The Slow Brain Death of VB.NET

I’ve been a Vb4, 5, and 6 programmer for the past 12 years. I’m trying to learn c# simply because I did a few searches on careerbuilder and dice for my area and came up with something like 47 jobs in C#, 48 in Java, 30 in vb.net, 0 in Vbx, and a few in C++ or C. I downloaded the free C# 2008 express.

Here’s a few conclusions so far:

  1. Learn/Review a little C first, Then a little C++.

  2. The default help that comes with the express editions is a joke, so download the MSDN express library.

  3. But really get a good book. The MSDN express library doesn’t seem to be geared for learning. If they were going to teach you how to drive they’d tell you what a coil, piston ring, and distributor was, but never to stick the key in the ignition and turn it! (Oh yeah, they’d omit to tell you to put the car in park first.)

  4. Intellisense is great, and the language, to some extent, seems logically put together.

Ok. I’ve seen enough! I came here looking for sample code for an application an saw yet another, DotNot is great, Classic VB is old and to be done away with, flame war filled with selfish programmers who obviously are not affected by any switch the Micro$oft fleabags threw on the rest of the respectable development world. I will not rest till I create a compiler that will re-invent the Classic VB language in all it’s glory, for all major platforms, and will PERSONALLY see to it that this DotNot fraud sinks into the sands of oblivion, and we will see who will laugh last. This ain’t business now, it’s personal!

I have used both languages - starting with VB and moving to C# out of curiosity. On balance I prefer C# because I find VB rather cumbersome (that old chestnut :wink: ) and in the beginning I also found it easier to shift to the .Net paradigm through using C#. Currently I am working towards MS certification and alternating between the two languages
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This isn’t about technological advancements, it’s about money. It’s your money, but Microsoft wants it. Back in 1998 a copy of Visual Studio 6 Enterprise Edition probably commanded close to $2000 and yet in a few short years MS introduced dot net and put v6 products on the chopping block. Then with the release of Windows Vista, VB6, as well as programs developed using it, could no longer operate without the help of a product such as Virtual PC. This is not such an issue for home use since a person is free to continue using any operating system and compatible productivity software that he/she desires, but in the realm of commercial software coding lagging behind the competition can be fatal. This fits in nicely with Microsoft’s planned obsolescence scheme but ends up as an extra expense for the companies on the receiving end.

i want good project in VB.NET
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I want vb.net coding for decreasing time for the tool timer control

I want vb.net coding for decreasing time for the tool timer control

Yes!! Yes!! Yes!! Please stay with Visual Basic 6.0. All 6 million of you… UNITE and continue using VB 6.0.

I was there back in the day when we were the Red Headed step children of the development community. Not OOP and on and on. I was also attending Windows NT classes when the Novell guys were laughing at that inherently unstable Windows NT version 3.51 too. SCO Unix was just entering it’s downward spiral and it was move on or go down with the ship. NT 3.51 was the newest thing going and all my SCO colleagues even went postal on me. Where are all those SCO Novell guys today? Hint: N.G.P.A. - Not Getting Paid Anymore. They disappeared almost overnight when NT 4.0 came out. I made a fantastic living removing Novell and SCO systems.

It was a challenge to learn how to program with the .NET framework. Totally different thinking than VB 6 application design. Some old dogs can learn new tricks. I also went the C# route instead of VB.NET. All of you out there who are crying about the beloved VB 6 and the good ole days must not have been there at all. I was there when we were called names like “Bill Boys” and “Windows Weenies”. VB 6 was simple and cheap to develop applications with. That’s all. It was also clunky and quirky too. Avoiding Dll Hell alone is worth updating to .NET. True OOP is yet another valid argument. CLR, Common Types and the list just keeps getting longer.

Anyway back to the crux of the post. Please don’t migrate to the .NET framework. .NET sucks, VB.NET sucks, C# Sucks. Stay with VB 6. Not because VB 6 is better but because it’s just that much more code that I’ll rewrite when you’re N.G.P.A.

That’s exactly what the Novell guys said…

Hey let’s bring back Windows '95 and continue development on it too. Then we could have two versions. One for people who are willing to put forth an effort to advance their skill set and the other for people who have to much invested to learn anything new.

I have been using VB.NET in Visual Studio for about a year. I moved directly from Classic ASP, which I moved to from PHP at my other job.

It is syntactically similar to Basic/ASP. There is alot of code examples online that are written in C#. They are very easy to translate into VB. The only drawback is that if you use alot of JavaScript you have to jump syntactically back and forth between curly braces/semicolons to the more verbose VB.

Aside from that, they both appear to be very similar. If it is an issue of churning out the product, then using what you are most comfortable with seems the way to go.

Learning a language is simple for me. My biggest challenge has been in moving from procedural to object oriented thinking and applying it effectively.

I think C# is more likely to be the new VB, but not quite as popular.
The drastic mindshare loss is too much to make up.

  • Shelon Padmore

I have been using VB 6 since 2000. I am a hobbyist but I do have some paying database customers. I started re-writing my database app
in VB 2008 XE in december of 2007.

I will admit it has been frustrating at times but well worth the effort.

I can also see that in some cases re-writing a project would not be
worth the effort.

It’s interesting to look back at the 10 years or so of comments here.

Now in 2014, the VB6 programming language is still popular. Well, why wouldn’t it be ? Who can justify rewriting legacy code just because Microsoft wants to sell you a new language ?

Microsoft support VB6 until ‘at least’ 2024. And the VB6 IDE runs in Windows 10.
And Microsoft have committed to supporting VBA programming in Office.

The guide to installing the VB6 IDE on Windows 7 has had 395,000 views. And 50,000 views of the equivalent guide for Windows 8.

Clearly VB6 programming is going to be around for many years, possibly outlasting VBdotNet.

And what did become the next VB6 ? The answer clearly is JavaScript.

The “C” in C# is really a bracket. It was going to be called “Bracket#” because of the extreme number of brackets they make you put in the language but it didn’t sound as cool.

I think having lots of ( { [ makes developers think higher of themselves. I also think that young graduate developers like to specialise in new languages so they get a leg up on older (35+) developers.

Oh…you’re a guru from way back in VB5 days? How are you still coding? PS. I’m struggling with these ridiculous MS Office macros.

We’ll soon end up like COBOL developers and earn $350/hour :sunglasses:

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And here it is, 14 years after this article was posted, and VB.NET is alive and well. :laughing:

I’ve been coding since roughly 1996 in a hundred different languages including C#, and I still prefer to use VB.NET over many other languages including C#. It’s just more enjoyable to me, and at least in my case, I’ve never found a single use case where I couldn’t do something I wanted to do in VB that was do-able in C#.

LONG LIVE VB! :heart:

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