Geting on the bus, not under it...

[Pino]

The figures of people viewing the VB6 forums still shock me. Commercially VB6 IS dead. However there are always going to be legacy apps around and I understand a small percentage of developers still need to use it, however that doesnt explain them figures.

[esposito]

The figures of people viewing the VB6 forums still shock me. Commercially VB6 IS dead. However there are always going to be legacy apps around and I understand a small percentage of developers still need to use it, however that doesnt explain them figures.

I wish those figures could make MS wonder why so many VB6 users are reluctant to switch to .NET.

The truth is, .NET is nothing new. Java has been around for decades and many of those who produce native software and never found it convenient to use Java will never consider .NET an alternative to VB6.

[Pino]

I wish those figures could make MS wonder why so many VB6 users are reluctant to switch to .NET.

The truth is, .NET is nothing new. Java has been around for decades and many of those who produce native software and never found it convenient to use Java will never consider .NET an alternative to VB6.

No Disrespect but "them people" are such a small minority. If you spoke to 90% of people viewing the VB6 board they wouldnt know what you were talking about.

So I still cant figure out why so many people are using VB6. I cant think of a valid reason (For the masses), other than reluctance to change.

MS are in a loose loose situation here, although more people would be annoyed if the langauge didnt develop and change.

[Pino]

I think this forum has either alot of ranked content for VB6 or has a very die-hard member base.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vb6
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/c%23

Much higher percentage there. Maybe forums like this that are still activley supporting VB6 discussions are attracting vb6 users from other forums who arnt that interested anymore

[esposito]

No Disrespect but "them people" are such a small minority. If you spoke to 90% of people viewing the VB6 board they wouldnt know what you were talking about.

So I still cant figure out why so many people are using VB6. I cant think of a valid reason (For the masses), other than reluctance to change.

MS are in a loose loose situation here, although more people would be annoyed if the langauge didnt develop and change.

Reluctance to change was never significant when MS released newer versions of VB. It only took a couple of years at most to see the majority of VB users switch to the latest version. I'm firmly convinced that the explanation of this reluctance has only one name: the Framework Deployment Hell!

[Shaggy Hiker]

There IS no framework deployment hell. We work ONLY in .NET, and there has never been even a single complaint.

However, it would be nice to see a native compiler option for .NET. They exist commercially, I believe, but not as part of VS, currently. That would solve your problem with obfuscation, and wrapping the frameworks into the OS, as is happening, would remove the other difference between VB6 and .NET. It seems to be a simple option. Byte code programs are intended to run anywhere, but that's not how most people work. Offering the option to compile to native seems like a simple enough change. However, it would be an onerous change unless that really had something to do with why people still use VB6, and I frankly doubt that is a reason for the vast majority.

[esposito]

There IS no framework deployment hell. We work ONLY in .NET, and there has never been even a single complaint.

A lot of people don't like complaining. They just stopped using VB and switched to either Delphi or RealBasic. Others will use VB6 until MS breaks compatibility with 32-bit native software.

I remember I was happy to switch from VB3 to VB4 and enthused about the possibility to compile in both 16 and 32 bits. When VB5 came out I bought it right away and never went back to VB4. Some years later, I could not see any significant changes iin VB6 and so I decided to stick to VB5, though I sometimes played around with the newer version. When VB.NET was released I immediately understood that it was time for me to look elsewhere: it was the most counterproductive tool I could use to develop my native software.

Offering the option to compile to native seems like a simple enough change. However, it would be an onerous change unless that really had something to do with why people still use VB6, and I frankly doubt that is a reason for the vast majority.

If this is not the reason, how is it possible that some software houses make money selling conversion tools (Thinstall for one) which cost hundreds -- if not thousands --- of dollars?

[cicatrix]

In my view, one of the most important reasons is that there are many types of software that do not need the power of the .NET Framework to be developed. Why on earth should a programmer make his software depend on a huge sort of virtual machine when he could get the same results in VB6? You don't need a main battle tank to kill a fly!

Funny you mention that. I remember when in the late 90s people were frustrated about having to distribute MSVB runtimes along with their projects. And it confused many end-users when something like 'VBRUN300.DLL not found' happenned.

