Ah, Visual Basic. Love it or hate it, thousands of kids (and adults) use it each year to either learn how to program, or to actually program full-blown commercial apps... I remember working in a sort of sweatshop, learning VB 6 while "on the ropes" and all of a sudden VB.NET came on the scene. A week later we switched back to VB 6. So did a lot of others. The old-school VB vs. VB.NET battle has been raging for a while now. Remember that
petition? Apparently Microsoft is trying pretty hard to make happy with those disgruntled VB developers (thankfully I have moved on to greener pastures). eWeek has some gory
details, peppered with lively quotes from happy and concerned parties... In the final analysis it's hard to say if VB 6 diehards will be appeased. My bet is most will NOT be happy with the new, new VB. While it does pack a lot of cool features, there's always going to be the die-hards with their lust for all the old
gunk COM-goodness that made VB such a beast. LINQ, a way to do databases without knowing SQL, looks particularly promising. What was that line Steve Ballmer ran around screaming a few years ago? "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Now if only they (the developers) would listen... Anyone out there holed up in a shack with their dog-eared copy of VB 6 unwilling to just
let it go?
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Comments
3
Subscribe to commentsChris BrowneOct 10th 2005 11:18PM
Unwilling to let it go? No way.
It took me a long time to let go of VB6, I've been using VB since '95 and I finally let my old friend go in April, all because I moved jobs, I'd still be using it otherwise.
I'm now just about to get my MCAD, and I couldn't happier with VB.Net, its way more fun to use.
Don DemsakOct 11th 2005 7:47AM
You need to make a slight correction to the statement: "LINQ, a way to do databases without knowing SQL". Linq has nothing to do with SQL, DLinq does, which is an implementation of Linq. XLinq is another implementation of Linq, but for XML (yet another, but better, object model for dealing with XML).
Sahil MalikOct 12th 2005 1:07PM
Linq is not a way to do databases. Even DLinq will not make database knowledge, especially SQL, obsolete. At best, DLinq is a way to do easy translation between databases and objects. Thats really what it's all about.
Also, given that MS itself has such a huge codebase and investment in COM, it only makes sense if people who use MS technology try and learn from Microsoft's example. You don't need to rewrite all of your code to move to .NET.
Inspite of a multi-year retirement plan for VB6, there are still some people who will refuse to upgrade to VB.NET. Or they will continue to blame Microsoft for an architecture they developed that cannot be easily used over Interop. Any developer with half a brain knows to abstract his logic so changing components can be easily swapped. But if you wrote all your logic in the front end - obviously you will run into a wall one day. Then don't go blaming Microsoft for retiring an archaic programming platform.