First, let me say i love VB6. It has a great IDE, great debugging tools, very extensible, has enough power for most tasks, easy to add more horsepower in teh form in C dlls or COM objects, and makes GUI stuff an absolute breeze.
Sure i wish it had the capability of linking in C obj files, inline asm, directly linked in VB runtime, and some more default libraries like php has access to by default...but .NET was .NOT the answer.
In the early days of Java, everyone was all hot to trot on platform independance and web integration. The marketers went nuts pushing wares. MS hopped on board with J# until they got sued and lost. Now we have .NET which i consider to be MSs old J# retooled and reworked in their own flavor of poo.
I understand the .NET good debugging capabilities and a powerful IDE, and addresses some of the shortfalls i find with vb6, however they turned it into even a greater pile of bloatware. Everyone used to complain about the 1mb vb runtime that installed in seconds. So they turned around and created a 25mb runtime for .NET that takes tens of minutes to download and then tens of minutes to install.
What sparks this post is me looking at my add remove programs list. Right now I have 3 versions of that blasted runtime installed on my machine, each taking up close to 200mb a piece. Its just bloated crap.
Honestly i guess I am also a little peeved that VB.NET has very little in common with VB6. You cant realistically covert the code over. You can use old code as COM objects but still. Also I hate the class layout of Java and .NET. Its academic in design. Overly long and nested classes and object encapsulation. Makes all your code lines needlessly long.
I do understand its powerful to use .NET on embedded devices. To have one programming model across different processors and memory models, but for desktop development .NET is garbage in my book no matter how much they hype it. I wont even begin to talk about their web forms mess. ASP and PHP are still better solutions in my book.
Part of me also cant help but feel that their desire to incite the new language of the day isnt driven by their need to ship more product and refresh their IDE sales.
As a developer i dont need mindless break neck innovation just because you need more sales volume. I need a stable workable tool that lets me earn a living without having to go back and learn the ABCs of your language du jour.
If these are the choice we must make, then i would much rather pay a subscription yearly for continued license to my development IDE and operating system so that both of us have a stable operating base and tool set. Most of the innovations in VISTA are garbage also.
Mindless "innovation" and media hype for home users and fluff to sell the next sales unit.
Author: Dave
Source: http://sandsprite.com/blogs/index.php?uid=11&pid=35
You have some very good points. VB6 wreaks of needing a better custodian. What has happen to it is a travesty. Though many new developers still flock to VB6 for its simplicity and power. Microsoft's long term plans seem to be waiting for all the hard core VB6 developers to die already and keep VB6 running because those guys created too many mission critical apps with it that live forever.
ReplyDeleteYes, true. Moreover, the number of VB6 programmers actually increased in recent years.
ReplyDeleteRead this too, it is writen on May 2016 by David Platt (not the author of the above article):
https://msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/dn973019
Yes. VB6 rocks for its simplicity. There are tons of applications out there developed in VB6 which their owners are not ready to upgrade because they have invested a lot on these. Migration is not feasible for them and they are just maintaining those legacy applications to keep their show running. These owners will stop upgrading their operating systems the day Microsoft prevents/restricts vb6 apps to run on their new version of windows.
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