Let's ask MS to make VB6 open source!

As Microsoft decided to discontinue VB6 a long time ago, don't you think it would be in the interest of the thousands (millions?) of developers who are still using it to urge them to make that old product of theirs open source?

If they did, they would show great consideration for their customers and it would certainly pay off in terms of reputation, professionalism and sensitiveness to our requests.

After all, they have decided to make VB.NET Express Edition free, which is a much more powerful product, so it shouldn't take much for them to please their customers by giving away a development tool they have trashed and with which they now make no money at all.

Any comments will be appreciated.

http://weblogs.asp.net/guybarrette/a...en-source.aspx

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Originally Posted by gep13

http://weblogs.asp.net/guybarrette/a...en-source.aspx

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I like one of the comments made to the blog you have posted:

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If they did Windows would not die a humble death in the future. it is only still around because old VB6 software still runs on it.

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There is too much current software based on it. If they made it open-source, it would only be a small step before the runtimes were ported to linux and a simple patch would then make most of the current vb6 programs linux native. If you are that interested in basic, look up darkbasic.

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Originally Posted by Lord Orwell

There is too much current software based on it. If they made it open-source, it would only be a small step before the runtimes were ported to linux and a simple patch would then make most of the current vb6 programs linux native. If you are that interested in basic, look up darkbasic.

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What difference would it make for MS, considering they are not interested in VB6 anymore? After all, they have allowed Linux to run .NET software using Mono. So, why should they be afraid of VB6 Linux native software?

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Originally Posted by Lord Orwell

If you are that interested in basic, look up darkbasic.

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Like many other VB6 developers (actually, I think the majority of them), I'm not interested in Basic but in Visual Basic, i.e. I want a programming environment that makes my VB6 code and forms open up when I double-click on one of my .vbp files.

Hey,

I am not looking at starting a VB6/VB.Net flame war here, there have already been too much of those, but I am going to put this out there....

Is there anything stopping you from moving to developing in VB.Net? As you have mentioned, the Express Edition are completely free.

Gary

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gep13

Hey,

I am not looking at starting a VB6/VB.Net flame war here, there have already been too much of those, but I am going to put this out there....

Is there anything stopping you from moving to developing in VB.Net? As you have mentioned, the Express Edition are completely free.

Gary

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Well, I think I have explained my reasons for it in tens of posts. Basically, what stops me from switching to .NET is, above all, the fact that my software must also be used on pendrives/flashdrives and the .NET Framework would not allow anything like that.

Hey,

What does this software do?

Given the correct permissions, a .Net Application can be run from a USB Drive.

Gary

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Originally Posted by gep13

Hey,

What does this software do?

Given the correct permissions, a .Net Application can be run from a USB Drive.

Gary

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Only if the Framework has been installed, can a .NET application be run from a pendrive. The problem is, I don't know whether the user has installed it or not, nor do I want to force him or her to install it. To make a long story short, my application must be a native one if I want to be sure that the final user will be able to run it without installation.

Granted, yes, the .Net Framework needs to be installed, however, it is becoming more and more common for the Framework to be installed, as it ships with the base OS.

I take your point though, that you can't rely on it being there.

Gary

Wow, what brings this very same topic up so often? I'm referring specifically to the "VB6 to open source" topic itself.

A long time ago when it became clear VB6 was the end of the line and we'd never get successors in the product line I used to be interested in such a possibility. But I became convinced quickly it wouldn't ever happen, and as time goes on even more convinced it wouldn't buy us much.

One reason I say this is I'm pretty unimpressed with the level of sophistication I see in open source software aside from products that have major corporate underwriting, whether behind the scenes or publicly.

I have also looked pretty hard at many of the alternatives to Visual Basic including commercial products. I don't mean they aren't worthy efforts, but despite so much criticism of the flaws of VB6 (I refer to the state of the IDE, compiler, and standard component suite - not the language) it remains the gold standard even for Microsoft's current offerings. A lot of highly-focused work was done on that product line going back to QuickBasic/PDS on MS-DOS.

Most of the AlsoBasics are pretty shabby. While some of them are excellent in niche areas (more optimal compilation of straight-line crunching code for example) overall they're still rather primitive and ragged. They're mostly relegated to DOS-style game programmers who refused to ever embrace the way Windows programs are supposed to be constructed.

Another reason is that in a lot of ways Windows is Visual Basic and Visual Basic is Windows. Yes, an outrageous statement, but there is a close coupling between the two things - at least between VB and the layers of Windows above the kernel and Win32 API. This means that it would be difficult to produce certain kinds of improvements to VB without corresponding improvements in higher-level parts of Windows. IIS, IE, COM+, MSMQ, MSXML, WinHTTP, DirectX, the list goes on and on... all have major VB-oriented "plumbing" in them. These things are no longer being enhanced with VB in mind though, which is starting to become a problem because less effort is made on this plumbing every new Windows release.


