VB6 is DEAD!

[Schmidt]

The company i was working for around 6-7 years ago was doing a lot of web development, and the guys i was working with were much more experienced then me, and we looked at Silverlight (and Flex the adobe alternative which we built a few extra-net sites in), and despite the benefits of both at the time, we decided that we wouldn't build any major apps in either of them.
The take up of the SilverLight plugin was an issue, and even though Flex targeted the Flash player, we saw the trend even then to move away from run-times in the web for business apps.

Then you started late enough, to notice the maturing of the HTML5/JS alternative.
Many companies still use Flash despite its existence.

And that's because of some tech-goodies which are still not easy to mimick with HTML5/JS -
and because Adobe still *supports* this developer-tool. My point was that there's many
vendors who take their responsibility more seriously with regards to those, who they expect
to invest a lot time and money around the tools they have to offer.

But I think, we have that well-established now - developer-tools, especially when being
languages, or thightly related to them, deserve a bit more caution from the vendors-side
with regards to the eco-systems which evolve around them - a thing MS was very careless
about in the last years.

So my point is the experienced Web Developers i worked with saw SilverLight as a dead end pretty early on, so using a tech like that (when it is still very new and has low adoption) is a risk that could have been avoided if you have the right people making the decisions.

Well, there's always a few who have a good gut-feeling, which later on turns out to be
the right one - still there's the petition with some 15000 votes, to bring back Silverlight -
cannot imagine, that each and everybody who voted there was not "enlightened enough" -
or should be belittled with "man, you should have seen HTML5 coming" ... some were
using it despite that - Browsers are still in need of a "better internal language" - CoffeeScript,
TypeScript are attempts which use JS as a kind of "IL" - but also Google is trying with
Chromes NaCl (native-client), to offer better programming for Browser-Clients.


[deployment]

Now i will have to flat out disagree with that statement. I have yet to have a .Net app where i had any install issues with at all really. Deployment has never as far as i am concerned been a problem with .Net apps, i have never seen a difference.

I wrote that it's still *easier* with VB6 (especially when you use regfree COM),
not that .NET had "issues" with deployment.

But your tone does comes across as pretty Anti .Net at times and you sometime seem to bundle all users of .net together as one entity, although this may have been just after one of Niya's posts :0)

I bring (as anybody else) reasons for why I'm personally don't use or like it -
trying very hard, to not write untruths whilst doing so.
And you're right - when I make "blanket statements" (which I normally dislike),
I do it mostly on purpose, in reply to another blanket statement, to point this
kind of stuff out to others.

You will see quite a lot of this approach here in this thread, where I hand out the
same "way of poor arguing" simply back to the one who came up with it first.

.NET is a good tool, it might not be a good tool for everyone but it does a good job for many others. For me it works well as a RAD development tool, the downsides which you point out, don't affect the business i work for (or my previous ones).

Now, if only more .NETers would see it the same way as you do - you can even
replace .NET with VB6 in the above sentence, and it still is true.

My point being, don't judge VB6ers that fast - there's a lot more reasons many
in your camp never considered, which play a role why they still use their tool.

Sorry when I try in the following, to shorten things a bit - this discussion eats
up too much of my time already - and many things start to become repetitive.

Since you became a collector of my "I agree" statements recently, maybe it will
make you happy when I come up with a few more of them:
- I agree, that .NET in the perception of customers has a better "ranking" than VB6.
- I agree, that there's more opportunities on the Job-market for .NET than for VB6.
There - why should I deny obvious facts, when they are brought up.


[provocations and banishments]

While i agree with you there , Carlos was not completely innocent in this thread and his arguments are not nearly as well constructed . He has tended to just say .Net is crap (which just as some of the comments you have found insulting, some .Net developers also found these insulting)

Carlos is not a native english-speaker, hard to walk the fine line between insults and
"stalwart replies" in such heated discussions (had and still have my own problems
with that) - aside from that, I never was a fan of the "it takes two to dance"-saying -
I'm a strong believer in causal-chains - find and remove the true cause, and a lot of
strange effects will never happen.

What about those starting out there career, or still studying?
the Job Market is very important i would say to many of them, i know it was to me, and they do have a choice.

There's a learning-phase which takes a few years, until you can consider taking up
a career as developer - and in the early phase, as a totally green Newbie, it doesn't
matter much, which tool to begin with - VB6 will do the Job (learning algorithms
and patterns) just fine (very good Debugger, Intellisense - any IDE with easy to
accomplish "try again differently"-cycles will bring a Newbie up to speed).

