Thought blog

It very interesting to hear from so many old VB 6 programmers that they hate/dislike/refuse to use vb.net I have no idea why because I always felt that VB was becoming an obsolete programming language.

Back in 1999 I was invited up to Microsoft’s Campus for 2 days of discovery of what was then called COM+ 2.0 and the Next Generation Windows Services. The group I was involved in was with the VB team. For 16 hours we met with the team and discussed what they where doing with VB. I was totally into what they were presenting and planning to do with Visual Basic. I was thinking that VB would finally be a REAL programming language.

The team did have some concerns on if they should support old VB6 code as well as VB 7 code (that is what they were calling it then) in the new Visual Studio IDE. 3/4 of the guests, including myself, were saying to forget about supporting both; we need to move forward a modern language. I felt that if you left VB programmers to their own devices they would not use any of the new awesome features. The other 1/4 of the guests were saying that this would be a big mistake to not have the ability to build VB6 style apps in the new environment.

I guess when I look back it I was thinking about how our company used VB. We did many things that not your average VB programmer would do. Many times I would say I needed this feature in VB and the response back from Microsoft was that maybe I should forget about VB and start doing everything in C++. I LOVED VB and I did not want to switch to C++! How dare they tell me to give up my first programming love! Just give it a face lift and I will be happy. When I saw VB 7 I was in Heaven. My old VB would finally be the true beauty that I expected it to be!

When I we left the MSFT campus, a package arrived a couple of days later at home with the latest bits for what is now .NET. I installed it and started playing around with what they had showed us the previous week. It extremely slow and buggy but it gave me a chance to play with what was about to change they way we do development! I could not wait for this new framework. (Little did I know I would almost have to wait 2 1/2 more years)

Then something happened that changed my development career. It was called COOL. I remember all the rumors about this new language Microsoft was creating called COOL and I found this in the New Projects Window. I started playing around with COOL and I simply fell in love with it. Yes its just like Java, but it was better. It felt like Java/C++ but it was as easy as VB. From this point on I decided that I would be COOL and learn everything I could about it in this technology preview. The name was later changed to C#.

So when .NET finally shipped, I broke off my 10 relationship with Visual Basic. (I actually cheating on VB for several years with the beta, but now I could go public with it) Since 2001 I would say that 80% of my work has been in C#, 15% in C++ and 5% in either VB.NET or VB6. I hated every minute working in VB. I had a job at a consulting firm and I wrote this address validation control in VB and the whole time I was wishing I could have done it in C#. VB just did not do it for me any more. It started looking foreign and I felt like it could never be like the old days.

Lately I’ve been diving into Java and cocoa (Apple C Language) for personal enlightenment on my Mac.

Some ways I feel a bit responsible for the decision of Microsoft to only support VB.net and guilty because I did not even use the new language when it was introduced. Although I highly doubt Microsoft’s decision to not support VB6 with .nET was made from 6 guests telling them not to!!! I can only hope that I had that much pull