3 ms·
The first money I made using a computer was writing simple business automation apps in VB, first 5 and for a short while 6. I also dabbled in Access Basic and t
by smhenderson 7y ago
The first money I made using a computer was writing simple business automation apps in VB, first 5 and for a short while 6. I also dabbled in Access Basic and then VBA when all the office apps standardized on it instead of each having their own flavor.
VB was great like you said until you needed to do something difficult. I remember Bruce McKinny’s Hardcore Visual Basic book being my best friend for a little while. It thought me I could do the hard stuff in C, make a DLL and drop that into my VB project.
Bruce had a saying, VB makes 95% of the job easy and the other 5% impossible.
- jeffFrom18F 7y agoI was going to make a reference to "Hardcore Visual Basic" but you beat me to it. Fantastic book, it's hard to find a tech book that is that useful and fun at the same time. My first job started out with mostly Visual Basic 6. One of the modules written in VC++ by a bunch of guys who were looking to get that on their resume (they had since departed). It probably should have just been in VB as well and was always a nightmare to debug and enhance. Once .net was prominent we mostly moved to C#. There didn't seem to be much of a reason to go with VB.Net, C# seemed more "legitimate" and without the hassles of Visual C++/MFC. Decades later and I still find myself writing an Excel macro in VBA now and then but I've largely moved on.
- teh_klev 7y agoMatt Curland's "Advanced Visual Basic 6: Power Techniques for Everyday Programs: Hardcore Programming Techniques" was a cracker of a book as well back in the day: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0201707128 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0201707128