "special dedicace" for that. So sad its reputation was tarnished later :suss:
Fold With Us! What a sad world it would be if everyone said and did only what was easy - Shog9
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[From a mailing list] http://classicvb.org/petition/ [^] [My reply] This merely reflects how negatively people react to change. If MS hadn’t brought out VB.NET, VB would have died a not-so-slow and rather painful death as far as VB people were concerned. VB.NET itself is a weird syntactical contortion of a language that’s natively unsuitable for decent OO programming and I suppose MS would either deprecate VB.NET eventually or keep changing it constantly until it resembles C# to such an extent that it’d be hard to tell them apart. I understand the problem that VB programmers now have no means to write unmanaged apps. Maybe the workaround for that should be a VB.NET compiler that compiles to native code (which’d mean a native VB.NET library has to be written, since native code shouldn’t be dependent on the BCL). But other than that, continuing VB6 would be an utter waste of time, resource and money as far as Microsoft it concerned. And Microsoft is a corporate company that exists to further its financial base; it’s not a charity organization. My 2 cents. Nish
Nishant S wrote: This merely reflects how negatively people react to change. A tool has to adapt to its users, not the other way round :mad: Nishant S wrote: And Microsoft is a corporate company that exists to further its financial base; it’s not a charity organization. Well, MS currently sits on 50 Billion $. With customers like you it can easily "further its financial base" ;P My 1,5 cents.
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[From a mailing list] http://classicvb.org/petition/ [^] [My reply] This merely reflects how negatively people react to change. If MS hadn’t brought out VB.NET, VB would have died a not-so-slow and rather painful death as far as VB people were concerned. VB.NET itself is a weird syntactical contortion of a language that’s natively unsuitable for decent OO programming and I suppose MS would either deprecate VB.NET eventually or keep changing it constantly until it resembles C# to such an extent that it’d be hard to tell them apart. I understand the problem that VB programmers now have no means to write unmanaged apps. Maybe the workaround for that should be a VB.NET compiler that compiles to native code (which’d mean a native VB.NET library has to be written, since native code shouldn’t be dependent on the BCL). But other than that, continuing VB6 would be an utter waste of time, resource and money as far as Microsoft it concerned. And Microsoft is a corporate company that exists to further its financial base; it’s not a charity organization. My 2 cents. Nish
Now that explains why I've never liked to associate myself with the language. ;P Chris Meech I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar] Gently arching his fishing rod back he moves the tip forward in a gentle arch releasing the line.... kersplunk [Doug Goulden] Nice sig! [Tim Deveaux on Matt Newman's sig with a quote from me]
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Nishant S wrote: This merely reflects how negatively people react to change. A tool has to adapt to its users, not the other way round :mad: Nishant S wrote: And Microsoft is a corporate company that exists to further its financial base; it’s not a charity organization. Well, MS currently sits on 50 Billion $. With customers like you it can easily "further its financial base" ;P My 1,5 cents.
CP Visitor wrote: A tool has to adapt to its users, not the other way round Really? Then explain the advent of OOP, Web Services, Generics, Web Forms, Windows Services, USB, Firewire, Ethernet, FDDI, ... We have to adapt to use the tools. Can you imagine using COBOL to snag the video off of your camera? New tools were invented and old ones improved to make it easier for us to accomplish new tasks, but we still have to adapt to the tools to use them. CP Visitor wrote: Well, MS currently sits on 50 Billion $. With customers like you it can easily "further its financial base" It's not really because of the users "like us" why Microsoft is sitting on $billions$. It's because they are in the right inductry, in the right business, at the right time and leading that industry. Where would our little industry be without them? Frankly, I'd had Microsoft lead us FAR more than leaving it to IBM... RageInTheMachine9532 "...a pungent, ghastly, stinky piece of cheese!" -- The Roaming Gnome
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[From a mailing list] http://classicvb.org/petition/ [^] [My reply] This merely reflects how negatively people react to change. If MS hadn’t brought out VB.NET, VB would have died a not-so-slow and rather painful death as far as VB people were concerned. VB.NET itself is a weird syntactical contortion of a language that’s natively unsuitable for decent OO programming and I suppose MS would either deprecate VB.NET eventually or keep changing it constantly until it resembles C# to such an extent that it’d be hard to tell them apart. I understand the problem that VB programmers now have no means to write unmanaged apps. Maybe the workaround for that should be a VB.NET compiler that compiles to native code (which’d mean a native VB.NET library has to be written, since native code shouldn’t be dependent on the BCL). But other than that, continuing VB6 would be an utter waste of time, resource and money as far as Microsoft it concerned. And Microsoft is a corporate company that exists to further its financial base; it’s not a charity organization. My 2 cents. Nish