My point is simply that I don't think Microsoft has any interest in releasing the codebase as open source, and I do not expect the community that might spring up to support it to be capable of doing a decent job. Major software products like VB that have lived through an extensive period of evolution result in a codebase that just isn't easy for a random person to tinker with effectively.

By now Microsoft has lost the knowledge itself, whether through employees leaving or moving on to work on other things for a decade. This is evident from the extremely poor quality we have seen in some of the more recently released security updates to VB6 component libraries. As they produce "security fixes" bugs have been introduced that are so bad they render the controls useless. Some of these have been re-released three times and still have terrible bugs. We even saw this in the first release of VB6 SP6, which was so problematic some people won't move beyond SP5 to this day even though the re-release of SP6 long, long ago addressed the issues.

As far as I'm aware you can still develop programs in vb6.0 because Microsoft have allowed the new operating systems, etc to support it. Also, like others have mentioned there are a lot of people around still using vb6.0 (maybe even earlier technology) that haven't switch to vb.net, etc.

You can (and many of us do) still use VB6 programs even up through Windows 7.

There are lots of places where support is thin though. Microsoft dropped VB6 support in DirectX, they never made it easy to use reg-free COM, "XP style" theme support is minimal and indirect, we haven't seen support for SOAP and Web Services evolve beyond the old SOAP Toolkit 3.0, we never got IPv6 and P2P support, the new system controls and dialogs in Windows XP and beyond have no VB6-friendly wrappers, you can forget about compiling code for 64-bit execution, support is basically non-existant in Azure. We were supposed to get an enhanced "embedded VB" for CE and Windows Mobile...

... the list goes on and on.

It is beyond dispute that MS have dropped support for VB6. They have invested so much time and effort in .NET that, in my opinion, they would never consider the idea of going back on their decision.

The only hope VB6 die-hards like me may still have is that MS could yield to the pleas of the thousands of VB6 developers around the world and give away the source code. Many will say that the chances of something like that taking place are pretty slim but, in any case, I think it is worth a try. That was the reason why I started this thread.

Well, if you convert all your vb6.0 programs to .net by rewritting them then you'll never have to go back to vb6.0.

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Originally Posted by dilettante

You can (and many of us do) still use VB6 programs even up through Windows 7.

There are lots of places where support is thin though. Microsoft dropped VB6 support in DirectX, they never made it easy to use reg-free COM, "XP style" theme support is minimal and indirect, we haven't seen support for SOAP and Web Services evolve beyond the old SOAP Toolkit 3.0, we never got IPv6 and P2P support, the new system controls and dialogs in Windows XP and beyond have no VB6-friendly wrappers, you can forget about compiling code for 64-bit execution, support is basically non-existant in Azure. We were supposed to get an enhanced "embedded VB" for CE and Windows Mobile...

... the list goes on and on.

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Out of interest....

...how much VB6 development do you do?

When I first started out developing, I did a couple VB6 applications, and then my company switched to doing .Net, and since then we have never had to do anymore.

Do you get clients coming to ask you specifically that they want something done in VB6, or is this a preference of your company?

With all the problems that you just listed, and obviously more that you haven't, I am curious as to why there hasn't been a switch.

Gary

I just found out something that makes me think they will NEVER do this. They just finally quit selling licenses to windows 3.1 last year! If they are still selling vb6 licenses to schools and such, they aren't going to give up a source of income.

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Originally Posted by Lord Orwell

I just found out something that makes me think they will NEVER do this. They just finally quit selling licenses to windows 3.1 last year! If they are still selling vb6 licenses to schools and such, they aren't going to give up a source of income.

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Yeah, I've noticed a lot of new people in the vb6 and earlier section. Some of those people are being taught vb5.0 and 6.0 in their classes even though it is now 2010.

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Originally Posted by Lord Orwell

I just found out something that makes me think they will NEVER do this. They just finally quit selling licenses to windows 3.1 last year! If they are still selling vb6 licenses to schools and such, they aren't going to give up a source of income.

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They are still selling VB6 to schools?!? Really?!?

That really surprises me. Especially since there are free editions of Visual VB.Net, C# and Web Developer, why would schools not opt to teach their student .Net?

Gary

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Originally Posted by gep13

They are still selling VB6 to schools?!? Really?!?

That really surprises me. Especially since there are free editions of Visual VB.Net, C# and Web Developer, why would schools not opt to teach their student .Net?

Gary

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Gary, have you ever thought of the possibility that some people may not want their programs to depend on a huge Framework and may consider native software quicker and less cumbersome than .NET applications?