When the end of your studies comes near, then it's your responsibility of course,
to look where the greatest chances are, and to pick a language which you consider
promising - depending on the field you have the most interest in.
If it's Web-Programming, then there's many good tools to choose from (not only ASP.NET),
if you're more the electronics and hardware-guy, then deepening your C-Skills is a good
idea before knocking on doors there, if you are into "mobile Apps" then Android- or iOS-
tools are a good idea - and if you consider Win-Desktop-Apps your future playground -
then looking around, what's currently used (often it's .NET, sometimes C++ or Java) is
of course right.

That you started your first steps with VB6 will not hinder you in that later happening
"refine your skills"-phase.

I think you are being unfair there Olaf,...
He may disagree with you but he was engaging in honest debate.

That was exactly the point - I feel he dished out an "invented story" -
not really "honest debate", as I understand the term.

Olaf

[dilettante]

I think a good case can be made that new programmers should be looking at .Net languages instead of VB6 too.

For one thing, it is getting hard to obtain a legal copy of VB6 while .Net Express Editions are free downloads. For another, keeping VB6 viable on current versions of Windows requires a lot of knowledge casual users just don't have. One more reason is the huge amount of help and support available from Microsoft and 3rd party programming sites. But the main reason is that .Net comes with a ton of "handouts" in the way of wrappers for almost anything you can think of, this is the gigantic Framework in its many versions.

This ".Net welfare program" should make it easier to create working .Net applications than VB6 applications on current versions of Windows. There are so many bad examples out there of VB6 code that only works right on Win9x, Win2K, or XP under appcompat conditions, usually elevated rights.

Leave VB6 to the professional. Casual coders should use .Net, and I'd be glad to see more of them make that choice.

[Schmidt]

What's wrong with "polishing my Model T, keeping it in shape" I might ask?
There's a universe where I can order tuning-parts from - and my "lap-times"
still hold up to the competition - so, no reason to change it yet...

Olaf

Just in case someone is wondering, how anybody can accomplish even a
"single lap" with a "Ford Model T" - sorry for the confusion - thought you meant
the (also quite old) "Ford Mustang" (which was marketed in germany as "T5").
http://www.mustangclub.de/index.php/t5-merkmale

And well, for the sake of being in ChitChat (and the car-lovers who apparently
hang around here) - not sure if you've ever seen the vid about another "Ford-T",
pushed to its limits on the Nurburg-Ring whilst taking up the challenge of:

"What, only 9:59 for the lap, I can do this time in a VAN!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KiC03_wVjc

Olaf

[Carlos Rocha]

I like dilettante's last post. It describes perfectly what's .NET for me: a huge library with almost everything one can imagine might need some day, and easy to work with. I like particularly the last sentence. I'm not a VB6 professional, but I understand exactly what he means.

I also want to thank Olaf for the kind words, and congratulate him for the way he resumed and exposed his point of view on the matter(s). It's Olaf at his best

About my behavior, I'm not proud of it, but I don't want to talk about it. Not with the other contender banned.

I know Olaf since 2007 and became a huge fan of his work and knowledge shown is many areas. His uninterested willing to help is something that almost everybody must agree with me, I believe.
Someone (I din't went back to make sure who) drop some doubts about Olaf knowing me and Fatina, but my impression is that it was just a way to create doubts about some kind of "VB6 club". Not important anyway.

I will now just seat here in my corner and learn

[dilettante]

.Netters can polish their Model A code instead I guess.

[3com]

Hurray for Lua!

Nice tuto, clear and easy understandable.
LUA 5.2 support Bitwise Operations.

This library provides bitwise operations. It provides all its functions inside the table bit32.

I'm studyng LUA but focused to create games. Some guys are working on OOP LUA framework for FPSC:R (reloaded version).

And yeah, perhaps LUA is the future language for many developers, since....

Lua is an extension programming language designed to support general procedural programming with data description facilities. It also offers good support for object-oriented programming, functional programming, and data-driven programming. Lua is intended to be used as a powerful, lightweight, embeddable scripting language for any program that needs one. Lua is implemented as a library, written in clean C, the common subset of Standard C and C++.

Being an extension language, Lua has no notion of a "main" program: it only works embedded in a host client, called the embedding program or simply the host. The host program can invoke functions to execute a piece of Lua code, can write and read Lua variables, and can register C functions to be called by Lua code. Through the use of C functions, Lua can be augmented to cope with a wide range of different domains, thus creating customized programming languages sharing a syntactical framework. The Lua distribution includes a sample host program called lua, which uses the Lua library to offer a complete, standalone Lua interpreter, for interactive or batch use.

