VB.NET

Question

I know VB was huge and many wannabe-programmers made a very good living slopping apps together in VB6 but why would Microsoft carry over so much of that into VB.NET? The reason I'm venting here is because I have a coworker who is taking a beginning VB.NET class. Rather than teaching Objects and good codiing practices that are hacking it up the same way VB6 used to do. And Microsoft has enabled them to do so but keeping the syntax of Subs and Functions around. Here I am trying to explain to my coworker what a constructor is what a method is (as opposed to a function) and I'm just confusing her more because the language itself has not lent itself to actually presenting what is going on under the hood. Okay I'm just venting... -James

armondalaban · Answer

DO YOU MEAN-- YOU DON'T LIKE VB?

marvin7 · Answer

I have read estimates as high as 65% (at one time) of all Windows development was done in Visual Basic. That being said an operating system is useless without software to run on it and I think they wanted to be able to easily port those older applications to .NET... however they wanted Visual Basic to be compliant with the CLS... vis-a-vis Visual Basic.NET. Visual Basic will never die. If you use good programming practices it's actually not too bad. (In my heart of hearts I almost wish C# were NOT case-sensitive especially since it was supposedly built from the ground-up and the CLS requires that a programming language not rely on character case to distinguish between tokens and lexemes.) (Scratch that... there are too many times where my class and my object only differ in case.)

chrishornberger · Answer

I think MS would have been more universally respected (perhaps not always liked but respected? yes) had they left VB6 as the vb alternative and made a statement that ... although support for VB6 will continue for the immediate future we are strongly urging programmers to move towards C# as the RAD tool of choice in place of VB...  They sure as hell weren't afraid to rattle some cages with their crappy java support (and later dropping it like a hot potato) in J++. THey weren't afraid to break thousands of applications when they broke the COM rule and changed the main interfaces in ADO back in 2.0/2.1. They weren't afraid to rewrite history with SQL Server. Or other half-baked idea... anyone remember ActiveX Documents? ugh. DHTML applications in VB? *sigh*

james · Answer

And by the way that was porting not poting... I type poorly when I'm frustrated :)

james · Answer

I suspect there were several meetings in Redmond on how to keep the VB dynasty alive by weaking the structure and making it appear to be the same free-for-all that VB was. I just want to kick someone at Microsoft right in their .Net Balls for poting VB into an OO world.

chrishornberger · Answer

I know VB was huge and many wannabe-programmers made a very good living slopping apps together in VB6 but why would Microsoft carry over so much of that into VB.NET?  Because like everyone who owns a cash-cow they give in to whiners. Waaaa I want my 1-based arrays back! Waaaaa I want to write shitty code by being able to turn off options. Here I am trying to explain to my coworker what a constructor is what a method is (as opposed to a function) and I'm just confusing her more because the language itself has not lent itself to actually presenting what is going on under the hood.  *nods* I hear you. I've had this same argument for a long time. I refuse to work with VB.NET on that principle alone... that it STILL allows such weak coding. I'm a VB developer from way back but I'm happy to say that other than tinkering around with stuff early on I've never released a single line of vb.net code. Not because the language isn't full-featured... because it is... but because they un-fixed it to satisfy whiner consortiums full of half-baked so-called programmers... ie... revenue streams.