When those people quit using VB6, they will very likely not switch to .NET but to any other programming language that allows them to produce native software, such as Delphi, RealBasic and the like.

So, don't be surprised if many schools and developers who are their own bosses -- as I am -- are still using VB6 and refuse to take .NET into any consideraton. It's just because these two programming languages are two completely different kettles of fish. It's as if you were surprised because someone refused to abandon Windows and switch to Linux.

Hey,

As I mentioned previously, I am not trying to start another VB6/.Net flame war, so I am not going to say anymore on that subject.

I was merely trying to understand why they are still teaching VB6 in school's. As you have correctly pointed out, there are alternatives out there for creating native code, that are actively being supported and updated, so why would schools choose to teach something that is effectively "dead". To my mind, this makes no sense whatsoever.

Gary

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Originally Posted by gep13

I was merely trying to understand why they are still teaching VB6 in schools. As you have correctly pointed out, there are alternatives out there for creating native code, that are actively being supported and updated, so why would schools choose to teach something that is effectively "dead". To my mind, this makes no sense whatsoever.

Gary

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Obviously, because learning VB6 is a piece of cake in comparison with other programming languages. A beginner may start being productive in less than a week. MS committed a serious crime when they decided to discontinue it... and they will surely pay for it (are they already paying?).

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Originally Posted by esposito

Obviously, because learning VB6 is a piece of cake in comparison with other programming languages. A beginner may start being productive in less than a week.

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I would like to see the evidence to back this statement up.

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Originally Posted by gep13

I would like to see the evidence to back this statement up.

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It took me a couple of days to teach my wife how to manage a database in VB6. I started teaching her how to do the same in Delphi more than two months ago and she still gets mixed up with all those "begin...end" statements, commas and semi-colons.

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Originally Posted by Nightwalker83

Yeah, I've noticed a lot of new people in the vb6 and earlier section.

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Right now, for example, there are 82 viewers in the VB6 and Earlier section against 42 (about half as many!) in the Visual Basic .NET one. Long live VB6!

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Originally Posted by gep13

Out of interest....

...how much VB6 development do you do?

When I first started out developing, I did a couple VB6 applications, and then my company switched to doing .Net, and since then we have never had to do anymore.

Do you get clients coming to ask you specifically that they want something done in VB6, or is this a preference of your company?

With all the problems that you just listed, and obviously more that you haven't, I am curious as to why there hasn't been a switch.

Gary

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I'd have to say that the bulk of Windows programming being done around me is C# and VB.Net now. Up until two years ago I was programming in C# most of the time on Windows myself.

Then a strange thing happened.

Problems were being brought to me, programs written by other people. Most of these had been written by vendor contractors to handle specific situations that involved interoperation between Windows and other OSs. Suddenly an emergency arose. A critical server running the application had failed and was rebuilt and running, but something must be done now.

The "something now" was to write a VB6 Service to do the same job. I ripped out the Web Service interface and went with a lighter protocol that the non-Windows systems could easily handle. No more bulky HTTP. No more bloated SOAP. In two weeks I had one EXE, one DLL, and a clean Installer MSI that could be deployed every time. After one week of parallel runs it went into production. It was 1/3 as many lines of code and performance was 12 times as fast as the former .Net application, and it was running on a less powerful server!


There has been little letup since then. Demand has come from all over to rip and replace .Net applications in these sorts of roles.

Not all of the benefits come from using VB6. There are simply a lot of bad programmers out there. But .Net leads people down a path of ineffiency both in technology (managed code penalty, Web Services and WCF, interop and P/Invoke) and architectural habits ("drunk on OOP" mentality, gratuitous multithreading).

Schools can't just change their cirriculmn overnight... there's certifications involved and it has to be in compliance with what other schools are doing. This is what makes grades and credits transferrable. If I take a.NET class at a local university, then transfer to another one that doesn't have a .NET cirriculm I lose out... those grades will not transfer. Changing development languages - changing ANYthing about course work isn't easy. That's why VB6 is still in use in a lot of educational places.

Esposito - All that means is that twice as many people have problems with VB6 than they do with VB.NET. And just because some one is viewing one forum vs another doesn't mean squat.

As for VB going open source... even if it were to happen, it's written in C. Those that would be interested in keeping VB6 around so they could use it would need to learn C to keep it alive. Somehow I don't see that happening. The legions of VB users out there do so for a reason, so we wouldn't have to use C/C++ .... If I'm going to learn C to just keep VB alive, then I might as well switch to C and get the benefits of that.

-tg

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Originally Posted by techgnome

Schools can't just change their cirriculmn overnight... there's certifications involved and it has to be in compliance with what other schools are doing. This is what makes grades and credits transferrable. If I take a.NET class at a local university, then transfer to another one that doesn't have a .NET cirriculm I lose out... those grades will not transfer. Changing development languages - changing ANYthing about course work isn't easy. That's why VB6 is still in use in a lot of educational places.

