Advice me please..What tool is good for me..

[arunb]

Hi,

I need your advise on which Development tool is the best for me.

For some years now I have been using Visual Basic 6.0 for developing applications mostly for real time data acquisitions, machine control etc.

The programs generally use a serial port for communication with the external world.

I find Visual Basic 6.0 best suited for me because
(1). This was my first language.
(2). It has the best IDE\
(3). It has all the GUI components required to make a good windows application.

The most important of all, it has the MSCOMM control that makes communication with the external world easy, I have tried other development tools such as FreePascal etc. and have found that they lack a serial port class or DLLs that supports events as the MSCOMM control.

Kindly advise whether VB.NET is OK, is the learning curve to steep even for Visual Basic developers...

I have also developed several controls/ standard codes using visual basic, so naturally I may be biased towards using a VB compliant tool.

thanks
aa

[Hack]

I would strongly suggest VB.NET 2008 - it not only is the lastest iteration of Visual Basic, but the price for the Express version can't be beat - its free!

[DeanMc]

I find that the .net variant of VB is much better than VB 6 or below. I think that has more to do with the consistency of the framework though. I also find that there are less quirks in .net as opposed to VB 6.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

Yes it would seem from your post that the natural progression for you would be vb.net.

And no the learning curve is fairly simple for an experienced VB developer, as it is the next iteration of VB.

Also you should have access to pretty much all the classes and controls you had in VB6, and the IDE will look rather familiar for a VB user to.

[Hack]

I also find that there are less quirks in .net as opposed to VB 6.

I wouldn't go that far...the quirks are different to be sure, but I'm not certain VB6 has more.

Both have their...hmmm..."interesting features".

[techgnome]

Isn't that the definition of an upgrade?

Upgrade: (v) - To take out old bugs, put new ones in.

-tg

[DeanMc]

Very true techgnome, I suppose I agree to a degree hack, there are a great many VBism's in the .net universe too.

[arunb]

I Just downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2008 express edition, i found the IDE excellent.

Id the VB 2008 a compiler based language or an interpreter ??, I thought the application execution is faster in VB 2008 than VB 6

thanks
aa

[DeanMc]

Its compiled on the fly by a compiler called the JIT (Just In Time) compiler. It doesn't compile into machine code it compiles into MIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language), think java byte code. From there it is compiled into machine code as needed, optimised for each processer. This is all handled by the CLR (Common Language Runtime) which is the little fuzzy bit of the .Net framework that makes it special.