Let's ask MS to make VB6 open source!

[DeanMc]

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.

[RhinoBull]

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

???

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

???

• Massing of poor code styles and seriously questionable hacks.

???

[dilettante]

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.

[dilettante]

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.

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.

[gep13]

@ gep 13

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

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.

[gep13]

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.

(a) Agreed
(b) Agreed

[Nightwalker83]

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.

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.

[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.

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!

[esposito]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[RhinoBull]

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.

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.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

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.

[Shaggy Hiker]

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

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.

[gep13]

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

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

[esposito]

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

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.

[techgnome]

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

[Nightwalker83]

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.

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

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!

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.

[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.

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.

[Nightwalker83]

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.

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.

[Lord Orwell]

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.

[FunkyDexter]

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.

[techgnome]

"rather due to inertia." -- I actually know of one place where the LACK of inertia prevents them from moving to .NET. It's not because they don't want to (ever since .NET first came out, it was seen as the way to go and would solve a lot of issues)... it's not because people need to be retrained (last I knew, they had the knowledge)... in the end it came down to politics.

-tg

[Shaggy Hiker]

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.

You pre-date me.

Gee, I kind of feel bad saying something as depressing as that. You're a good sort, really, even if your gills are still showing. I remember when we first discovered fire (what a night THAT was), how about sharing an even earlier story, such as the invention of dirt. Would that soften the blow?


@FD:

with more spit than Cerberus

[esposito]

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.

Why are they supporting the Mono project, then? Aren't they afraid of the fact that people may switch from Windows to Linux?

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.

You are obviously right: in this forum most developers have already switched to .NET. I have one question, though: is there any reason why a developer who produces desktop (non-Web based) software should prefer .NET to another programming language that can do the same job without needing the Framework?

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.

There are also a lot of people who decide not to switch to .NET because they don't want their software to depend on a huge virtual machine.

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.

Abandoning customers for purely commercial reasons can backfire: the first thing I did when I realised that MS had discontinued VB6 was look for an alternative language that was not produced by them. In short, I didn't (and I still don't) feel like investing in a development tool that, in the future, MS may abandon again. So, MS have lost a customer and found someone who will give testimony of the way in which he was left stranded. Other software houses may decide as well to discontinue one of their products or they may even go bankrupt. Nevertheless, the difference is that, when it happens, they normally sell their product to another software house and, by doing so, they show more respect for their customers. This happened to Borland that decided to stop producing Delphi and sell it to Embarcadero.

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.

Thank you for having found my Web site fine. It is designed for a kind of user that is not exactly a computer wizard. Basically, I produce accounting and data management software for an Italian fairly aged public. By the way, the strange alien writing which scared you is called Italian.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

is there any reason why a developer who produces desktop (non-Web based) software should prefer.NET to another programming language that can do the same job without needing the Framework?

Hi Esposito there are a number of reasons, one of the big ones though is that many developers work for companies (as i am aware you work for yourself), and as a developer you need to be skilled in the languages which are in demand so that you can remain in work.

If you look at the job market not many people are still recruiting for VB6 developers any more where as there are plenty of .Net jobs.

There are also a lot of people who decide not to switch to .NET because they don't want their software to depend on a huge virtual machine.

This is true, but do you not think that as an when Windows 7 finally takes over from XP as the most used version of Windows some of these issue will go away as Windows 7 comes with the framework pre-installed ?

[esposito]

Hi Esposito there are a number of reasons, one of the big ones though is that many developers work for companies (as i am aware you work for yourself), and as a developer you need to be skilled in the languages which are in demand so that you can remain in work.

If you look at the job market not many people are still recruiting for VB6 developers any more where as there are plenty of .Net jobs.

This is a good point. Yes, the fact that I am my own boss makes my situation particular. So, I'll rephrase my question: is there any valid reason why a developer of desktop software who is his own boss should prefer .NET to VB6 or Delphi?