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Here in Italy school syllabuses are quite flexible and a teacher may decide which language to use in his classes without any restrictions. In spite of the shortage of money that Italian state schools have to face up to, the majority of them (at least, those that I know) have not switched to teaching .NET yet and still prefer expensive programming languages for native code software to the .NET free Express editions.

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Esposito - All that means is that twice as many people have problems with VB6 than they do with VB.NET. And just because some one is viewing one forum vs another doesn't mean squat.

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On the contrary, I think that the more people use a language, the more probable it is to find someone who needs help with it.

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As for VB going open source... even if it were to happen, it's written in C. Those that would be interested in keeping VB6 around so they could use it would need to learn C to keep it alive. Somehow I don't see that happening. The legions of VB users out there do so for a reason, so we wouldn't have to use C/C++ .... If I'm going to learn C to just keep VB alive, then I might as well switch to C and get the benefits of that.

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You probably ignore the Lazarus project, that is the exact negation of what you have stated.

I've used Lazarus and Delphi. Lazarus is no Delphi, and Delphi is no VB6. Neither Basic or Pascal is a perfect programming language, but nothing is. I have nothing against Pascal or any other member of the Algol language family.

I think it comes down to having a large enough group of high-powered folks to develop and support complex software like compilers, IDEs, and the libraries and utilities that go along with them.


I use NS Basic (both Desktop and CE versions) for side projects. This is a commercial product, but it has many warts that require as many or more workarounds. The company is very responsive to good bug reports, but non-bug "warts" take a backseat. They have other products to develop and support as well, and a small company only has limited resources. I wouldn't even be using their products except they let me do things I can't do as easily otherwise. On the plus side since they are based on VBScript these products are very easy for a VB6 programmer to use and they even have IDEs much like VB6's.

I mention this because working with them compared to working in VB6 is a lot like using Delphi and Lazarus side by side. My concern is that an open source Basic based on the VB6 source code would probably end up just as ragged very quickly.

That doesn't mean I'm against the idea in any way. I just have low expectations.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by esposito

Right now, for example, there are 82 viewers in the VB6 and Earlier section against 42 (about half as many!) in the Visual Basic .NET one. Long live VB6!

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Oh look, I think VB6 is losing popularity:

Attachment 76725

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dilettante

I'd have to say that the bulk of Windows programming being done around me is C# and VB.Net now. Up until two years ago I was programming in C# most of the time on Windows myself.

Then a strange thing happened.

Problems were being brought to me, programs written by other people. Most of these had been written by vendor contractors to handle specific situations that involved interoperation between Windows and other OSs. Suddenly an emergency arose. A critical server running the application had failed and was rebuilt and running, but something must be done now.

The "something now" was to write a VB6 Service to do the same job. I ripped out the Web Service interface and went with a lighter protocol that the non-Windows systems could easily handle. No more bulky HTTP. No more bloated SOAP. In two weeks I had one EXE, one DLL, and a clean Installer MSI that could be deployed every time. After one week of parallel runs it went into production. It was 1/3 as many lines of code and performance was 12 times as fast as the former .Net application, and it was running on a less powerful server!


There has been little letup since then. Demand has come from all over to rip and replace .Net applications in these sorts of roles.

Not all of the benefits come from using VB6. There are simply a lot of bad programmers out there. But .Net leads people down a path of ineffiency both in technology (managed code penalty, Web Services and WCF, interop and P/Invoke) and architectural habits ("drunk on OOP" mentality, gratuitous multithreading).

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That is quite an interesting turn of events.

Although I agree with some of what you are saying, I think a lot of it comes down to "how" something is written. All of the technologies that you have mentioned have there place, however, it is all to easy to see these being misused.

Gary

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Originally Posted by techgnome

Schools can't just change their cirriculmn overnight... there's certifications involved and it has to be in compliance with what other schools are doing. This is what makes grades and credits transferrable. If I take a.NET class at a local university, then transfer to another one that doesn't have a .NET cirriculm I lose out... those grades will not transfer. Changing development languages - changing ANYthing about course work isn't easy. That's why VB6 is still in use in a lot of educational places.

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That is a good point, I hadn't thought of it like that.

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Originally Posted by gep13

Oh look, I think VB6 is losing popularity:

Attachment 76725

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Considering that VB6 was released more than a decade ago, it is amazing that in the year 2010 we still have popular discussion forums dedicated to it. On the contrary, what should make MS worry is the fact that in these forums the viewers of the VB6 section often outnumber those visiting the .NET one.