.NET Framework is included in Vista and Windows 7 distribution by default so there is nothing to worry about.
I think that Windows.Forms will be the last programming platform for PC, the programming industry slowly moves towards the online applications. Take Google Chrome OS, for example, I understand it relies heavily on being online. The days when we will run our software on remote servers are not that far I think. ASP.Net/Java are far more promising programming platforms than Windows.Forms.

[dbasnett]

"I think that Windows.Forms will be the last programming platform for PC, the programming industry slowly moves towards the online applications."

When I started in this business it was all online, and then those two guys in California started a revolution. For some time the pendulum has been swinging back, but how far will it go until we re-learn the reasons for moving the power outward.

[Shaggy Hiker]

A lot of people don't like complaining. They just stopped using VB and switched to either Delphi or RealBasic. Others will use VB6 until MS breaks compatibility with 32-bit native software.

That points clearly irrelevant. If they had stopped using VB altogether, it would have no impact on the relative numbers in a forum, it would simply decrease the total number.

When VB5 came out I bought it right away and never went back to VB4. Some years later, I could not see any significant changes iin VB6 and so I decided to stick to VB5, though I sometimes played around with the newer version.

Ya. I moved to VB6 right away, but not for any particular reason. Those two were so similar that VB6 could have been called VB5.1. I would guess that it was called VB6 largely for sales reasons.

When VB.NET was released I immediately understood that it was time for me to look elsewhere: it was the most counterproductive tool I could use to develop my native software.

In your case that would be true. You wouldn't be doing much web development or web services, either, and you certainly aren't doing any multithreading in VB6, so you wouldn't have seen any benefit from that.

If this is not the reason, how is it possible that some software houses make money selling conversion tools (Thinstall for one) which cost hundreds -- if not thousands --- of dollars?

Frankly, I would say that the point supports my statement more than it undermines it. I am aware that those companies exist, and I thought the price was in the thousands rather than the hundreds, though I admit that I have never looked. They are not seeing much volume at that price. If they were selling tens of thousands of copies, the cost would be way down. After all, as you well know, development is virtually the entire cost for software. The cost to produce a unit is near zero. Therefore, to recoup the cost of the package as a whole, you either have to sell many units at a low price, or just a few units at a high price. Companies who expect that there will be few buyers, but VERY motivated buyers, will charge a higher price because they have to recoup cost from a small user base. Therefore, the high price of these packages suggests that there are few buyers.

Of course, there is always a different interpretation to the relative numbers: VB6 has more questions because it is harder to learn for the existing pool of users (this could be read in two ways).

[Shaggy Hiker]

[QUOTE=dbasnett;3709894those two guys in California [/QUOTE]

C'mon, admit it: You just said that because you can't spell the other Steve's name, either.

[dbasnett]

J-o-b-s

[ntg]

However there are always going to be legacy apps around and I understand a small percentage of developers still need to use it, however that doesnt explain them figures.

Sure it does. My personal legacy nemesis is COBOL and I was forced to learn it once. There's still a huge amount of production COBOL code, Gartner estimated that there were 200 billion lines of COBOL in worldwide usage. Someone needs to maintain it and even use COBOL to make enhancements in existing code. Such penetration is also the reason for the .Net COBOL compiler. These unfortunate developers will definitely show up somewhere in some statistics or forums.

It's something like that with VB6 - it was hugely adopted (I've read estimations of 6 million end-users) and this ensured that there will be lots of people that need to use it for a long time and not just a small percentage of developers. How else would you explain the fact that it's a dead-end unsupported language, part of an IDE replaced for almost a decade which is dated five releases back from the upcoming VS 2010 but still has a noticeable share amongst developers?

[dilettante]

Actually there are a lot more componaies selling Cobol systems than just the .Net flavors too.

Often they use their own proprietary "Cobol VMs" instead of compiling to native code, in order to get portability among Windows, various Unix platforms (Sparc, Intel/AMD), etc. Sort of the Java "write once" concept but with more control over libraries and environment than Java has. However there has been major product consolidation in this space via acquisitions over the past several years, so there are fewer such companies now than 5 years ago.