[dilettante]

LUA? Seriously?

Besides never really even being alive as such, this would be the canonical script kiddie's language if AutoIt didn't exist.

It's really a macro scripting language, meant to be embedded in some larger program.

[dclamp]

Shaggy Hiker is my dad....




I bet no one saw that coming.... But its true.

[ColinE66]

From what I can make out from your posts, anybody over the age of 25 is potentially your dad.

[dclamp]

If I had a 25 year old father that would be concerning considering he would have been 3 when I was conceived.

[Nightwalker83]

I think I probably agree with you that VB6 is a good starter language to learn on. Personally I was taught Ada as my first language. That's not just dead, it's fossilised. Actually, you challenged me earlier to name some language I'd worked in that had fallen away and Ada's a good one to cite. You can still compile a program in it but just you try writing a gui or a web page

Well it must be if school continue to teach it either that or they are so tight with the cash they can not afford .NET! Also, there seem to be a lot of people using either VB6 or .NET and getting the syntax confused that is using VB6 syntax in .NET and vice-versa.

[ColinE66]

If I had a 25 year old father that would be concerning considering he would have been 3 when I was conceived.

That went straight over your head, then...

[dclamp]

You are probably calling me young. But twas not a good enough joke.

[Shaggy Hiker]

No, that's not what I wrote - what about citing me correctly?


Not sure about the "deeper meaning" of that particular snippet - just in case you mean
it as an allegation of potential "double-or-triple-accounts" of mine, you mark me a liar -
therefore a clarification would be nice.

I'm tempted to make one of your own condescending statements about people not reading what you wrote clearly, but they annoy the heck out of me, so I'll just put it this way: You read the words, you did not understand them. In fact, you sound rather defensive, but what I wrote was not meant to suggest that I doubted your statements in any way. I do see that when you say that you think you know who Fatina is, you may also hold that you do not know Fatina, because the word "know" is quite subjective. I did interpret your statements as saying that you know Fatina in other contexts than this forum, and that you know Carlos in other contexts than this forum. If that isn't the case, then I did misunderstand you. If you also feel that you don't know either one of them...then you are using a different definition of knowledge. I was not disputing what you said, I was reading it as meaning that you have more involvement with both of those two, and knew more about who they were, than just from threads in this forum, or from just programming.





[plea about more decency]

Again, read more carefully what I wrote...

Write better, and people may understand your meaning better. Consider your following statement:

When somebody is asking, if he shall continue with professional VB6-development,
then this one is not an employee - employees who work for somebody else, usually
do not have free coice about the tools they are using, hence these would not ask.

Really? Employees are not slaves. While it is true that if employee A remains with company C then they are likely to have little say as to what they use, you also have to consider their motivation. Lots of people change jobs frequently, and for lesser reasons than simply deciding on what technology they are interested in. Furthermore, the question is one that we roughly once a year, on average, where I work. So, why would I assume that you are talking only about the self-employed? A more reasonable person to be asking that question would be somebody starting out in a career and thinking about where to take the career, in general.

So, "answering that with the Job-market" is pointless.

Which of course, is not at all the case, because it is not at all pointless.

At this point Shaggy, I will end the discussion with you, because I don't see
how you can conclude from a VB6-App (which you have no Source-Code for),
what potential "design-mistakes" it contains -

Because I wrote it, of course. I wasn't about to write a book on the design mistakes....oh, wait....To be perfectly honest, that book is nearing 700 pages and will end up probably in the vicinity of 900-1000. I then hope to get a chance to edit it down to around 400, and will then add some other sections. It's a program concerning a subject that I have spent the last 17 years immersed in. The program in question was an early attempt at solving the problem domain, and there are plenty of design mistakes. I really could go on for many pages about the problem domain, other attempts by other groups to solve it, the mistakes I made (and why) in the initial solution (which has worked for all this time, mistakes and all), and how to solve them. None of that is particularly relevant, though.

I usually avoid discussions with people who try to make a fool out of me.

You shouldn't worry so much about that. Solitary confinement isn't really any better.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Shaggy Hiker is my dad....




I bet no one saw that coming.... But its true.

Well, I certainly didn't see that coming, and I'm pretty sure it's not true.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Well, I'm conviced that I did.