I find your reasoning lacking. Given that I have looked at your site the applications there do not need to be ran on a flash drive, your using it as a selling point. In fact there is no software that needs to be ran from a flash drive, Why would you bother? With current technology it is more than easy to develop feature rich web apps or have a data store on a flash drive. Poor broadband, that's a governmental issue not a software one, sign a partition and get on with it.

Your site looks terrible and the screen shots of your applications look awful too. I am sure they run perfectly but they remind me of why VB6 should burn forever, terribly designed applications that caused a whole slew of mishmashed rubbish that runs corporations.

On the subject of ease. Software should not be easy because it is not an easy task. Corporations are forever putting software second and then they wonder why budgets go up and applications fail, of course they do when you have some rent a monkeys on the job for a few weeks. VB6 had some fantastic examples of software but also some of the worst. It is your breed that make managers think it is acceptable to "code by the hour". VB6 is the very reason that software lost its "art form" status and now you have sites like rent a coder looking for full CMS software for less than 100 dollars.

I'm sure you are a fantastic software developer and make a nice amount of money but do not come in here and tell me that MS trying to drag software, kicking and screaming into the 21st century where design is as important as functionality and software takes time and planning, was all a big mistake.

Oh and if you think this is all an il thought out rant look at the iPhone, with its rather large framework. You know none of that fanciness is built into objective C.

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

I find your reasoning lacking. Given that I have looked at your site the applications there do not need to be ran on a flash drive, your using it as a selling point. In fact there is no software that needs to be ran from a flash drive, Why would you bother? With current technology it is more than easy to develop feature rich web apps or have a data store on a flash drive. Poor broadband, that's a governmental issue not a software one, sign a partition and get on with it.

Your site looks terrible and the screen shots of your applications look awful too. I am sure they run perfectly but they remind me of why VB6 should burn forever, terribly designed applications that caused a whole slew of mishmashed rubbish that runs corporations.

On the subject of ease. Software should not be easy because it is not an easy task. Corporations are forever putting software second and then they wonder why budgets go up and applications fail, of course they do when you have some rent a monkeys on the job for a few weeks. VB6 had some fantastic examples of software but also some of the worst. It is your breed that make managers think it is acceptable to "code by the hour". VB6 is the very reason that software lost its "art form" status and now you have sites like rent a coder looking for full CMS software for less than 100 dollars.

I'm sure you are a fantastic software developer and make a nice amount of money but do not come in here and tell me that MS trying to drag software, kicking and screaming into the 21st century where design is as important as functionality and software takes time and planning, was all a big mistake.

Oh and if you think this is all an il thought out rant look at the iPhone, with its rather large framework. You know none of that fanciness is built into objective C.

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I would look at the iphone framework but it only runs on mac.

And i really don't understand your rant against vb6. How is it intrinsically worse than vb5 or 4? For that matter, it actually was one of the first programs that let you use a gui to design YOUR gui. For me at least, it's pretty friggin hard to design a good gui in c due to all the manual math. wysiwyg designing like vb pioneered make it so much easier. I code completely differently now. I design the user interface first and the code follows naturally from there. Plus let's not forget it is one of the forefront pioneers of object oriented programming.

Really, if you have such a problem with vb, you should take a step backwards and look at its predecessors.

and yeah, it came across not only as a rant, but as a personal attack on a fellow coder and developer. Please refrain from such behaviour. This is not a chit-chat thread and even if it were personal attacks like that will get you banned.

@ gep 13

:lol: However, those results are misleading because most people require sleep and when that happens the numbers are bound to drop.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lord Orwell

For that matter, it actually was one of the first programs that let you use a gui to design YOUR gui. For me at least, it's pretty friggin hard to design a good gui in c due to all the manual math. wysiwyg designing like vb pioneered make it so much easier.

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I agree! The visual languages have certainly made it easier for some people when designing their programs, rather than having to guess the location where the object would appear on the screen.

It WAS good, originally. It is not now, it is past it's sell by date and has been for some time. And no it was not a personal attack against a member but rather an honest opinion. I have not slandered a fellow member I have stated my opinion on the look of his products and his reasoning behind why VB6 is superior in his view. If my opinion seems obtuse it is because I do not feel I should skirt around an issue just because my opinion is at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Referring to VB6 with any relevancy is foolish, it is a legacy language built on poor practices. One only has to look at all of the string and chewing gum holding half of the cooperate world's LOB applications together to see it was not a great language, it merely offered unparalleled speed in terms of development but we are paying for that means to an end now with people having to maintain poorly built systems.

Also if Esposito feels I have attacked his integrity I apologies but I will not say sorry for being critical for ones work that is freely available online.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

Referring to VB6 with any relevancy is foolish, it is a legacy language built on poor practices...

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Define "poor practices".

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

... but we are paying for that means to an end now with people having to maintain poorly built systems.

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"poorly built systems" can be done in any language.

