Just curious if any VB6 coders still exist.... just a conversation of the old days.

I retired a little while ago, and started writing VB6 code again - just because I love the feel of the IDE and the fast snappy feeling. Most other IDE's seem so slow these days. So I installed Visual Studio 6 again on my windows 10 computers, and loving the programming world again! Hahaha

I found this site this year, and brings back so many memories. How many still use VB6 these days? For work or just for fun. I started making OpenGL games from Blender OBJ files, and the first thing I ran into was the lack of PNG support. (laughing - oh, how old this language is....) So, not wanting to use libraries, I wrote a PNG loading function so I can use those nice images purely within VB6. :-)

Slow as snot right now (takes like a minute for a 2024x2024 image), so I am going to see if I can speed things up since I wrote it to "understand" DEFLATE and PNG file structure, and Huffman decoding! Really fun if you like that sort of thing. Code is rather readable, function calls, and zero efficiencies so I can learn the logic.

Any other souls out there that like to do things like this? Or is it just my mind failing into the twilight zone? :-) Anyway, it's nice to see you all around here!

Still a few left. There's a VB6 subforum on this site, it's still active daily. If you haven't used it recently there's actually been a lot of advancements in the past 10 years pushing the limits and modernizing.

A lot of VB6 people are now moving to twinBASIC, which is essentially a de facto VB7... Backwards compatible but with a long long list of new features. Relevant to your comment, native PNG support and the delegates for call by pointer recently enabled me to add OpenGL support to my Windows API package (tick a box, no more declaring win32 APIs) for 1.2-4.6 plus ARB and EXT functions, and FreeGLUT. You'd see it all as normal functions complete with intellisense for arguments even though they're called from a pointer obtained from wglGetProcAddress. Plus the Windows-included 1.1 defs of course.

I get the nostalgia. Vb6 was actually after i'd been programming for multiple years as a hobbyist. I learned to program in basic on a c64 and that is Microsoft Basic 2.0. I moved on from there to QBasic when I finally got a PC. I actually started learning c because of how slow it was and discovered that vbdos could compile it. They created runtimes when they added windows support but we eventually got compile ability back. I was blown away the first time I managed to integrate with the mouse driver. I had the Microsoft Mouse programmer's reference guide, and it came with qbasic samples. There was apparently a way to embed assembly in qbasic in the comment areas and that's what their sample did. I've never seen anything like it since.
I'm 54 now and finally got a job programming about eight years ago, and it's in c#. That was a decently easy transition because of how similar the .net languages are, and I didn't even know c# when they hired me.

VB6 can have inline asm with an addin by The trick. tB has something close to embedded asm built in; it has Emit/EmitAny/StackOffset to insert raw bytecode and local vars into the final binary. Like

Code:

---

            Dim t As Double = m_spMediaEngine.GetCurrentTime()
            #If Win64 Then
                Emit(&HF2, &H0F, &H11, &H84, &H24): EmitAny(StackOffset(t)) 'movsd [rsp+StackOffset(t)], xmm0
            #End If
            Debug.Print "Emit_t=" & t

or

Public Function NtCurrentTeb CDecl Naked() As LongPtr
    #If Win64 Then
    Emit(&H65, &H48, &H8b, &H04, &H25, &H30, &H00)  'mov    rax,QWORD PTR gs:0x30
    Emit(&H00, &H00)
    Emit(&Hc3)                                      'ret     
    #Else
    Emit(&H64, &Ha1, &H18, &H00, &H00, &H00)    'mov    eax,fs:0x18
    Emit(&Hc3)                                  'ret
    #End If
End Function

    Public Function InterlockedIncrement CDecl Naked(Addend As Long) As Long
    #If Win64 Then
        Emit(&Hb8, &H01, &H00, &H00, &H00)        ' mov    eax,0x1
        Emit(&Hf0, &H0f, &Hc1, &H41, &H00)        ' lock xadd DWORD PTR [rcx+0x4],eax
        Emit(&Hff, &Hc0)                          ' inc    eax
        Emit(&Hc3)                                ' ret
    #Else
        Emit(&H8b, &H4c, &H24, &H04)      ' mov    ecx, DWORD PTR _Addend$[esp-4]
        Emit(&Hb8, &H01, &H00, &H00, &H00) ' mov    eax, 1
        Emit(&Hf0, &H0f, &Hc1, &H01)      ' lock xadd DWORD PTR [ecx], eax
        Emit(&H40)                        ' inc    eax
        Emit(&Hc3)                        ' ret    0
    #End If
    End Function

---

And Naked omits any built in prologue/epilogue

Ah! QBasic 4.5 - I have that installed on my Samsung tablet with a dosbox emulator. =) That always brings back the good old days.

Yes, I enjoy the VB6 environment because it feels so snappy still. I have an MSDN Enterprise subscription, so I have the newest VS environments, but they are progressively getting so stinking slow! I downloaded twinBasic since this site introduced me to it - pretty nice I must say.

I really enjoy using VB6 with little to no libraries. =) Except the ones I made eons ago. Anyone want a pure VB6 TCP/UDP socket class that uses direct winsock? LOL. I made that way back around 1997 because microsofts txp code sucked so bad. I use it for an old email service and hundreds of other projects. Wouldn't mind sharing if people actually wanted it. =)

But yes, my heart belongs to VB6, even though I know dozens of languages... I think the last count was slightly over 40. :D

i know what you mean but you get to the point where you start counting things other people don't consider actual languages. Is css a language? probably not, but I know it. I also know 8086 assembly, 6802 assembly (without a compiler), Commodore Basic, c# vb.net clipper, javascript, java, and so on, and now i'm going to have to learn kotlin. Stupid google...
I can also program in basic c and c++ as long as we are talking dos. I haven't done it in years though. I evan had a compiler at one time that compiled clipper, which is a dbase 3 compatible programming language. I don't think I want to learn any more.
VB 6, 5, 4 were my first introduction to windows programming. I miss that forms designer. vb1 was kind of cool and you should try to find it if you don't have it. It can compile qbasic programs into executables. I actually managed to tie into the mouse driver from inside qbasic to make a simple menu for our shop program.

Oh wow - I never know VB1 could compile QBasic! I wonder where I could even find that... must do a google search tonight! LOL Yes, I come from an electronic engineering, so my languages include things outside Windows like PLC's as well as SQL and Apple, Atari, ASM and CPU machine codes - (I lump it into ASM, like 6502, 8085, 8086, 68000, etc...) But for all of them, VB6 and Atari Basic are the top two I love since those started everything! First Atari, then later VB started my professional career. Hahaha!

Oh, the good old days - the young will never know the joys of programming all these simple machines...

Now, I am learning OpenGL Shading and CUDA language - but since I am not fluent, I don't count those! And I completely understand getting mouse to work in QBasic! I did that once for a RPG game I was making at the end of college. Never finished the game, as life kinda got in the way - but DOS interrupts were fun. Hahaha

Glad to meet everyone here - I am so glad I found this place. :-)

If you're interested I made recently made a demo of using OpenGL shaders in tB (it would work in VB6 but you'd need different OpenGL declares as it lacks the smooth function pointer delegates for wglGetProcAddress and ability to mark a class as an appobject so they're autoinitialized on use).

https://github.com/fafalone/OpenGLDe...n/GLShaderDemo

There are probably millions of VB6 programmers out there. They are called VBA programmers. The major difference is the coding is done in a Microsoft Office App with hooks and code unique to the apps and can not be easily compiled to a standalone executable but with a little work most project can be accomplished using either. I have been using VB since the 1990s.