i'm begginer in vb6

[mr.computer]

i'm begginer in vb6..
what's your advice?

[RhinoBull]

My advice would be to start with VB 2008/2010 instead - you can get it for free (the Express edition) directly from Microsoft.
VB6 is 12 (but practically a lot older than that) years old...

[sessi4ml]

If you want something to happen, only you can make it happen.
To master anything takes about four hours a day.
Start with small code...and expand.
Write program:
Guess a number between 1 - 100
This was my first program.

Be nice to people, try not to hurt anyone, and if you are lucky you will fall into love.
Breath, take a step forward, check in, Breath...
Dance like no one is looking
And be sure to have fun.

Now go write some code...with comments

[baja_yu]

I suggest you *seriously* consider what RhinoBull said, and after that you can either pick up a good book, or find some free online resources. You can find a lot by simply Googling "learn vb.net" or something like that.

You can use these Forums and other website to find free/open source projects and samples, so you can learn by example. But I suggest you dont skip the books. You can learn a lot of things from other peoples examples, but those examples are written by people with various levels of knowledge, so you can also take a lot of bad habits and mistakes from them.

Do take time to learn the programming basics. You wont regret it later on.

[dtbradio]

I agree, if you're a beginner, start with Visual Basic2008/2010. Many of us who have full-time careers are steeped in the older VB 4-5-6 (and in my case Qbasic and Quick Basic 4-5) tradition, and we simply do not have enough time to learn a whole new programming approach if its not directly related to career goals. If you're younger with time on your hands, now is definitely the time to start learning!

[CDRIVE]

There is a caveat to devoting the rest of your life to VBNET. That is, there is absolutely no guarantee the Microsoft won't throw you and VBNET under the bus someday too!

[vb5prgrmr]

>There is a caveat to devoting the rest of your life to VBNET. That is, there is absolutely no guarantee the Microsoft won't throw you and VBNET under the bus someday too!

Only a few to several years left to find out... Then what, do we finally get our VB7 that was supposed to come out before all this .NET nonsence???

[Hack]

As there is no programming question involved, I'm moving this to General Developer

[esposito]

There is a caveat to devoting the rest of your life to VBNET. That is, there is absolutely no guarantee the Microsoft won't throw you and VBNET under the bus someday too!

Wise words. History has already taught us that lesson.

[dtbradio]

I guess as long as programs written in VB6 will still run on future Windows versions, there will still be many of us hobby/amateur programmers who keep using VB6. Even if MS has discontinued all support, there's still TONS of support from users all over the globe.

[baja_yu]

I guess as long as programs written in VB6 will still run on future Windows versions, there will still be many of us hobby/amateur programmers who keep using VB6. Even if MS has discontinued all support, there's still TONS of support from users all over the globe.

That's just it. There are some indications that they wont work on the future Windows 8 (or whatever it will be called).

[GaryMazzone]

Adapt or get left behind.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

There is a caveat to devoting the rest of your life to VBNET. That is, there is absolutely no guarantee the Microsoft won't throw you and VBNET under the bus someday too!

To be fair the same could be said of any programming language that is owned by a corporation. Only Company Neutral languages like c++ can reasonably guarantee that you should be able to use them for life, and even then something could happen that changes all that.

Programming is about change, so far in my career i have learnt 6 languages and have worked a small amount with of a couple more, the last one C# i am still learning.

I guess as long as programs written in VB6 will still run on future Windows versions

As far as i was aware Microsoft are dropping the vb6 runtime from future versions of Windows. So after Windows 7 vb6 programs will not work on future versions of Windows.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Of course, we have also heard that VB6 would not run on Vista, then Windows 7, and so forth.

NSA has it right, though. If you want to work in a language that is going to be certain to be around for decades, then you need to use C/C++. There are open source compilers for both, and thousands of books and tons of other material to help you. However, when it comes to C/C++, you just might need all those resources...

