After reading this post from beginning to end I tend to think Shaggy Hiker asked a good question back in post #21.
Any shift in programming technology forces the programmer to absorb new concepts.Quote:
...What are the objections to VB.NET...
Sometimes this is not possible to do all on your own.
The knee jerk reaction for many is frustration or some other emotional response usually ending in shelving any study in the new direction.
My programming skills are mostly self taught. I can remember coming up against OOP for the first time. I didn't get it at all.
I taught myself Borland's Turbo Pascal from versions 2.5 on up. I decided to ignore OOP and keep producing procedural programs.
The folks on programming bulletin boards (Internet and Forum precursors) complained mightily.
"How dare Borland make this change." "I'll jump ship to Microsoft first." Etc...
I also ignored Microsoft Windows and continued to use MS-DOS. Mainly because i didn't own windows at home.
Finally Windows 98 became the tool of choice at work then Win NT and i needed to write apps for myself at work.
The company owned a copy of VB5 that no one was using so I loaded it on my machine and was very unhappy.
The hurdle this time was event driven programming. Functions and SubRoutines. It was a whole new world.
I found someone to give me a couple of hours of personal tutoring to get me started. After that I made headway but still had trouble with other concepts.
By the time i upgraded to VB6 I was pretty comfortable with the product. I had 'discovered' the internet and programming forums.
I cannot say enough how grateful I am to the VB community and the generous folk that dwell here and on other forums.
They are the reason I believe in giving back by helping when and where I can.
I ignored VB.NET for quite a while.
I made the jump from mechanical engineering to software engineering and amazingly was getting paid to code.
Part of the resistance was I was usually under pressure to create apps in short order. I didn't feel I had the time. Period.
Again the good folk online helped to explain the differences. The reasonlng behind the changes. How I could leverage them.
Even so It took a long while to accept OOP. I think seeing how the namespaces and the native classes simplifed using tools
finally tipped me over the edge. Now I cannot imagine not using classes and inheritence.
I also ignored WPF in favor of WinForms. Again the concepts are not easy for me.
Lastly I would like to address the future of programming. Historically I rescricted myself to desktop programming.
Never learned how to write web apps. Zero background.
So the question on my mind is what happens when Microsoft decides to stop supporting desktop development?
All signs point to that as the eventual goal. How many of us will curse and complain or make the jump when this happens?