Has anyone noticed how many MVP's have signed this stupid petition? Can they not see the train coming at them? Have they completely forgotten about the 64-bit processor? Do they know that the VB runtime would have to be completely rewritten to accomodate such an advance? IMHO, VB's problems weren't so much in the language (and yes, I agree that it really needed improvement!), but in it's pathetic execution environment. Basically, that runtime limited you to Windows applications. Writing anything else, like a web app or a service was a huge hack. Interoperating with the Win32 API was a black art. It really needed to be replaced, and I for one am glad that it's dying. I cut my teeth on BASIC when I was 8. I taught myself C, C++, Intel Assembler, TI 9900 Assembler, COBOL, Pascal, FORTRAN, Java, ..., about a dozen other flavors of BASIC, scripting, runtimes, and a mountain of other things I've since forgotten about. Either you adapt, upgrade your skills, and move on, or you get left behind with the whiney kids who are still crying about Turtle! RageInTheMachine9532 "...a pungent, ghastly, stinky piece of cheese!" -- The Roaming Gnome
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[From a mailing list] http://classicvb.org/petition/ [^] [My reply] This merely reflects how negatively people react to change. If MS hadn’t brought out VB.NET, VB would have died a not-so-slow and rather painful death as far as VB people were concerned. VB.NET itself is a weird syntactical contortion of a language that’s natively unsuitable for decent OO programming and I suppose MS would either deprecate VB.NET eventually or keep changing it constantly until it resembles C# to such an extent that it’d be hard to tell them apart. I understand the problem that VB programmers now have no means to write unmanaged apps. Maybe the workaround for that should be a VB.NET compiler that compiles to native code (which’d mean a native VB.NET library has to be written, since native code shouldn’t be dependent on the BCL). But other than that, continuing VB6 would be an utter waste of time, resource and money as far as Microsoft it concerned. And Microsoft is a corporate company that exists to further its financial base; it’s not a charity organization. My 2 cents. Nish
Sorry Nish but I couldn't resist ;). Nishant S: "VB.NET itself is a weird syntactical contortion of a language that’s natively unsuitable for decent OO programming and I suppose MS would either deprecate VB.NET eventually or keep changing it constantly until it resembles C# to such an extent that it’d be hard to tell them apart" What do you mean by weird syntactical contortion? Or are you just saying that it's too wordy? What do you think about managed extension and CLI (by the way, I have read your articles that involve these subjects)? Could you provide a whee bit more detail as to why VB7 is "natively" unsuitable for decent OO programming? When you say "natively", are you saying that in order to implement an OO design with VB7, you have to pull out VB 6 hacks in order to do so, that is, are you saying that the instrinsics of the language don't allow for proper implementation of an OO design? I think the likelihood that VB will be completely deprecated is comparable to the likelihood that C++ will be completely deprecated, in other words, it's just not going to happen. Sure you could replace VB with C# since any programming task with the former can be done with the latter, vice versa, however, from a business standpoint it makes no sense, and like you said MS is a business that's out to make money, and to do so, you need to diversify, that is, not place all your eggs in just one basket. Imagine if MS came out tomorrow saying C# is from here on out the only supported .NET language. I have a feeling there would be lots of unhappy customers. Sun made the mistake of imposing just one language; I doubt MS will do the same. Do you really believe that VB changes in light of changes made to C#? Perhaps so, but that same argument can be made in reverse. For example, where did foreach come from? This next point has nothing to do with language per se, but why will C# 2.0 support edit and continue? Well, now that I think about it a bit more, since languages that target .NET (CLR/BCL, etc...)change as .NET changes (for example, generics), and since C# is the native .NET language that was designed and developed with .NET in mind, I guess it follows that if C# changes so will other languages. But pretty please, do keep in mind that much of the .NET stuff you work with today has its roots in VB (Windows Forms->VB 6 Forms, WebForms->VB 6 Web Classes, etc...) I really can't think of an application that must be written in C# and not VB7. That's not to say there aren't any differences between the two, because ther