VB6 has been replaced by .NET (there was no VB7 that died, it was called VB6.5), but that's nothing new. I never used VB versions prior to 5 (technically, I used VB4 after a fashion, but not explicitly), but my understanding is that there was a major shift in language between VB3 and VB4, and in any case, VB4 was radically different from the QBASIC that was shipped as part of DOS. So even within Basic, the move to .NET is at least the third, if not the fourth, total revision in somewhat more than a decade (.NET came out in 2002, so those changes were 1992-2002). Will there be another one? Of course. Heck, when somebody knocks Windows off the pedestal as the most common OS, perhaps all VB will go the way of the dinosaurs (along with Espositos Delphi).

The only safe route for long term is C/C++, which need not necessarily fail even if the most common processor ceases to be the x86 family.

[dtbradio]

I guess at some point I will have to just deal with the headaches I get from looking at C code, and learn it.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

I guess at some point I will have to just deal with the headaches I get from looking at C code, and learn it.

Either that or be prepared to learn when changes happen as they often do. VB.Net for Instance is not that difficult to learn if you already know VB.

Web development has seen massive changes in recent years this doesn't stop people doing it, people adapt to the new technologies and often use them to make better systems than were possible before.

[sessi4ml]

Posting like this amazes me. It starts with a simple question, I need help in VB6, and it morphs into , learn, change or die...
Oh, by the way...learn 'C'

Choose a different field , building maintence...thanks dad

[NeedSomeAnswers]

What,

you think the advice given is wrong in some way ?

Would you advise someone who is just starting out to learn a language that is in effect dying rather than the latest technology ?

I never understand this resistance to change some people have, i have worked as a software developer for over 10 years and i learn something new virtually everyday.

[Jenner]

Exactly NeedSomeAnswers. Software development is about change. I used VB6 for YEARS and you know what? I'm SO happy I never, ever have to touch that buggy tub of crud again, I was walking on air. VB6 is dead, and for a new programmer, there's as much sense to learning VB6 as there is to learning COBOL or ADA.

When my current company asked me to write a program for them, I decided I'd see what this VB.NET was about, downloaded the Express edition and uninstalled VB6 as not to tempt me.

After the first day, I could do everything I wanted to with forms, and learn several new tricks I only dreamed of having in VB6 like anchoring/docking and FlowLayoutPanels.

After a week, I understood the basic structures, conditionals, and variable types. I turned on Option Strict and learned to use Convert.

After a month, I had all the basics... object enumeration, difference between classes and structures, events and handlers, file manipulation, and how to talk to databases. All 100% self taught from scouring online tutorials 4 hours a day. My code still looked very VB6-ish, but it worked.

After a year, my code no longer looks much looks vb6. I'm now regularly doing things like creating new class objects that inherit other classes, implementing standard interfaces in my classes, and I've mastered multi-threading and invoking delegates.

After four years, there's still things I can learn providing I choose to. I still haven't had good opportunity to use WCF or WPF yet for example though I've been picking at WPF off and on for some time now. I still don't know some of these fancier ways to handle XML; but most of these technologies I just haven't had a need to learn yet. At this point though, I've mastered LINQ and lambdas, I routinely design objects now that inherit from more primitive objects I've made, and I'm learning basic game programming via XNA and Managed DirectX.

My advice to the OP, don't bother learning VB6. It's a dead language. Period. Learn .NET. Heck, learn any modern, actively developed language; whether it's VB.NET or C#, Java, C++ , or Python.

[mr.computer]

Thanks for the info.

[RhinoBull]

I guess as long as programs written in VB6 will still run on future Windows versions, there will still be many of us hobby/amateur programmers who keep using VB6. Even if MS has discontinued all support, there's still TONS of support from users all over the globe.

That's not the point anymore - as OSs advance old programming languages cannot keep up with new technologies that they were meant to support back in days.
See, VB6 was developed during WinNT era, then it was Win2K and finally XP...
Guess what? All of them were based on the same platform with better gui and perhaps better hardware support with each release.
Now, when Vista was introduced Vb6 immediately began to show its age and with the release of Win7 it's even more obvious.
To support new technologies you'd have use (or build your own) third parties but even that isn't always possible.
When language becomes shorthanded it really "becomes" a ... well ... COBOL ... (sorry but I just couldn't resist)