5 ms·

The end of Visual Basic.NET, that is. "Classic" Visual Basic has been ended for a long time now. (And VB.NET is much less of a loss -- it was never as popular

The end of Visual Basic.NET, that is. "Classic" Visual Basic has been ended for a long time now. (And VB.NET is much less of a loss -- it was never as popular as classic VB. Even when it first came out, it was clear that if you were a VB developer, Microsoft really wanted you to move to C#; VB.NET always felt like an afterthought, a fig leaf they could use to say they really weren't abandoning VB when they obviously were.)

th0ma5 7y ago
I totally agree and felt that such that after I went through the pain of learning VB.NET, I felt rather silly when I took a look at C# and realized I had learned like 99% of the whole thing is just the .NET ecosystem, so picking up C# was pretty quick.
- cm2187 7y ago
  Did the same thing, but in my mind, 50% of knowing a language is muscle memory, you type without even thinking about it because there is zero doubt or ambiguity about the syntax, even anticipating the reaction of the IDE as you type. That’s why when I switched from vb.net to c# (when microsoft announced they were deinvesting in it 2-3y ago), I stopped writing vb completely. It is hard to fit two languages in muscle memory (unless the syntax is pretty close).
analog31 7y ago
For me, the switch to dot-net meant that continuing to upgrade past VB5/6 no longer held any particular advantage over switching to some other language altogether, not to mention possibly some other operating system as well. I ended up in the Python camp, where I reside today. Edit: I should also mention that VB5/6 got me away from HyperCard. I loved the idea of being able to draw my GUI, and not having to screw around with writing my own event loop. With VB, I liked that it was "object based," by which I mean that you could use objects provided by the tool without having to create them. This was a great way for me to ease my way into OOP. By the time I wrote my first object, I already understood what objects were useful for.
dmitriid 7y ago
> "Classic" Visual Basic has been ended for a long time now. It kinda still lives on in classic ASP. It will be supported indefinitely so far [1] [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2669020/active-server-pages-asp-support-in-windows https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2669020/active-serv...
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
  IIS ASP and the Shell CScript/WScript hosts are just environments for the COM-based Active Scripting engine. At the time it was very capable as lots of software titles opened themselves up to automation via COM - that's why you could have Classic ASP pages that invoked Office Excel to generate charts dynamically. Unfortunately it was all a mess, but it was also something beautiful because it meant that a desktop/server OS was more than just a place where heterogenous applications could live: they could truly interact with each other regardless of their programming language or runtime platform. That grand vision - itself an extension of OLE from the early 1990s - died down with the rise of .NET (this wasn't intentional - Microsoft just had a lot of reorgs around that time and COM was more-or-less feature-complete, and no-one was really using DCOM) - but with Windows 8 and the "WinRT" API I was hopeful that COM would be back and new ways of automating applications would come around, and that Microsoft would have a great system for non-programmer users wanting to build workflows like they can with Apple's macOS Automator and AppleScript. This also ties-in with the do-as-little-work-as-necessary being done for VBA support in Microsoft's products. While we all wish Microsoft would allow modern JavaScript as a first-class COM automation language - the Office VBA runtime only supports its own VB6-dialect (the VBA language), and while Active Scripting supports JScript (a snapshot of JavaScript version 3 from 1999-2001) it doesn't support static typing nor is any of the tooling inside Office compatible at all. - so instead we have JavaScript, but only for "Office Apps" which don't offer anywhere near the same kind of integration or control over Office applications (or things like filesystem access) that VBA does. It's like it's 2008 again and everyone's excited about the new iPhone OS App Store and thinking about all the cool iPhone OS system extensions they'd add, like a Today screen or a camera app that can record video by using low-level camera hardware APIs - only to be discover Apple will only let-in apps using nerfed and siloed high-level APIs that take away all of the fun from extending an OS.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
spsrich2 7y ago
loads of people still claim to write new apps in VB6! and good luck to them !
toyg 7y ago
Exactly. The writing was on the wall all the way back in 2001. It’s basically been a 20-year-long transition, and one has to admire Microsoft’s dedication to their developer userbase in that area.
mysterydip 7y ago
Definitely. I was a huge fan of VB6, spent thousands of hours writing all kinds of things. When I first heard of VB.NET, I was excited to see what new features were implemented, expecting something like VB4->VB5->VB6. Boy was I in for a surprise. It seemed more like C wrapped in VB syntax. I started looking to other languages at that point, but as some other posters said I never found anything quite able to match the rapid prototyping GUI and debugging features of the VB6 IDE.
- hermitdev 7y ago
  I never did VB6 or VB.Net, but I've done VBscript with classic ASP and VBA in Excel. Glad I went with C# instead of VB.Net. Not trashing VB, but C# was always more capable and fully featured than VB (VB couldnt even do unsigned integers, and I dont it can even now), and almost immediately more widely adopted in even .Net 1.0. Hell, C++ with COM was more capable (if not extremely annoying amd error prone). Of course VBscript and VBA share very similar syntaxes, but they're not the same languages or std object models/libraries, just maybe 95% similar.
  - tastroder 7y ago
    Thing is, it was never about language capability. VB6 with COM was still faster in terms of development cycles for people used to the woes back then. Though I'd argue that the few differences there were between VBScript/VBA and VB6 made it much more capable from a development perspective back then... Most of my VB6 bubble moved to VB.Net during the transition, the widespread move to C# with those folks came years later when it became somewhat inevitable. After all, for the typical type of application, language is honestly mostly irrelevant as long as it does not get in your way. All this feels a little like history repeating itself. We even naively made up a petition back then to keep VB6 around, somewhat glad that led nowhere in retrospect. A few decades ago I loved that the VB ecosystem was approachable and combined beginners and professional users. I somewhat think we have enough other good tools that fit this description these days, some of which incidentally even come with a good programming language.
  - dirtydroog 7y ago
    Java still doesn't do unsigned

th0ma5 7y ago

I totally agree and felt that such that after I went through the pain of learning VB.NET, I felt rather silly when I took a look at C# and realized I had learned like 99% of the whole thing is just the .NET ecosystem, so picking up C# was pretty quick.

