3 ms·

I think VB was such a smash hit not because of the language but because the ease of writing a quick GUI for Windows, there wasn't really anything quite like it

I think VB was such a smash hit not because of the language but because the ease of writing a quick GUI for Windows, there wasn't really anything quite like it at the time. Other GUI builders existed but were harder to use and not as well integrated. The appeal of VB lives on in WinForms with C# as the backing language. Initially MS tried hard to keep VB.Net around as a fully emancipated partner but it turns out everyone just moved over to C#.

Turing_Machine 4y ago
> I think VB was such a smash hit not because of the language but because the ease of writing a quick GUI for Windows, there wasn't really anything quite like it at the time. I agree completely. The language itself was pretty crap, but there was nothing like it for rapid layout and wiring of a GUI. IMO, even modern tools like the storyboards and visual components in Xcode don't quite make it (they're more powerful, certainly, but also much more complicated to use).
- signaru 4y ago
  Basically how Pascal still exists in Delphi/Lazarus. I'm not a fan of the language, but Rapid cross-platform GUIs that compile to native code instead of bytecode that anyone can just drop to ILSpy are really compelling.
jodrellblank 4y ago
> "Initially MS tried hard to keep VB.Net around as a fully emancipated partner" Not very hard[1]; "making Visual Basic.NET not backwards-compatible with VB 6.0. This was literally the first time in living memory that when you bought an upgrade to a Microsoft product, your old data (i.e. the code you had written in VB6) could not be imported perfectly and silently. It was the first time a Microsoft upgrade did not respect the work that users did using the previous version of a product. And the sky didn’t seem to fall, not inside Microsoft. VB6 developers were up in arms, but they were disappearing anyway, because most of them were corporate developers who were migrating to web development anyway. The real long term damage was hidden. With this major victory under their belts, the MSDN Magazine Camp took over. Suddenly it was OK to change things. IIS 6.0 came out with a different threading model that broke some old applications. I was shocked to discover that our customers with Windows Server 2003 were having trouble running FogBugz. Then .NET 1.1 was not perfectly backwards compatible with 1.0. And now that the cat was out of the bag, the OS team got into the spirit and decided that instead of adding features to the Windows API, they were going to completely replace it. Instead of Win32, we are told, we should now start getting ready for WinFX: the next generation Windows API. All different. Based on .NET with managed code. XAML. Avalon." [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
- zwieback 4y ago
  I meant they tried hard to keep C# and VB.Net equal, not VB.Net backwards compatible to VB Classic
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    VB.Net had features that didn't have a C# cognate expressly to simplify migration.
  - wvenable 4y ago
    As a classic VB and C# developer, that was their mistake. VB.NET has no reason to exist. If it was much more backwards compatible with VB Classic it would have had a reason to exist -- it would have allowed VB projects (of which there were millions) to migrate over to .NET smoothly.

Turing_Machine 4y ago

> I think VB was such a smash hit not because of the language but because the ease of writing a quick GUI for Windows, there wasn't really anything quite like it at the time. I agree completely. The language itself was pretty crap, but there was nothing like it for rapid layout and wiring of a GUI. IMO, even modern tools like the storyboards and visual components in Xcode don't quite make it (they're more powerful, certainly, but also much more complicated to use).

signaru 4y ago
Basically how Pascal still exists in Delphi/Lazarus. I'm not a fan of the language, but Rapid cross-platform GUIs that compile to native code instead of bytecode that anyone can just drop to ILSpy are really compelling.

jodrellblank 4y ago

> "Initially MS tried hard to keep VB.Net around as a fully emancipated partner" Not very hard[1]; "making Visual Basic.NET not backwards-compatible with VB 6.0. This was literally the first time in living memory that when you bought an upgrade to a Microsoft product, your old data (i.e. the code you had written in VB6) could not be imported perfectly and silently. It was the first time a Microsoft upgrade did not respect the work that users did using the previous version of a product. And the sky didn’t seem to fall, not inside Microsoft. VB6 developers were up in arms, but they were disappearing anyway, because most of them were corporate developers who were migrating to web development anyway. The real long term damage was hidden. With this major victory under their belts, the MSDN Magazine Camp took over. Suddenly it was OK to change things. IIS 6.0 came out with a different threading model that broke some old applications. I was shocked to discover that our customers with Windows Server 2003 were having trouble running FogBugz. Then .NET 1.1 was not perfectly backwards compatible with 1.0. And now that the cat was out of the bag, the OS team got into the spirit and decided that instead of adding features to the Windows API, they were going to completely replace it. Instead of Win32, we are told, we should now start getting ready for WinFX: the next generation Windows API. All different. Based on .NET with managed code. XAML. Avalon." [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

zwieback 4y ago
I meant they tried hard to keep C# and VB.Net equal, not VB.Net backwards compatible to VB Classic
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  VB.Net had features that didn't have a C# cognate expressly to simplify migration.
- wvenable 4y ago
  As a classic VB and C# developer, that was their mistake. VB.NET has no reason to exist. If it was much more backwards compatible with VB Classic it would have had a reason to exist -- it would have allowed VB projects (of which there were millions) to migrate over to .NET smoothly.