Section :: Bytegeist

VB 6 - Aerial Pigs in View

by Dermot Hogan

Microsoft helps VB6 users (again)

Friday 29 September 2006.

Well, the pigs have started to fly. Microsoft has introduced a tool that makes it easier for the poor, ignorant, un-enlightened VB 6 user to use .NET forms – in a VB6 application. Woo-hoo!!

Let’s see now: VB6 was released about eight years ago, and .NET about 5 years ago. And it’s taken this long for Microsoft to twig that there is a whole raft of VB 6 users out there who are perfectly content to sit on their wallets and not fork out good cash for VB .Net.

The tool in question is the Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 and it looks to be part of what the doctor ordered for VB6 users beached by Microsoft’s insane decision to dump VB6 in favour of VB .NET. Not to put too fine a point on it, the market has rejected VB.NET in its current form. I’m not going to go over the arguments as to why the last language you should chose to upgrade to from VB6 is VB .NET: to my mind it’s a no-brainer choice to go with C#. If you’re going to have to re-write your application, you might as well write it in something that’s certainly going to stay around.

I’ve some experience here having previously written a reasonably sized application in VB .NET and one I’m now working on in C#. You can write perfectly good applications in both, but I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever in switching to C#. It’s better supported, with far more examples of how to do things out there on the web and its obviously Microsoft’s favoured language child. Put it another way, where do you think Microsoft’s language A Team (headed up by Anders Hejlsberg) work? It’s not VB .NET, I can tell you that.

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VB 6 - Aerial Pigs in View
18 December 2006, by Another Bathless VB Savage

Too little too late, and not all that interesting anyway. What we really want is the VB7 we never got, with improvements from a LONG list submitted to Microsoft over several years.

I’ve been amazed we haven’t seen more discussion of Anders Hejlsberg as Microsoft’s "one man natural disaster." There was the Turbo Pascal vs. MS Basic ’80s, the Delphi vs. VB ’90s, then the VJ++ vs. VB debacle of the late ’90s - which ended in the infamous Sun lawsuit over VJ’s deviance from Java. Finally we have the .Net situation, which was also clearly meant as a VB-killer in favor of the curly braces set.

But why has Mr. H. gotten off so easy? I’m sure he’s a great guy. I’m sure he’s brilliant and responsible for many brilliant creations. No, he’s never trash-talked the "Basic" world that I’m aware of.

Yet he seems to have had such a central role for so very long.
VB 6 - Aerial Pigs in View
26 October 2006

I believe that Microsoft has missed the mark totally again. VB stands for Visual BASIC, and having used VB 6 and the new incarnation VB 2005 I see not much BASIC in it. I don’t believe every one wants to turn themselves into a C++ (or C#) programmer.
VB 6 - Aerial Pigs in View
23 October 2006, by George Wenger

This wizard is just another example of "way too little, way too late". Microsoft has, indeed made it clear that they have no loyalty to either VB or VB programmers, but your assumption that C# will " be around for while" is what we all thought about VB - and look what happened to all of us!

I am always tempted to paraphrase their own slogan: "Microsoft. Where do we want you to go today?".
VB 6 - Aerial Pigs in View
30 September 2006

From what I see, this is just a wizard for creating a COM wrapper in VB.NET for a component written in VB.NET - something perfectly doable without the wizard. This gives the component consumer nothing new and saves the component writer user some mouse clicks and keystrokes. Perhaps I haven’t dug deeply enough but I fail to see the justification for either the tool or the jubilation. It seems to be aimed more at pointy-haired types looking for an excuse to ’upgrade’ coders rather than at coders who haven’t yet found a reason to ’upgrade’ their tools.