This is true, but do you not think that as an when Windows 7 finally takes over from XP as the most used version of Windows some of these issue will go away as Windows 7 comes with the framework pre-installed ?

The problem is, by then there will surely be a newer version of the Framework and, if you want to keep yourself up-to-date, you will have to face up to the same issue.

[si_the_geek]

In the end they just deem that, from a business point of view, you're not important enough to matter.

That is a reasonable assumption, but it isn't actually correct.

Esposito has admitted on several previous occasions that MS went out of their way to give him help to move to a more appropriate tool - even tho it meant giving a customer to their competitors.

He does (or did) matter to them, but they aren't willing to hinder the masses in order to make life a little easier for a tiny minority.

Why are they supporting the Mono project, then? Aren't they afraid of the fact that people may switch from Windows to Linux?

The vast majority of people won't move to Linux, so any loss there will be insignificant.

There is a big gain however, as more developers are likely to buy/use VS (which costs more than Windows), and other market based benefits.

There are also a lot of people who decide not to switch to .NET because they don't want their software to depend on a huge virtual machine.

Lots yes, but they are almost certainly the minority... because most users already have an apt framework, or can get it very easily.

Your situation is different and almost unique, but you have been well aware of that for years.

Abandoning customers for purely commercial reasons can backfire: ... So, MS have lost a customer and found someone who will give testimony of the way in which he was left stranded. ...

You are well aware that they did not leave you stranded at all - they just didn't make things harder for the masses in order to give a tiny minority exactly what they wanted.

While it would be nice to have one tool that suits every situation, it is incredibly naive to pretend that would be the best way to go - there are good reasons that there are a variety of languages available.

You like to regularly pretend that MS have been out of order, but there is no valid reason for you to do that... and by concealing the facts (such as their assistance to help you find a more apt tool, which gained them nothing), you are clearly the one who is being out of order.

This is a good point. Yes, the fact that I am my own boss makes my situation particular. So, I'll rephrase my question: is there any valid reason why a developer of desktop software who is his own boss should prefer .NET to VB6 or Delphi?

There are lots of reasons, such as: the time to write software being dramatically reduced, the ability to have multiple targets (desktop, phone, web) with one code base, extra functionality, etc.

The problem is, by then there will surely be a newer version of the Framework and, if you want to keep yourself up-to-date, you will have to face up to the same issue.

That is virtually irrelevant... from the 2008 edition (or perhaps even 2005) onwards, you can use whichever framework version you like.

If you have a reason to use just one framework (as would be best for your situation), you can do that.

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.

Editing is too much effort, but more off-topic posts are likely to lead to this thread being closed - separate thread(s) should be created instead.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Why are they supporting the Mono project, then? Aren't they afraid of the fact that people may switch from Windows to Linux?

They most certainly are. Bill G had a name for that project that is more colorful than can be posted here. However, they made the business calculation that ignoring Linux could cause them to be left behind, so they wanted to be generating revenue (and a bit of directional control) related to Linux.

You are obviously right: in this forum most developers have already switched to .NET. I have one question, though: is there any reason why a developer who produces desktop (non-Web based) software should prefer .NET to another programming language that can do the same job without needing the Framework?

While the best answer is certainly the one given by NSA, I would add that the framework is not an issue for a whole bunch of people. If you absolutely don't care about it, as I don't for my personal projects, then .NET is all benefit. Only if you care about the framework is it in any way a negative.

There are also a lot of people who decide not to switch to .NET because they don't want their software to depend on a huge virtual machine.

That's kind of funny. VB6 requires a virtual machine that made VB6 programs too large to fit on floppy disks (at least on a single one) which were the common media back in its day. Early on, the VB virtual machine was an impediment, and now you consider it trivial, and quite rightly. With streaming media, the .NET framework is already trivial in size to many people.

Abandoning customers for purely commercial reasons can backfire: the first thing I did when I realised that MS had discontinued VB6 was look for an alternative language that was not produced by them.

