The future of VB and Microsoft

[steel]

Hello all. I've been a VB programmer for a couple of months now and I absolutely love it. I'm 24 and plan on making a career move to VB programming. Though with all of the press lately about Microsoft and the Justice Depart. having to stop the negotiating. (In fact Judge Jackson is set to deliver is verdict today at 5:00 pm. ET) I just hope this does not effect the market in a way to hurt us programmers. Just curious on what are some of the thoughts from the more experienced programmers in this forum, thanks for any feedback.

Jonathan

[badgers]

I think that the verdict will be mostly monitary. The gov will just want cash. I remember reading all the hype about making MS post the source code but I do not think it will happen.
I do not think that VB is part of the anti-trust suit. Only MS operating systems are under the scope of the legal action.
It would be interesting to see what happens.
The dark side of me wants to see MS post the source code for the operating systems(98/NT/2000)
thank you for your time and have a good day

[Serge]

No matter what the verdict will be, you can never go wrong knowing VB. There are a lot of jobs out there for VB developers. Of course, try to learn VB in combination with databases. About 80% of VB jobs are database oriented.

Just my $0.02

[JorgeLedo]

Better than only knowing a language is to know many (but one, at least, deeply). Either way this is a business that is in constant evolution so you never really know what the future will bring you. For instance: I started developing in GCC/Unix and done that for a couple of years, suddenly I had to change to QBasic for about 6 months then to FoxPro then to Access then to C++ then to VCC and finaly I'm working on VBaisc from 4 years now. I've done some HTML and SQL things by the meantime. Nowadays I'm feeling pretty satisfied with my job (only programming and with a subject I like). So my adviec (my two cents), if of any value, is for you to concentrate in what you are doing and do it well, how you do it is of no matter. Because, as I usually teach, someone that is able to make a GOOD flowchart based on the needs of the customer is a good programmer. The rest any typist can do it.

P.S.: I hope no one gets me wrong for the typist thing.