I shouldn't have added that, since I knew that I was going to write so much that I didn't want to take the time to explain it. I don't believe that anybody makes a decision like this (and possibly every decision) based on reason. We base our decisions on emotion. I don't believe there are any studies that show anything different. Therefore, if you like VB6, or .NET, or C, or any other language, it is almost certainly due to reasons that are not either purely, or primarily, rational. I know why I liked VB6 (it was pretty much inevitable), and I know why I prefer .NET. Neither opinion was based on gaining a thorough understanding of the language before making a thorough comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of each, weighting them, and summing the result, or anything of the sort. For example, I abandoned VB6 before I knew nearly anything about .NET, and before .NET had many of the features I most like about it today. I moved to VB6 without seriously considering the alternatives available at the time. Neither decision was wrong, but neither decision was rational. For that reason, I strongly doubt that you made a reasoned or dispassionate decision in this, either.

Then recompile the .NET-Mandelbrot-App which targetted 2.0 with 3.5, if you prefer.
Doesn't change a thing - .NET Apps still are less easy to deploy than VB6-Apps.

No, that's really not true. VB6 never had a mechanism for redeploying that was even close to as effective as .NET. On the other hand, VB6 DID have the package and deployment tool, which was easier to use (and less versatile) than what came with .NET (though not the Express edition). So, you could build a simple deployment package in VB6 more easily than in .NET, but you couldn't build a complex deployment package at all withough third party help. In .NET, you can build a simple deployment package, though it isn't as easy to use, but you also have a means to build something that allows automatic updating, which VB6 didn't have built in.

I recommend google, before posting stuff you are not really sure about -
I am sure - and if it helps - a colleague of you also already disagreed.

Right. So, I could search on finding out that other people have problems with something that has never caused me any problems. But that's true of darn near EVERYTHING. There are probably people who have complaints about not being able to figure out screw top bottles, but that doesn't mean that screw top bottles are bad things. I've never had any issues with the GC. Apparently, some people have. Golly, what do you suggest I do? Abandon the whole language and all I have written in it because somebody has had a problem with some piece of it?

It is - same as with the point above - if in doubt, ask Google before posting things
you're not sure about.

There's a lot of de-obfuscators for .NET.
Well, did the googling for you, choosing the second link:

Let me be more clear: I wasn't saying that it was easier or harder to decompile one language or the other. I was saying that it doesn't matter whether it is easy or hard. I was saying that the difficulty of decompiling is not what protects your software. People who say that they are afraid of .NET because it is easy to decompile are suggesting that decompiling is some kind of thread to their livelihood, or that the threat to their livelihood is in some way reduced by compiling to native code. That isn't true. They aren't 'making it harder' for thieves. Most of them aren't doing anything at all.

If I wanted to write a Mandelbrot app, I wouldn't even consider stealing your code. If you gave me the source code, I might use some of the math...or I might not. What is it about that app that is worth protecting? If nobody else could perform the math, then you might want to protect that, but that's all over the web, so there's nothing to protect. You might want to protect the UI, but you can't, as long as anybody can use the working app, because most good coders can recreate a UI if they can play with it a bit to find out what it does.

This is how most software works: There is nothing special about the algorithm that is so valuable that it has to be protected (and if it is that valuable, then native compilation won't protect it). What is special is the idea about how to solve the problem that the program was written to address. That can be stolen EASILY and without actual work, in most cases. That's what copyright protection is all about. For example, when Lotus sued Borland over stealing Lotus 1-2-3, they weren't contending that Borland decompiled their app, changed a few bytes, and re-sold it. Had the suit been over that, it would have been over in days rather than years. Borland had re-created the functionality of 1-2-3, and thereby had stolen the idea, not the code.

As I pointed out to axisdj, if somebody is going to steal your program, you are better off if they steal the code, because that is clearly illegal. If they don't steal the code, but just steal the look and feel, you have a MUCH harder time protecting your turf, but your turf is just as much in danger.

Wouldn't that be speculation Shaggy?

Well...yes...what else could it be? I was asking you to speculate on what your position would be if some hypothetical future scenario came into being, which you did. I think that is the very definition of speculation.

[dilettante]

I see the .Net plinkers here as something akin to a swarm of slavering World War Z zombies, driven mindlessly to infect others. You rarely see anyone squatting over a VB.Net thread trying to convince anyone there to write in VB6 instead, yet the oppostire occurs all the time here. If .Netters stayed in their ghetto none of this friction and heat would even exist.

As it says at TIOBE Index:

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system.

And sure enough Visual Basic (as opposed to the great pretender VB.Net) remains highly ranked.