This is very true. MS took a look at the current market, and the trends that they saw coming, and changed strategy. That certainly left some people hung out to dry, and as a business move it may have been a bad one, but if they get crushed by Google trying to make computers online only, then who will really care? They felt that the web would be king and acted accordingly. If the model of online only apps takes such market share that the Windows OS is discarded, where will your VB6 apps be then? That was the future that MS foresaw. It may or may not happen, but they felt it likely enough that they turned the ship, and in doing so, you were cast aside.

So, I'll rephrase my question: is there any valid reason why a developer of desktop software who is his own boss should prefer .NET to VB6 or Delphi?

On my own, my apps are HIGHLY multithreaded. VB6 handles multithreading not at all. How does Delphi do?

[esposito]

Your situation is different and almost unique, but you have been well aware of that for years. You are well aware that they did not leave you stranded at all - they just didn't make things harder for the masses in order to give a tiny minority exactly what they wanted.

Believe me, I'm not alone! There are 14319 developers, including 265 Microsoft MVPs, who have signed A PETITION FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNMANAGED VISUAL BASIC AND VISUAL BASIC FOR APPLICATIONS. Click on the link below:
http://classicvb.org/petition/?lang=en

[esposito]

On my own, my apps are HIGHLY multithreaded. VB6 handles multithreading not at all. How does Delphi do?

Multithreading is surely essential for those who deal with advanced programming, as you probably do. In my case, it's marginal.

[si_the_geek]

Believe me, I'm not alone!

Yes you are, or at least very close to it - and it is deceitful of you to pretend otherwise.

I am well aware of the petition, and as I have told you before:

• I am one of the people who signed it.
• Like most people, my reasons for signing it were entirely different to yours.
• Like many others who signed it, I do not believe that it would be the right thing to do any more - but there is no way for people to remove themselves from the list.

Even without those points, 14319 is a very tiny percentage of VB developers (I don't know exactly how many, but it is easily in the millions).


You are part of an extremely small minority, and you just clutch at straws (in spite of previous evidence you have already seen repeatedly) to pretend that it is not the case.

You believe (probably correctly) that VB.Net is not the right tool for your situation - so simply don't use it.

Stop pretending that somehow VB.Net is wrong in general, or that Microsoft (who actively helped you personally move to something apt for your situation - which you should have done yourself) did something wrong by focussing their future efforts on what was best for the vast majority of developers.

As can be seen in the posts above, you still haven't put in enough effort to have a valid opinion of .Net - one issue is bad for you, so you ignore/forget the rest of it (which is mainly good points, even for you).

Despite the ridiculously large amount of threads where you have made the claims, there has been almost nobody backing you up at all - yet you still pretend that a large percentage are of others are in the same situation.

There is no valid reason for these claims that you keep on making (most of which you have admitted before are not valid), or for posting them repeatedly - especially in cases like this one where it is not even the topic.

That's enough for this thread, so get this back on topic, or I'll close the thread.

[esposito]

Yes you are, or at least very close to it - and it is deceitful of you to pretend otherwise.

If you take a look at forums dedicated to Delphi, you will see that I'm not alone in not wanting to embrace .NET. All of my new applications are developed in Delphi but I still miss VB6 because things could be done much more quickly with it. I have to maintain software I developed in VB6 that took me months of work. That's why I would like MS to understand that many of their customers would be grateful to them if they sold the VB6 source code to some other software house.

You believe (probably correctly) that VB.Net is not the right tool for your situation - so simply don't use it.

You bet I will never use .NET in my life! Just to use a quotation from one of my previous posts, ONLY WHEN THE SUN CEASES TO SHINE, WILL I .NET! If worse comes to worse, I'll switch to Java, which is completely free.

As can be seen in the posts above, you still haven't put in enough effort to have a valid opinion of .Net - one issue is bad for you, so you ignore/forget the rest of it (which is mainly good points, even for you).

Despite the ridiculously large amount of threads where you have made the claims, there has been almost nobody backing you up at all - yet you still pretend that a large percentage are of others are in the same situation.

