VB to be abandoned?

dave holbon

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I’ve been developing applications since Access 1 hit the streets. Can anyone tell me why I should now throw away just about all these years of learning and start walking down the .NET and C# or VB.NET path? All the bumph I’ve received from MS tend to make me believe that VB is about to be abandoned. Strangely this represents the largest programming community on the planet.

Converting existing large applications to the .NET platform is a nightmare (there are some very subtle differences) and I have now decided it’s going to be quicker to re-write from scratch, but wonder what’s around the next corner.

Surely Microsoft will not abandon ten years of building the biggest customer programming knowledge base in the world in favour of the .NET path or failing this would it have been better to make .NET totally incompatible with existing systems so we all knew where we stand?

:) :)
 
They will make it obsolete as fast as possible. That was their intention all along. It was meant to be a quick programming langauge meant to be an introduction langauge to then go onto C++ with MFC and all the other frameworks, which failed as in VB it was so much easier to develop programs.

.NET is where MS is going to put it's money, VB.net is just something that will be use as stepping stone to C#. C# is where i am going to put my money. C# + .NET.

.NET is a new framework that is meant to clean up the Api in Windows, which is why it is so different, they tried to keep backwards compatibility, but they are slowly breaking that as well with every time they clean up the Api more.

I suggest learning C# or Java.
 
Java is a good WTG - also I believ platforms like Delphi will continue to find their "niche" - it alldepends where you want to be and what your intended market for your skill-set - be sure of that before deciding.
 
Speed of development is absolutely essential as is quickly and cheaply implementing major changes.

To me, going back to C# which a couple of years ago I found ponderous and slow (in relation to development times) which by the way was part authored by Anders Hejlsberg (who is famous for the design of the Delphi language), just did not cut the mustard and I think it’s about a decade more difficult to implement and learn and hence more expensive to deploy and maintain. However I have to say that using API calls (to be avoided at all costs) was even more complex and difficult to “get your head round” as there seemed to me to be thousands of them all named incorrectly and difficult to remember, however this is what they (Microsoft) should have worked on and not taking a step backward (in my view) in order to break Sun Systems “Java”.

There are some very large applications written using VB, some are in use by the major banks and large industrial concerns, writing these in C++ or C# is just not a viable proposition, nor can they be maintained at reasonable cost or even reasonable timescales. All Industry will suffer here a huge increase in costs transferring their Access databases using the DAO (to be removed from Access) interface to ADO.

Who is going to write a thousand lines of code when only a couple of dozen are required not to mention the dramatic effect such a move will have on the “part time” or student programmers most of which won’t exist after the introduction of these systems and the removal of VB. Systems modelling will become more expensive than actually writing the thing in the first place.

Still this will create an opportunity for some small and focused company. Microsoft has made their first IBM (compatibility) error. I think this really will make the first major dent in their demise profit wise.

What was the point of all this in the first place and why are we going backwards? Easier and simpler is always better.


:) :) :)
 
VB might be simple to use, it has major flaws which hard core people complained about. So now we ahve C# which is based on J++.

The API is simplified a lot if you ask me. They removed a lot of the hard to remember API calls in favor of a simplified API. C# i have personally found is a lot faster to develop in, but then again i am used to C style language, so VB is a step back in that respect.
 
I started my programming career (or what’s left of it) using C, without doubt this is the most dangerous language to use within Windows (circa 1994-2000). Many programmers who were taught to use this language never moved onward from the MS-DOS environment. To this day very day I still find them attempting to access areas that they should not (no device driver then?) and in my day writing device drivers was a “junior programmers” issue, hence most were full of bugs, some still are. Why re-invent the wheel, why attempt to be a clever programmer, why, why, why.

I have long since disregarded something as being “good” just on the premise that it was difficult to learn, required an IQ of 125 just to get started and upon five years training put students into the real world where “other” development systems were running rings around them in every aspect of which they had not the slightest clue. Of course they were against such things; the whole world is, it’s not excellence. That is not to say however that they are right, they are not. Nor does it mean they are programmers, it does not, but then the programming world is not about “classical programming” and has not been now for many years, it’s about the tools available to do things quickly and safely that looks good and performs at minimal cost to the user and not the programmers self esteem and kudos. Programming now is not just learning the compilation programme used, it’s about industrial processes, work-flows and most importantly engineering and the understanding of processes.

You may be the best C++ programmer in the world, but if this is not translated into the best programme for the users, it’s a failure whichever way you look at it.

We need more skills than just being able to write programmes, it’s only 5% of the problem, engineering and processes understanding are the rest.


:) :) :)
 

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