Where is the Basic, in Visual Basic?

[techgnome]

don't call us code monkeys

Yeah! We're "Compilable Instruction Simians"

In all honesty, I don't think VB has been very "BASIC" for some time... I remember making the transition to VB3 for the first time... at the time I didn't think it was all that Basic any more. transitioning from procedural programming to event programming was the hardest thing for me to grasp... ever. Even OOP/OOD came easier for me than the concept of events... "OK, I get it that when I click this button, this code runs... but where the heck is the ***** code that says 'if button clicked, run this code' ... " YEah... I spent three weeks going around and around and around on that one...


an astute classmate of mine back in the days of tech school (oddly the AF was kind enough to prepare me for just about everything but VB) noted that when you get right down to it, all languages are the same... they all have variable declarations, they all have some kind of loop structure, control structures, blocks, conditional statements and the same basic data types... they only differ in syntax.
I tell you it was a light bulb going on... that was my ah-ha moment. With the exception of my struggle with event-driven programming, after that moment, picking up new languages has been fairly simple... except Perl... that still confuses me... but I think that was the point behind it, to be as confusing as possible .. but picking up C++, PHP, even C# ... I may not be fluent or as quick in those languages as I am in VB, I can still read code and understand what's going on.

Another exception would be printing. In VB6 it is simply Printer.Print where as in VB.Net it is a bit more complex to say the least.

Yes and no... reason it isn't as simple as it used to be is because you have more control... things that used to be difficult with the old printer object are now easier... it allows for greater control then previously possible... so, yeah, it takes more code than it used to. That's why I simply go with a reporting too to take care of all that for me.

In terms of VB classic... VBScript is probably the most stripped-down, simplest form of VB. VBA would be the next step up from there. And then the next step up is VB6. Since VBA is basically a subset of VB6, anything you can do in VBA is going to be supported in VB6 ... mostly... there are some areas where it's not so direct, since VBA runs in context of Office, there are some things you have access to that you don't instantly have access to in VB6... at least not until you add the appropriate references.

-tg

[dbasnett]

The fundamental concepts of event programming and multi-programming / threading have also been around a long time. What was hard for me was that you could only diddle with controls on the UI thread and all of the BS that went along with that. My past kept fighting with it. In the old days if multiple processes wanted to share a resource it was up to the individual to make certain that only one process at a time accessed it. I still don't like it. I wish that MS had just put a caveat on all the controls that said don't access the control from multiple threads simultaneously.

[RyderS]

My past kept fighting with it.

I sure hear that, brother. Since I can't be a programmer full time (or anything close to that), the evolution of languages has out-paced me... and my past becomes a heavy anchor. It's harder to reorient your thinking than it is to start fresh, I think.

[RyderS]

My past kept fighting with it.

I sure hear that, brother. Since I can't be a programmer full time (or anything close to that), the evolution of languages has out-paced me... and my past becomes a heavy anchor. It's harder to reorient your thinking than it is to start fresh, I think.