Examples of poor practices that I have actually come across are:

• "Glueing" VB6 code to C++ code to have a GUI.
• Development of applications around GUI's (any large system cannot support this type of development)
• Massing of poor code styles and seriously questionable hacks.

These are just items from 1 system I work with on a daily basis. I agree that systems can be poorly built in any language but VB6 was the proverbial gold rush when it came to cheaply developed poorly designed systems. It is not that I am even a .Net fan boy. I think python got it right in terms of an extendible language VB6 did not. The fact that it had RAD development papered over some serious design flaws in the implementation of the language.

I am not even sure why people are surprised .NET came about. All it was in essence was a major clean up. If it had not been branded .NET and simply called the VB7 runtime with no C# none of these arguments would have happened.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

• "Glueing" VB6 code to C++ code to have a GUI.

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??? :confused:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

• Development of applications around GUI's (any large system cannot.

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??? :confused:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

• Massing of poor code styles and seriously questionable hacks.

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??? :confused:

We've managed to drag this off into the weeds with secondary topics.

All he was trying to do was drum up enthusiasm among existing VB6 programmers for the idea of trying to get Microsoft to release the source code for the VB6 system. I just think it (a.) will never happen and (b.) might not lead to good results. But I'm not against the idea.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

I am not even sure why people are surprised .NET came about. All it was in essence was a major clean up. If it had not been branded .NET and simply called the VB7 runtime with no C# none of these arguments would have happened.

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I think you have that entirely wrong.

Anders always hated VB with a passion, since it wiped Turbo Pascal off the map. He started his "VB Killer" project that produced Delphi. Delphi was never able to put a serious dent in VB market share, attracting many bitter anti-Microsoft people to its community.

Anders was hired by Microsoft and created Visual J++, a private Java clone. Adoption rates by developers were minimal. Sun sued Microsoft and won, destroying VJ++ forever.

Yet Anders wanted to create another private version of Java. With input from the lawyers Project COOL was undertaken.

His hands near the throat of VB now, he decided to (successfully) lobby for its demise. He found accomplices, many from the VFoxPro team who also despised VB. They produced C# and "VB.Net" and sold it to the bigshots.

What you have is a fancy Java clone and a VB-like alternative language for the CLR/JVM.

Some of this is documented, other parts are hearsay. It is now 2010 and the game is long over.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nightwalker83

@ gep 13

:lol: However, those results are misleading because most people require sleep and when that happens the numbers are bound to drop.

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It would appear that you are missing the point that I was trying to make. The number of people viewing the forums at any point in time, can't be used as an indication of how well a particular language is doing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dilettante

All he was trying to do was drum up enthusiasm among existing VB6 programmers for the idea of trying to get Microsoft to release the source code for the VB6 system. I just think it (a.) will never happen and (b.) might not lead to good results. But I'm not against the idea.

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(a) Agreed
(b) Agreed

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

Referring to VB6 with any relevancy is foolish, it is a legacy language built on poor practices. One only has to look at all of the string and chewing gum holding half of the cooperate world's LOB applications together to see it was not a great language, it merely offered unparalleled speed in terms of development but we are paying for that means to an end now with people having to maintain poorly built systems.

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Whether or not a program is great or really poor would have nothing (if anything) to do with the specific programming language. It would be more that the programmer was lacking it skill if anything.

RhinoBull: Your post makes no sense, if you choose to sit in the corner shouting I'm not listening when I give you the answers you asked for well then I cannot continue my debate with you. My three reasons are perfectly valid and can be made about a huge proportion of corporate applications I have viewed.

Dilettante: I agree with with your first point about drumming up support but I feel that bashing one of the most successful frameworks ever implemented by saying that publicly downloadable software is not feesable and that .Net is inferior to VB6 in every thread begins to grate after a while. I also think you took up my .Net statement the wrong way. I know Anders had a lot of input into .Nets inception but I do feel that Microsoft where going to take the .Net route in one form or another. The point I was trying to make was that somewhere along the line VB was eventually going to move from VB6's implementation, breaking it anyway.

Nightwalker83: Actually I disagree. Many languages offer features and implementations that help in the construction of a program. Granted VB6 was not designed to be a poor language it was certainly used that way. I use many VB6 programs on a daily basis that are terrible and have been written by IBM outsourced coders for big money so I am not talking about some backyard outfit here. All I can do is speak from experience!

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

I find your reasoning lacking. Given that I have looked at your site the applications there do not need to be ran on a flash drive, your using it as a selling point. In fact there is no software that needs to be ran from a flash drive, Why would you bother? With current technology it is more than easy to develop feature rich web apps or have a data store on a flash drive. Poor broadband, that's a governmental issue not a software one, sign a partition and get on with it.