Case closed.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I see the .Net plinkers here as something akin to a swarm of slavering World War Z zombies, driven mindlessly to infect others.

I see you as a guy who occasionally likes to post things to rile people up. However, when it comes to a swarm...how many do you need to make up a swarm? You do your best with your particular view, but you seem to be unique. Does that make you a swarm?

Is it swarm in here, or is it just me?

You rarely see anyone squatting over a VB.Net thread trying to convince anyone there to write in VB6 instead,yet the oppostire occurs all the time here.

You see this, yet you draw from it the conclusion that .NETters are proseletyzing? How would it work the other way:

Questioner: I want to do X in .NET, please give cod?
Answerer: You should do this in VB6 because it is better and easier.
Questioner: Cool. Where do I get a copy of VB6?
Answerer:.....uh...steal it? e-bay? It isn't sold anymore and stopped being supported about 8 years back, so getting your hands on it is a bit difficult unless you already have it. The IDE doesn't install all that well on VB7 or beyond, either, but it WILL install.

If .Netters stayed in their ghetto none of this friction and heat would even exist.

You mean stayed away from Chit-Chat and General Developer?

As it says at TIOBE Index:
And sure enough Visual Basic (as opposed to the great pretender VB.Net) remains highly ranked.

Case misconstrued, at best. That vaunted VB rating started in 1984! Let's see....is that VB6? Nope, can't be, because there WAS no VB in 1984. The poll also hints at that by saying (visual) basic. So, how about the .NET poll? Well, that one started at the end of 2010. Was that the beginning of .NET? No, that happened in 2002. So, where was .NET included prior to the time Tiobe started tracking it? To see the answer, look at the graph of the performance of both of those. .NET has been trending steadily upwards since inception, but the date of inception was only Jan2011 (it's lowest point in the poll). The other basic (which can't be VB6, since it started more than a decade prior to VB4, which was the first incarnation of that form of VB) was doing really well until about the time that .NET was split off, at which point the other VB dropped considerably, and has been trending downwards ever since.

So, if you think that ranking shows VB Classic vs .NET, it does not. It shows Basic in all it's forms up until .NET was split out as a separate entity in 2010. Even with .NET split out, the old basic is not VB Classic, it is (Visual) Basic. If there is an explanation for what that means, please point it out to me. Frankly, I believe that they are using (Visual) Basic as a catchall to pick up EVERY kind of BASIC other than VB.NET, and prior to 2011, it was used to pick up EVERY kind of BASIC.

[sten2005]

You see this, yet you draw from it the conclusion that .NETters are proseletyzing? How would it work the other way:

Questioner: I want to do X in .NET, please give cod?

OK, I'll bite. Just for the halibut.

VB6 programmers have better things to do than post on threads relating to languages they do not use.

Proseletyzing? Perhaps the prawn-again .NETters carp on about VB6 to save our soles ? Something must explain why they trawl through VB6 sites. Though they can be a pain in the bass at times.

It's probably time to scale back on the fish puns now (but if you can think of a batter fish pun let minnow).

The 'religious' fervor of those who don't use use the VB6 programming language is always amusing. You can understand why those who have their employment or business dependent on VB6 should take the trouble to post, you can understand why those who choose to use VB6 would post. But what goes through the heads of those who (often repeatedly and at length) post about a language they don't actually use ?

[ColinE66]

My take on the TIOBE thing as a VB6er...


The .NET ratings (per that graph) begin at zero some time after 2010 NOT because that is when the ratings tracking began for that platform but, rather, because its ratings were negative prior to that time....



....just kidding

[ColinE66]

@sten, you haddock-rack those fish jokes didn't you. No eel feeling...

[sten2005]

@Colin, I'll need time to mullet over before I can come up with another fish pun.

[ColinE66]

Herring you loud and clear....

[sten2005]

I'm laughing so hard I might pull a mussel.

[ColinE66]

Damn, you're good at this. I'm starting to flounder already

[sten2005]

Just before a .NETter pulls me up on this - I know a mussel isn't a fish. I just thought it would be shellfish not to share.

[ColinE66]

I think you got away with your not-quite-fishy pun, tbh. Not everybody here is a native English speaker. Matter of fact, I believe one or two are a tad-pole-ish.

Anyway, if you eg-salmon the rest of this thread you'll notice weever-nuff tench-sion here already without us trying to ha-wrasse our fellow posters with this pollocks. Don't want anybody breaming with indignation.

Happy to discus...

[sten2005]

You're clearly a dab hand at this.

