6 ms·

And Visual Basic for all of its faults..

Bootvis 4y ago
I started programming with Visual Basic 6 and still feel robbed that in the 25 years of programming after I never built a native GUI.
- wolpoli 4y ago
  I never fully understood why we couldn't have the VB/Winform model of building GUI on the web. Is it because we need the designer skinnable GUI? With WebAssembly and CSS grid layout, could we finally get a modernize VB/Winform?
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    There are plenty of services that offers that. Even MS used to provide that with frontpage. The real answer to your question lies in why people don't use them much.
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      Because they used to produce dubious code leading to poor rendering result. I would like to say the Web was poorly designed but that would be too generous. The Web wasn’t designed at all. It’s a hodgepodge of poorly thought out technologies hastily cobbled together. It’s a piece of technology designed to display static textual content horribly contorted to make applications. It took decades for JS and CSS to reach a state I consider barely useable and the best we could do is apparently flexbox.
      - illiarian 4y ago
        > and the best we could do is apparently flexbox. And grid. The contortions you have to go through to get the equivalent of early 2000 Qt's spacer items and anchors...
  - illiarian 4y ago
    Because the web has nothing to facilitate that. Almost literally nothing: from rich components to data handling to control over rendering if needed. So the VB/Winform model of building GUI on the web has to re-invent all controls from scratch, then all dat abinfding from scratch, then...
    - Bootvis 4y ago
      Sounds like an idea for a startup!
      - wolpoli 4y ago
        Perhaps one of the local or browser-based IDE companies could take this on too.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  Ten/Twelve years ago me and a colleague would build random desktop apps using WinForms and C#, they were deployed using a network share and ClickOnce. They weren't the most elegant pieces of software ever developed, but it sure was easy to slap together a small tool for the warehouse manager or someone in sales. You can still do all that, on Windows. As I get older and have more experience, I have come to the conclusion that some people are more interested in the technology and less so in solving actual problems. While I'm pretty happy with my career, if I were to do it all over: Windows, Visual Studio, C++ and WinForms would have been the tools that I'd have picked. We're coming up on 25 years of a fairly stable, actively developed platform with pretty good backwards compatibility.
  - Bootvis 4y ago
    Maybe I missed some opportunities but with my later experience and in my line of work I got pushed towards webapps and these days PowerBI. I can make those work but I feel that as a beginner with VB6 I could build forms faster than I can do now in a browser. Also, I remember not being completely precise: I maintained a hacked together GUI build in Access VBA. It had its warts but its web-based replacement didn't blow it out of the water and took longer to develop.

I started programming with Visual Basic 6 and still feel robbed that in the 25 years of programming after I never built a native GUI.

wolpoli 4y ago
I never fully understood why we couldn't have the VB/Winform model of building GUI on the web. Is it because we need the designer skinnable GUI? With WebAssembly and CSS grid layout, could we finally get a modernize VB/Winform?
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  There are plenty of services that offers that. Even MS used to provide that with frontpage. The real answer to your question lies in why people don't use them much.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    Because they used to produce dubious code leading to poor rendering result. I would like to say the Web was poorly designed but that would be too generous. The Web wasn’t designed at all. It’s a hodgepodge of poorly thought out technologies hastily cobbled together. It’s a piece of technology designed to display static textual content horribly contorted to make applications. It took decades for JS and CSS to reach a state I consider barely useable and the best we could do is apparently flexbox.
    - illiarian 4y ago
      > and the best we could do is apparently flexbox. And grid. The contortions you have to go through to get the equivalent of early 2000 Qt's spacer items and anchors...
- illiarian 4y ago
  Because the web has nothing to facilitate that. Almost literally nothing: from rich components to data handling to control over rendering if needed. So the VB/Winform model of building GUI on the web has to re-invent all controls from scratch, then all dat abinfding from scratch, then...
  - Bootvis 4y ago
    Sounds like an idea for a startup!
    - wolpoli 4y ago
      Perhaps one of the local or browser-based IDE companies could take this on too.
mrweasel 4y ago
Ten/Twelve years ago me and a colleague would build random desktop apps using WinForms and C#, they were deployed using a network share and ClickOnce. They weren't the most elegant pieces of software ever developed, but it sure was easy to slap together a small tool for the warehouse manager or someone in sales. You can still do all that, on Windows. As I get older and have more experience, I have come to the conclusion that some people are more interested in the technology and less so in solving actual problems. While I'm pretty happy with my career, if I were to do it all over: Windows, Visual Studio, C++ and WinForms would have been the tools that I'd have picked. We're coming up on 25 years of a fairly stable, actively developed platform with pretty good backwards compatibility.
- Bootvis 4y ago
  Maybe I missed some opportunities but with my later experience and in my line of work I got pushed towards webapps and these days PowerBI. I can make those work but I feel that as a beginner with VB6 I could build forms faster than I can do now in a browser. Also, I remember not being completely precise: I maintained a hacked together GUI build in Access VBA. It had its warts but its web-based replacement didn't blow it out of the water and took longer to develop.