cm2187 7y ago
Did the same thing, but in my mind, 50% of knowing a language is muscle memory, you type without even thinking about it because there is zero doubt or ambiguity about the syntax, even anticipating the reaction of the IDE as you type. That’s why when I switched from vb.net to c# (when microsoft announced they were deinvesting in it 2-3y ago), I stopped writing vb completely. It is hard to fit two languages in muscle memory (unless the syntax is pretty close).

analog31 7y ago

For me, the switch to dot-net meant that continuing to upgrade past VB5/6 no longer held any particular advantage over switching to some other language altogether, not to mention possibly some other operating system as well. I ended up in the Python camp, where I reside today. Edit: I should also mention that VB5/6 got me away from HyperCard. I loved the idea of being able to draw my GUI, and not having to screw around with writing my own event loop. With VB, I liked that it was "object based," by which I mean that you could use objects provided by the tool without having to create them. This was a great way for me to ease my way into OOP. By the time I wrote my first object, I already understood what objects were useful for.

dmitriid 7y ago

> "Classic" Visual Basic has been ended for a long time now. It kinda still lives on in classic ASP. It will be supported indefinitely so far [1] [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2669020/active-server-pages-asp-support-in-windows https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2669020/active-serv...

DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
IIS ASP and the Shell CScript/WScript hosts are just environments for the COM-based Active Scripting engine. At the time it was very capable as lots of software titles opened themselves up to automation via COM - that's why you could have Classic ASP pages that invoked Office Excel to generate charts dynamically. Unfortunately it was all a mess, but it was also something beautiful because it meant that a desktop/server OS was more than just a place where heterogenous applications could live: they could truly interact with each other regardless of their programming language or runtime platform. That grand vision - itself an extension of OLE from the early 1990s - died down with the rise of .NET (this wasn't intentional - Microsoft just had a lot of reorgs around that time and COM was more-or-less feature-complete, and no-one was really using DCOM) - but with Windows 8 and the "WinRT" API I was hopeful that COM would be back and new ways of automating applications would come around, and that Microsoft would have a great system for non-programmer users wanting to build workflows like they can with Apple's macOS Automator and AppleScript. This also ties-in with the do-as-little-work-as-necessary being done for VBA support in Microsoft's products. While we all wish Microsoft would allow modern JavaScript as a first-class COM automation language - the Office VBA runtime only supports its own VB6-dialect (the VBA language), and while Active Scripting supports JScript (a snapshot of JavaScript version 3 from 1999-2001) it doesn't support static typing nor is any of the tooling inside Office compatible at all. - so instead we have JavaScript, but only for "Office Apps" which don't offer anywhere near the same kind of integration or control over Office applications (or things like filesystem access) that VBA does. It's like it's 2008 again and everyone's excited about the new iPhone OS App Store and thinking about all the cool iPhone OS system extensions they'd add, like a Today screen or a camera app that can record video by using low-level camera hardware APIs - only to be discover Apple will only let-in apps using nerfed and siloed high-level APIs that take away all of the fun from extending an OS.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

spsrich2 7y ago

loads of people still claim to write new apps in VB6! and good luck to them !

toyg 7y ago

Exactly. The writing was on the wall all the way back in 2001. It’s basically been a 20-year-long transition, and one has to admire Microsoft’s dedication to their developer userbase in that area.

mysterydip 7y ago

Definitely. I was a huge fan of VB6, spent thousands of hours writing all kinds of things. When I first heard of VB.NET, I was excited to see what new features were implemented, expecting something like VB4->VB5->VB6. Boy was I in for a surprise. It seemed more like C wrapped in VB syntax. I started looking to other languages at that point, but as some other posters said I never found anything quite able to match the rapid prototyping GUI and debugging features of the VB6 IDE.

hermitdev 7y ago
I never did VB6 or VB.Net, but I've done VBscript with classic ASP and VBA in Excel. Glad I went with C# instead of VB.Net. Not trashing VB, but C# was always more capable and fully featured than VB (VB couldnt even do unsigned integers, and I dont it can even now), and almost immediately more widely adopted in even .Net 1.0. Hell, C++ with COM was more capable (if not extremely annoying amd error prone). Of course VBscript and VBA share very similar syntaxes, but they're not the same languages or std object models/libraries, just maybe 95% similar.
- tastroder 7y ago
  Thing is, it was never about language capability. VB6 with COM was still faster in terms of development cycles for people used to the woes back then. Though I'd argue that the few differences there were between VBScript/VBA and VB6 made it much more capable from a development perspective back then... Most of my VB6 bubble moved to VB.Net during the transition, the widespread move to C# with those folks came years later when it became somewhat inevitable. After all, for the typical type of application, language is honestly mostly irrelevant as long as it does not get in your way. All this feels a little like history repeating itself. We even naively made up a petition back then to keep VB6 around, somewhat glad that led nowhere in retrospect. A few decades ago I loved that the VB ecosystem was approachable and combined beginners and professional users. I somewhat think we have enough other good tools that fit this description these days, some of which incidentally even come with a good programming language.
- dirtydroog 7y ago
  Java still doesn't do unsigned