There is no valid reason for these claims that you keep on making (most of which you have admitted before are not valid), or for posting them repeatedly - especially in cases like this one where it is not even the topic.

That's enough for this thread, so get this back on topic, or I'll close the thread.

The purpose of this thread was to explore the possibility for those who are still using VB6 to join together and ask MS to give a future to it. Don't they like money? So, why don't they want to sell a product they have binned? The future is made NOT ONLY of .NET. Native software is still an important part of it. Since we can take for granted that MS will never release the VB6 source code, let's try to see if they can be convinced to sell it and make some money that otherwise would be lost.

And yes, I'm sick and tired of repeating that, for my purposes, .NET is worth less than junk. So I'd like not to even mention the word ".NET" from now on. This thread is about VB6 and only VB6!

[Shaggy Hiker]

I still think you should learn C++ and get away from the whole issue. Delphi is marginal and VB6 is dead. C++ will outlive .NET, requires no framework, compiles to machine language, and has HUGE amounts of support. It is the language that you wish VB6 to be.

[si_the_geek]

If you take a look at forums dedicated to Delphi, you will see that I'm not alone in not wanting to embrace .NET.

No, but there are different reasons (perceived or real) for that - presumably most of which were the cause of those people using Delphi in the first place.

On this site (which MS are well known to read, and still has an active VB6 presence), very few people who understand .Net to a reasonable degree share the view.

Like with any tool there are situations where it is not the best, so in those cases use a tool that is more apt.

That's why I would like MS to understand that many of their customers would be grateful to them if they sold the VB6 source code to some other software house.

From what I have seen the "many" you mention is an insignificant percentage - and you have made it very clear that you are not one of them yourself (you are an ex-customer, and while you were leaving you got treated far better than you should have).

I am one of that small percentage who would like an unmanaged VB route (which is certainly not the same as "VB6 forever!" or ".Net is bad!"), but unlike you I will not make false/misleading claims to support my opinion.

You bet I will never use .NET in my life! ...

Yes, and that attitude is the problem.

It is an extremely good tool, and it is very likely that at some point in the next few years it will be the best tool for you (for one thing in particular, or for everything you do), but you will choose to ignore it because of your unjustified vendetta.

I on the other hand use it when it is right for me, and will almost certainly use it more as time goes on.

And yes, I'm sick and tired of repeating that, for my purposes, .NET is worth less than junk.

I don't believe that, because a very large percentage of your posts over the years repeat the same claims (even after you are well aware that they are not valid), often as an attempt to persuade relative newbies to join your vendetta before they have had a chance to learn the facts.

...Don't they like money? So, why don't they want to sell a product they have binned? ...

As has already been pointed out by others in this thread, in order for VB6 to be of any use in the future, it will take a large amount of redesign by people who know what they are doing in other languages - which will take a lot of money in itself.

There are many VB6 alternatives already available (several of them free), which means that only a tiny percentage of developers would be willing to pay for whatever was created.

Due to that, there is very little chance of anyone being willing to take the risk of paying for the work involved - let alone pay extra for the rights for it before they can even see what needs to be done.

The desire for unmanaged VB is very likely to reduce over time (more people will have the framework, etc) so the time scale to make any money at all is slim, which reduces the chances further.

Even if it was done (which would probably take years), Shaggy Hiker's recommendation is likely to be a better option for you.


I suspect a cheaper/easier/quicker option would be to create a new unmanaged .Net language which looks like VB6 (so that you get the benefits of the IDE etc), but I am not sure of the legal issues with that. In fact, there may well be something of that nature already, I haven't checked.

[esposito]

I still think you should learn C++ and get away from the whole issue. Delphi is marginal and VB6 is dead. C++ will outlive .NET, requires no framework, compiles to machine language, and has HUGE amounts of support. It is the language that you wish VB6 to be.

C++ does not have a form designer which is as easy as VB6 or Delphi and it would surely reduce my productivity. The fact that Delphi is marginal is highly debatable. There is a large community supporting this language and Embarcadero are seriously investing in it.

