5 ms·
The thing that most people forget about VB6 is that it wasn't the language that made it succesful - it was the tools. You could create a form in 30 seconds, dr
by AndrewDucker 14y ago
The thing that most people forget about VB6 is that it wasn't the language that made it succesful - it was the tools.
You could create a form in 30 seconds, drag a couple of buttons onto it, and start sticking code behind them.
It was _incredibly_ easy to go from nothing to an app that did something useful and was easy to use.
- flomo 14y agoTo that I would add 1) various database glue allowing drag-n-drop bindings, 2) Incredibly good MS Office integration (or anything COM), and 3) Huge library of third-party components (I haven't kept up with .NET desktop development, but in the 1.1-era, MS Office stuff was painful.)
- gouranga 14y agoThey fixed all the pain in .Net 4.0. Summary: http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/42590 http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/42590
- gouranga 14y agoIt's still that easy with .Net and Visual Studio :) XAML or WinForms still rock.
- stan_rogers 14y agoIt wasn't always that easy. Integrating Office apps prior to the introduction of VSTO was ugly and fraught with incompatible types. Especially if you were using a language other than VB.NET, which generally meant a whole lot of Type.Missing argument entries in every other line of code in addition to creating marginally machine-to-machine compatible COM interop wrappers. Getting beyond the "Works on My Machine" certification wasn't always an easy thing in VS 2003/Framework 1.x.
- gouranga 14y agoI never had much of a problem to be honest and I built some behemoths which involved ASP.Net, .Net CF, remoting and all sorts of other junk in the same app.
- asmithmd1 14y agoWhat is the web app equivalent of this? There must be several different companies trying to create a drag and drop web application IDE
- MartinCron 14y agoThe closest web app analog is (was) ASP.NET WebForms, which has pretty much been replaced by ASP.NET MVC.
- recursive 14y agoWebForms wishes it was VB6, but sadly, the ViewState abstraction leaks complexity like a sieve for any but the most trivial case.
- MartinCron 14y agoI agree wholeheartedly. Almost all of the abstractions in WebForms are leaky, and the think that it's abstracting... HTML, isn't so complex that it benefits from being abstracted. It was a learning process for all of us :)
- brisance 14y agoYou can take a look at RealStudio. The Web Edition is in the early versions and is still a little rough around the edges though their Mac/Windows desktop development environments are much better and have been around for many years. Link: http://www.realsoftware.com http://www.realsoftware.com
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- elchief 14y agoSencha Architect is the equivalent.
- ebiester 14y agoWavemaker is doing a decent job, but it's probably closer to MS Access for the web with the ability to go deeper using Java. Sencha architect is trying to do some of the same things as well.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoThere are a lot of not-programmers who thrived doing just this, and some of them are still around, getting programming jobs based off of that experience that doesn't translate at all to modern frameworks.