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If my customers keep telling me that they are enthused about the fact they can easily transport my software from a computer to another, I'll continue to guarantee this functionality, in spite of what you think.

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Your site looks terrible and the screen shots of your applications look awful too. I am sure they run perfectly but they remind me of why VB6 should burn forever, terribly designed applications that caused a whole slew of mishmashed rubbish that runs corporations.

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Frankly speaking, I couldn't care less about your opinion concerning my Web site, firstly because my sales have doubled recently, secondly because the opinion of someone who speaks in an offensive way like you is as worthy of attention as that of someone who lives in a cave.

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On the subject of ease. Software should not be easy because it is not an easy task. Corporations are forever putting software second and then they wonder why budgets go up and applications fail, of course they do when you have some rent a monkeys on the job for a few weeks. VB6 had some fantastic examples of software but also some of the worst. It is your breed that make managers think it is acceptable to "code by the hour". VB6 is the very reason that software lost its "art form" status and now you have sites like rent a coder looking for full CMS software for less than 100 dollars.

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On the contrary, I think that our task should be to make software as easy as possible for the final users, because their daily lives are already full of worries and complications.

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

RhinoBull: Your post makes no sense, if you choose to sit in the corner shouting I'm not listening when I give you the answers you asked for well then I cannot continue my debate with you. My three reasons are perfectly valid and can be made about a huge proportion of corporate applications I have viewed.

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You didn't answer anything what so ever which was why I replied with "???". You have to stop attacking anything and everything and look around you and think for a change - things are not (and were not) as bad as you try to present them.

My best regards.

DeanMc,

you seem to have got yourself inordinately wound up about this thread, I can understand your personnel dislike of VB6, due to you experiencing lots of badly coded VB6 apps, but you have to remember that for many years vb6 has also been used perfectly successfully to design business applications.

You can write perfectly good code in vb6, it's biggest problem is that it also makes it easy to write bad code.

Personally i am not the biggest fan of VB6 (although i don't hate it) as many times i have had to support badly written (by someone else mind) VB6 apps much as you have said yourself, Still you must recognise that your experience is not necessary everyone else's experience.

Also i believe the reason RhinoBull Question marked your points is that everyone of them is about poor design or poor programming, and does not actually reflect directly on to VB6 they could have been about systems written in any language.

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Originally Posted by Lord Orwell

Plus let's not forget it is one of the forefront pioneers of object oriented programming.

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I may have misread this. Are you saying that VB6 was one of the forefront pioneers of OO programming? VB6 made no more than an afterthought nod towards it, and was nowhere near the forefront. I wouldn't say that .NET was near the forefront, either. So I'm not sure which language were you refering to?

As for the original question: It's hopeless. Has MS EVER supported open source ANYTHING? I can see the appeal, but the chances are so slim as to not be worth the attempt by any other than those who find windmills to be their favorite sparring partners.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

As for the original question: It's hopeless. Has MS EVER supported open source ANYTHING?

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Depends, as far as I am aware, they are "helping" with the Mono Project, i.e. the Open Source implementation of the .Net Framework.

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Originally Posted by gep13

Depends, as far as I am aware, they are "helping" with the Mono Project, i.e. the Open Source implementation of the .Net Framework.

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Yes, MS's support for Mono is a concrete reason for hope. People change and even MS may change their policy and approach to open source.

Their support for Mono is more open standards rather than open sourced. If it was truly open sourced, then their coding for .NET would truly be open and widely available. It isn't. What they have done is to make the specifications for .NET languages available and even walked C# through the standards boards. That's about as open sourced as it gets. And it's not even the source. Open specification is more like it.

-tg

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Originally Posted by gep13

It would appear that you are missing the point that I was trying to make. The number of people viewing the forums at any point in time, can't be used as an indication of how well a particular language is doing.

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That would be true if I were talking in general sense but I was referring to this forum.

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

Nightwalker83: Actually I disagree. Many languages offer features and implementations that help in the construction of a program. Granted VB6 was not designed to be a poor language it was certainly used that way. I use many VB6 programs on a daily basis that are terrible and have been written by IBM outsourced coders for big money so I am not talking about some backyard outfit here. All I can do is speak from experience!

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So it would have to do whether then programmer was skillful enough to know how/why to use those features, etc. Bad programmer = Bad program.

I'm not sure that it is as simple as Bad programmer = Bad program. There are loads of new things coming out in .NET. The alphabet soup of technologies is growing at a fast pace. As an example, I have been playing around with the Entity Framework. There are several neat features to the EF, to be sure, but there is not a single thing there that couldn't be written without using the EF, and that is true for many of the technologies. The point to the EF is that it solves a problem that is not a coding problem, in that you could write a program that does the same thing with or without the EF. What the EF is solving is a management and organization problem which any given person may or may not believe exists. You can create entities that represent the data, and have a somewhat easier means to update data from these entities back to the database. The same result can be achieved by using tableadapters, dataadapters, or even just commands and raw SQL. However, the EF attempts to automate lots of the code away. Once you are familiar with the EF, you can bind a UI to a DB much quicker than you might with the other technologies. On the other hand, the EF has a large amount of code that is generated automatically. All of this code is useful in some situations, and nearly all of this code is useless in some other situations. However, you get it all.