Nevertheless, VB6 is so user-friendly that no other development tool on earth compares to it. Any other programming language which had been discontinued by its producer would have disappeared completely after such a long time.

There are many VB6 alternatives already available (several of them free), which means that only a tiny percentage of developers would be willing to pay for whatever was created.

Don't be so sure. Just the fact that the VB6 section of this forum is sometimes more crowded than the other (I don't want to mention its name!) should make you understand that a VB7 (a real VB7!) would make a very high percentage of developers happy. And, needless to say, those happy people would buy the product.

I suspect a cheaper/easier/quicker option would be to create a new unmanaged .Net language which looks like VB6 (so that you get the benefits of the IDE etc), but I am not sure of the legal issues with that. In fact, there may well be something of that nature already, I haven't checked.

If MS themselves came up with something like that, I'm sure it would be a winning strategy.

[si_the_geek]

C++ does not have a form designer which is as easy as VB6 or Delphi ...

There are options which are very close, and you could make your own too.

Nevertheless, VB6 is so user-friendly that no other development tool on earth compares to it.

Like most people who have used both VB6 and VB.Net, I disagree - VB.Net is noticeably more user friendly in many ways.

There is the initial OO hurdle to get over (and because you have VB6 experience, dropping your old habits), but that is about it.

Any other programming language which had been discontinued by its producer would have disappeared completely after such a long time.

I basically agree.

Don't be so sure. Just the fact that the VB6 section of this forum is sometimes more crowded than the other (I don't want to mention its name!) should make you understand that a VB7 (a real VB7!) would make a very high percentage of developers happy. And, needless to say, those happy people would buy the product.

The forum user counts is a fairly rare occurrence (and gradually getting rarer), and means virtually nothing anyway.

There are many reasons why people might be in the VB6 forum, and very few of them translate in to potential customers, let alone ones who would pay.

Some of the most frequent reasons are:

• Maintaining old apps that haven't been re-written in .Net yet.
• A pirate version of VB6 has become available fairly recently, and a surprising amount of people have admitted that they are using it simply because they could get it for free - and that they didn't realise that the legitimately free edition of VB.Net has more features.
• School/college based work... When the schools do move on from VB6, there is little/no gain from using unmanaged-VB (which should not be the same as VB6) rather than VB.Net

If MS themselves came up with something like that, I'm sure it would be a winning strategy.

It would be for you, me, and some others... but would the potential return they get be enough to risk the initial investment?

If they did it and it fails, then we would be back in the same situation again - but with the extra effort of learning the changes for a short-term fix.

[Lord Orwell]

it's too much effort do quote about the mono project, but i will say this:

.net 4.0 is about to come out, and apps that need 3.5 are becoming mainstream. The latest mono is just now coming into a decent 2.0 compliance. At the speed microsoft is releasing these things, it will never keep up.

[JuggaloBrotha]

esposito, I'm curious to why you keep saying that vb6 compiles to native code. It never has and never will, none of the VB versions have ever compiled to native code. QBasic (before VB ever existed) could compile to native code, but put the limitation of needing DOS to run. VB has always required a runtime, period. It's just the runtime in .Net is a much larger set of files and only shipped with Vista and up.

I've also noticed that you tend to nit pick everything spinning the same lame story under different views so before you nit pick this post and spin the same "native" code crap I'll simply say that if a program is compiled to native code that means it can run on any MS OS without trouble. So that means a vb6 app can run on Win95, but oh wait, it can't you have to install the vb6 runtime files before it can run. OMG vb6 has a runtime dependency. .Net has a runtime dependency... wait a minute .Net really is the next version of vb6.. Oh snap son. Maybe you should consider just migrating to .Net and quit your whining.

I mean if someone tries running your vb6 app from a flash drive on Win95c (the only version of Win95 with usb support) then they're going to get a program crash and you'll have to make an installer to distribute with your apps, just like you would have to with the .Net Framework like everyone else...