[Nightwalker83]

I'm not trying to be sarcastic here but, to paraphrase the words of the wise Ben Parker, with great power comes great complexity. And the .Net framework is indeed very powerful. I understand that VB.Net seems too complex at first but you are now experiencing the well-known feeling of reading programs in a language that's alien to you. You need to try to get into VB.Net in order to understand the order of the things it does. And obviously any attempt to learn a .Net language implies that you'll immerse yourself in the .Net framework as well.

Yeah, I will hopefully be learning vb.net when I go back to school next month. I took a break of about 6 six years and now I want to learn vb again.

Any quick-and-dirty conversion guideline would ignore the complexity of the framework and the fact that old VB6 code would need refactoring in order to take advantage of the framework's benefits. So, in a nutshell, no there is not and can never be an idiots guide to converting.

Ah ok, I doubt there is even a list of the changes between the code used in the two versions, like having the code to preform the same job lying side by side on the page. So we could see the difference in the two languages and the way they use the code. Like the documentation ActionScriptCheatSheet where it lists both versions and have they preform the same function/action.

[Shaggy Hiker]

You could make something like that for some concepts, but the VB6 would leave lots of areas blank.

[Nightwalker83]

You could make something like that for some concepts, but the VB6 would leave lots of areas blank.

Ah, guess I going have to stress myself out with trying learn vb.net trying to forget everything I know about the coding in VB6.0. It is not going to be easy.

Edit:

Geting on the bus, not under it...

It is spelt getting you missed the second t.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

So I still cant figure out why so many people are using VB6

I think the answer is a lot simpler, VBA (which is basically VB6) is still part of all Microsoft Office products.

If Microsoft were to implement VB.Net inside it's office products instead i think you would see a fall in VB6 use.

Also As Windows 7 / Server 2008 etc. becomes more prevalent in the business world i think this will also have a direct bearing on VB6 use, as not only do VB6 apps look terrible on Windows 7, i know from a couple of legacy apps we have written in VB6 that we are coming across more and more problems validating these old programs against newer operating systems.

[Nightwalker83]

Also As Windows 7 / Server 2008 etc. becomes more prevalent in the business world i think this will also have a direct bearing on VB6 use, as not only do VB6 apps look terrible on Windows 7, i know from a couple of legacy apps we have written in VB6 that we are coming across more and more problems validating these old programs against newer operating systems.

Yeah, I was surprised to hear that Microsoft were still supporting VB6.0 for Win7. I would have thought Win7 would be a .net only system.

[esposito]

That points clearly irrelevant. If they had stopped using VB altogether, it would have no impact on the relative numbers in a forum, it would simply decrease the total number.

Like me, they may still have to maintain their old software developed in VB6. That could be the reason why they still visit this forum now and then.

Frankly, I would say that the point supports my statement more than it undermines it. I am aware that those companies exist, and I thought the price was in the thousands rather than the hundreds, though I admit that I have never looked. They are not seeing much volume at that price. If they were selling tens of thousands of copies, the cost would be way down. After all, as you well know, development is virtually the entire cost for software. The cost to produce a unit is near zero. Therefore, to recoup the cost of the package as a whole, you either have to sell many units at a low price, or just a few units at a high price. Companies who expect that there will be few buyers, but VERY motivated buyers, will charge a higher price because they have to recoup cost from a small user base. Therefore, the high price of these packages suggests that there are few buyers.

I think what you said can be easily contradicted. MS are selling millions of copies of Office but in spite of that its price is still shamefully high.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Like me, they may still have to maintain their old software developed in VB6. That could be the reason why they still visit this forum now and then.

Do you ask questions or just answer them? I frequent .NET, but the number of threads I have started is pretty small.

I think what you said can be easily contradicted. MS are selling millions of copies of Office but in spite of that its price is still shamefully high.

You could be right about that. I thought the price was around $100-150, but I have never bought a copy as it has always been supplied to me one way or another (work, gift, etc.).

OK, I went to a site and looked it up. It looks like you can get Office Home, with Word, Excel, and two others which I forget, for $150. If you figure that games cost ~$50 as a new release, getting five programs for $150 is right in the ballpark. However, if you then go to look at the cost for Word and Excel as standalone programs, the cost is ~$110 per program, which is certainly higher than a game.

On the other hand, how many copies does MS actually sell for retail price? I may be in an odd demographic, but nobody I know has ever paid retail price for an Office product (nor do I know anybody who has stolen a copy, by the way).