Do you think a mod will ofishially ban us ? I'm certainly not trying to upset anyone on porpoise.

[ColinE66]

If oyster things up any more then, yes, I fear I'll be banned Then again, it might be viewed as a bit of light-hearted relief; this thread was becoming a little turbot-charged with emotion.

[sten2005]

I guess that is why other posters are being koi.

But don't feel gill-ty about fish puns, fins could be a shoal lot worse - we are just dropping a line, not using a .net.

[ColinE66]

Hmm, marlin over the last few posts, I have to agree. Not going to beat myself up for side-tracking a thread that has seen better dace.

[sten2005]

You don't have to be a brain sturgeon to think up a fish pun, but it is certainly giving me a haddock.

[ColinE66]

LOL. Puns are slowly getting worse Still, never really understood the zealousness of these language-versus-language threads. Same with OS's: PC/Mac-kerel the same to me...

[sten2005]

This thread shouldn't be about language versus language. It should be about Microsoft's mis-hake in discarding the VB6 programming language. In doing so they have left VB6 developers in the perch (you're right the puns are getting worse). Salmon in Microsoft should be brought to account. Microsoft should dolphinately either update or open source VB6.

[FunkyDexter]

Things had calmed down in this thread. I hope you don't dis-turbot.

(Puns are not a banning offence. Indeed, I always felt we could do with an official pun ranking system.)

The 'religious' fervor of those who don't use use the VB6 programming language is always amusing

Seriously, I see just as much religious fervour from VB6 fans. In fact, just about any finger you can point at either side of the debate can be pointed straight back the other way. Bad puns, tick. Daft pictures, tick. A complete inability to comprehend the opposite point of view, tick. Frequent condescension, tick. Personal attacks, tick. Profanity, tick. It goes on an on. We're all as bad as each other.

In fact I can only think of two things that one side does that the other doesn't. I don't see .Netters starting threads blaming a third party for their own decisions and I don't see 6ers jumping into .Net threads which (arguably) they shouldn't care less about. I will say, though, that both have the moral right to do these things. This is, after all, a public forum.

[ColinE66]

T Bad puns, tick.

Be fair. Our puns have only just started to go downhill! We were doing well there for a while...

But anyway, I wasn't trying to derail the thread for any other reason than pure amusement. It certainly wasn't part of a .NET hake-campaign (Sorry!)

[sten2005]

Thanks for giving us the oppor-tuna-ty to make these bad puns, Funky.

But I have to be on my pike now.

Carp diem

[Carlos Rocha]

Well, maybe .Netters are not devil-fish after all , they are only octopus-sies

[Shaggy Hiker]

OK, I'll bite. Just for the halibut.

VB6 programmers have better things to do than post on threads relating to languages they do not use.

Proseletyzing? Perhaps the prawn-again .NETters carp on about VB6 to save our soles ? Something must explain why they trawl through VB6 sites. Though they can be a pain in the bass at times.

It's probably time to scale back on the fish puns now (but if you can think of a batter fish pun let minnow).

Where have you been all this time? Some of those puns are old, but some are not. Very nice contribution to this cod-dammed thread. I hope it spawns many replies and paints the thread redd.

The 'religious' fervor of those who don't use use the VB6 programming language is always amusing. You can understand why those who have their employment or business dependent on VB6 should take the trouble to post, you can understand why those who choose to use VB6 would post. But what goes through the heads of those who (often repeatedly and at length) post about a language they don't actually use ?

Statements like that, to be frank. Passive-aggressive behavior is designed to annoy people, so why be surprised when it does? The OP started out by saying (maybe not in this thread, as this was not the start of it) that they had written this massive app in VB6 and MS was abandoning them, so where should they move to. A fair number of us, who also spent years writing in VB6 and are often still maintaining apps in VB6, suggested .NET, at which point a few others came in to say that VB6 was the greatest (which is fine) and others who explicitly stated that those who went to .NET were nothing but misguided sheep fooled by Microsoft. They then act all wide-eyed innocent when people were offended at being called easily-deluded fools.

There certainly IS religious fervor around this issue, but it isn't just on one side. The VB6 posters miss no opportunity to deride those who moved to .NET or like .NET. Furthermore, of the .NET people in this thread, virtually all of them spent years in VB6 before they moved over. The people who are NOT in this thread are those who are too young to remember VB6 as a present-day language.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Just before a .NETter pulls me up on this - I know a mussel isn't a fish. I just thought it would be shellfish not to share.

Well, don't clam up now.