[Lord Orwell]

esposito, I'm curious to why you keep saying that vb6 compiles to native code. It never has and never will, none of the VB versions have ever compiled to native code. QBasic (before VB ever existed) could compile to native code, but put the limitation of needing DOS to run. VB has always required a runtime, period. It's just the runtime in .Net is a much larger set of files and only shipped with Vista and up.

I've also noticed that you tend to nit pick everything spinning the same lame story under different views so before you nit pick this post and spin the same "native" code crap I'll simply say that if a program is compiled to native code that means it can run on any MS OS without trouble. So that means a vb6 app can run on Win95, but oh wait, it can't you have to install the vb6 runtime files before it can run. OMG vb6 has a runtime dependency. .Net has a runtime dependency... wait a minute .Net really is the next version of vb6.. Oh snap son. Maybe you should consider just migrating to .Net and quit your whining.

I mean if someone tries running your vb6 app from a flash drive on Win95c (the only version of Win95 with usb support) then they're going to get a program crash and you'll have to make an installer to distribute with your apps, just like you would have to with the .Net Framework like everyone else...

have you never dug into your menus? both vb5 and 6 have a "compile to native code" option in the project properties.

plus, i'm not necessarily disagreeing with any point you're trying to make, but to say that vb.net is a direct sequel to vb6 is really stretching it. Up until that version, vb was completely backwards compatible. While the programming structure is the same, it could also be said it's the same as any basic. While it's a new visual basic, it's a complete ground-up rewrite.

[dilettante]

VB6 can compile to native code as thoroughly as VC++. They both rely on runtimes and external libraries though, and why not? Reinventing the wheel is pointless. Your definition of "native code" is way off in the weeds. I believe the issue there is the relative ease of reverse-engineering a program's source from its EXE and DLLs.

QBasic was strictly an interpreter, perhaps you meant QuickBasic?

Trotting out Win95 is pretty silly. It has almost no relevance today, and even Win2K is dead as of July.


What I don't understand is why people who use VB.Net want to argue any of these points. They wouldn't even have come up if we just stuck to the original issue about releasing VB6 as open source software.

[Shaggy Hiker]

The topic of the thread was covered exhaustively long ago. The thread was started by Esposito, and he can take it wherever he wants as far as I'm concerned.

The drawbacks mentioned for C/C++ are too minor to overcome the advantages. Those languages have all the versatility you could ask for, compile to machine language, and nobody will cut you out. Learning them wouldn't be that hard. After all, you learned an entirely new language just to spite MS (VB6 is still around, so why else did you go to Delphi so quickly?), so why not learn a language that isn't owned by some company. You are betting that some new company will survive and continue where Borland failed. Fat chance. They're a niche market at best. Sure, they could be around for a couple more years, possibly even a decade, but what then? VB let you down in shorter time than that. If you switch to C/C++, you have an ANSI standard language that isn't owned by any company, so all kinds of different companies can build compilers, IDEs, and so forth. Choose C if you don't want to deal with OO design, choose C++ if you are fine with OO design.

In an earlier thread there were several links for viable IDEs that would allow form design. VB isn't any easier or harder other than the form design. Heck, I loved VB6, but after using the .NET IDE, the VB6 IDE is frustrating and awkward, so it isn't like the pinacle of design. Far from it, actually, as MS was able to improve on it considerably (and the IDE has nothing to do with the framework, .NET syntax, or any such thing, so it COULD have been put into earlier VB if it had been thought up back then). Furthermore, if VB6 was really so easy to learn and so easy to use, then why are there so many people asking questions about it? It isn't easy. The IDE is fairly good, but there are vastly better ones out there already. The language isn't particularly easy, and if you learned it, then learning C wouldn't be too tough for you. The code constructs would be the same, there would just be a change in the syntax for those code constructs.

There is no sound reason for you to stick with Delphi, which will ultimately disappoint you, other than that you don't want to learn the language that is obviously the most suitable for your needs.