So a good programmer with a good understanding of the EF may well build a program based on EF, and do so rapidly. They may have the ability to build the same program without using the EF, but chose to use the EF because it was quicker to get the program built rather than writing code to replicate the things that the EF code does. However, the resulting program will be good by some metrics and bad by others, regardless of the capability of the programmer. They may have had speed of development and low failure rate as the metrics they cared about, and they may well have achieved an admirable result by those metrics, yet runtime performance may have suffered as a result, so if you care more about that, then the program isn't so good.

And so forth. My basic point is that there is so much technology that can be thrown at a problem that it is becoming increasingly important to understand how you will measure success just in deciding which technologies to apply.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

I'm not sure that it is as simple as Bad programmer = Bad program. There are loads of new things coming out in .NET. The alphabet soup of technologies is growing at a fast pace. As an example, I have been playing around with the Entity Framework. There are several neat features to the EF, to be sure, but there is not a single thing there that couldn't be written without using the EF, and that is true for many of the technologies. The point to the EF is that it solves a problem that is not a coding problem, in that you could write a program that does the same thing with or without the EF. What the EF is solving is a management and organization problem which any given person may or may not believe exists. You can create entities that represent the data, and have a somewhat easier means to update data from these entities back to the database. The same result can be achieved by using tableadapters, dataadapters, or even just commands and raw SQL. However, the EF attempts to automate lots of the code away. Once you are familiar with the EF, you can bind a UI to a DB much quicker than you might with the other technologies. On the other hand, the EF has a large amount of code that is generated automatically. All of this code is useful in some situations, and nearly all of this code is useless in some other situations. However, you get it all.

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However, how can you blame the code if it can't make decisions on it's own and has to have input from someone in order to work correctly (unless, the code writes itself). Although, if I understand what you are getting at yes, you can only go as far as the technology of the day will allow you to go.

i wasn't referring to vb6 being a pioneer, i was referring to visual basic in general (starting with 1.0 which ran in dos) being a pioneer. Although other languages precede it, none were near as widespread due to the fact that it's pretty darn hard to write anything object oriented in dos. VB did it with a fake (ascii-art) GUI you could put your apps in complete with buttons. And to make the transition easy from qbasic (which every windows install had up until winme) it was backwards compatible and could compile qbasic apps into .exe. But that's neither here nor there.

I have serious doubts to any ibm coders programming anything in vb6. Cobol seems to be their preferred language, and if you are programming specifically for business use, it is actually easier to use than vb due to the focused design. And cobol is far from dead and it is still being taught an my local university, whereas vb6 is NOT.

And DEANMC, opinions are like butts. Everyone has one and they all stink. That's fine if you wish to criticize (for example) my website, but where do you come off doing a rant like that when it wasn't even the thread topic? This thread is so far off topic now it wouldn't amaze me if it got closed. This is not a chit-chat thread, it's general developer, and i can't believe it hasn't been edited for content by a moderator already with a stern warning all around for everyone.

I can't see MS releasing B6 as OpenSource. For one thing, MS guard their intellectual property with more spit than Cerberus. But also, MS don't want you to continue writing in VB6. They want you to switch to one flavour or another of .Net. Should MS be worried that there are people still using our VB6 forum? Yes. When nobodies using it they'll be happy because it will indicate that those who remain addicted to VB6 having finally kicked their habits.

Eposito, the argument you give for sticking with VB6 (you want to run from a pen drive) is valid... for you. But the point I think you're missing is that you represent a tiny minority. For the vast majority of us VB.Net is more suitable. The vast bulk of people who are still using VB6 are doing so, not because of a genuine technological reason, but rather due to inertia. They've got apps that are already in VB6 that they don't want to port. They've got developers who are trained in VB6 who'd need to be retrained. Often VB6 is just "what we do around here". Given that MS would really like to get all those developers onto .Net, why would they release 6 as open source? Sure, they might please you and a very few others who have a genuine reason not to use .Net but they lose the opportunity to prod the foot draggers forward. In the end they just deem that, from a business point of view, you're not important enough to matter.

Have you looked at the compact framework? I have no experience of it at all so this might be a red herring but it would be the first thing I'd look at if I were in your position.

Also, I looked at your site. It looked fine to me but there's all this strange alien writing all over it. which I couldn't understand I panicked, got scared and closed it down.:p