Paul Vick the voice of reason.
Paul Vick chimes in with some well thought out reasons why migrating VB6 to Visual Studio.NET isn’t a good idea. My favorite quote:
“To?start with the second point first, to those who think we should?integrate VB6 into the current Visual Studio shell, I can only offer the perspective of a developer whoís worked in both codebases: best of luck. ”
His other points addressing the idea of creating a non-integrated version of VB make sense too and extend what I said in my first post. How much longer do the VB6ers want? They’ve had 5 years to migrate their code. The need to migrate isn’t something that just popped up. Should Microsoft spend 4 years integrating “VB.COM” into Visual Studio.NET or 2 years shipping an update to VB 6? If they do ship a stand-alone version, what new features should it include? Generics? Wouldn’t that just be giving the VB6ers a placebo? It doesn’t cure their problem.
VB petition
ComputerZen.com – Scott Hanselman’s Weblog – You have GOT to be kidding me
On the other hand, this petition does provide a centrally located “do not hire” list.
VB 6 is dead, long live VB6
Randomize – VB6 Hold-Outs Grab Pitchforks and Torches
I’m with Richard and others on this one. Just because VB6 != VB.NET doesn’t mean that VB.NET should provide backwards compatibility. It’s not like Microsoft didn’t TELL you about this. It’s not like at PDC 2000 they didn’t say “VB.NET is not compatilble with VB6″. That was FIVE YEARS AGO PEOPLE. You are just NOW getting around to “protesting” VB.NET and the abandonment of VB6? I was doing primarily VB6 development at that time and I remember sitting in the sessions at PDC 2000 thinking, “Man, I can’t wait to dump VB6 and re-write my stuff in VB.NET and C#”. Hell, the VB6 people should be ECSTATIC that MS isn’t going to be updating their environment. Visual Studio 6 is more stable that Visual Studio.NET 200x. Some people prefer using Visual C++ 6.0 over Visual Studio C++.NET (or whatever it’s called).
So while I’m sympathetic, I’m not THAT sympathetic. There was less complaining when Java went from version 1.2 to version 1.3 and half the GUI code broke as a result. Just hike up your pretty pink pinafores and migrate your code to VB.NET. Those of us that might have to maintain your VB6 code at some point will be eternally grateful.
Amen Mikhail
Naming conventions: I don’t like camel and I do like Hungarian
Mikhail says he’s not really in love with camelCasing. I use it all the time and I did before I started coding against the .NET Framework. His example makes sense, although anyone who’s naming their vars “a”,”b” and “c” should be shot. 
My favorite example when I’m arguing for the use of pseudo Hungarian (or full Hungarian) is DateTime vars. I work in the web world so I’m always using the ToShortDate or ToLongDate methods on DateTime variables. If I’m passing around a DateTime string what should the var be called? shortDateTimeString? or just shortDateTime? That’s not really descriptive, lets use startDate. Does startDate return a DateTime or a String? Should I name the var startDateShortDateString? Wouldn’t strStartDate be better than startDateShortDateString? The “hover over the variable in the IDE” trick only works if you are in the IDE and if the IDE is working (I’ve had to restart Visual Studio more than once to get intellisense working again).
What’s all the hub-bub, bub?
I’ve always drilled down into my objects in the Locals and Auto windows in the debugger. Am I missing something overly dramatic here?
updateLooks like Ian Griffth had the same question. Julia explains that the VB debugger and the C# debugger are apparently horses of different colors.
C# AND VB.NET suck
A well-deserved smack back to some C# zealotry
“When are these C# zealots going to stop telling us VB.NET programmers that we suck, our language sucks, and that we don’t know how to use our own language.”
About the same time the softie suck-ups quit telling Java, Perl, and PHP programmers and Linux users that their language sucks and their software sucks. In other words, never.
BTW I program in C# 90% of the time in my job and I’ve never had to use unsafe code even when writing interop code. Why use unsafe code when you can write safe code eh? Generics seem to me like delegates in that they seem to solve one specific problem (typed collections) and really don’t have any other uses. I haven’t written any high-performance apps in .NET yet so the whole boxing vs. non-boxing code performance hit hasn’t affected me yet. Maybe that’s a bigger deal than I think?
I “grew up” on VB 4.0 (32-bit thank, no 16-bit for me. I looked forward and never looked back!). I did the majority of my professional programming using VB 5.0 and 6.0. Why did I choose C#? The simplicity of the language. I had just spent about a year doing some Java programming. I didn’t have a lot of extra syntax and functions to learn along with all the namspaces. Does that mean that VB.NET sucks? No. Now that I’m more familiar with the .NET framework, I’m thinking about using VB.NET more often. I’m using it exclusively at home to build little shortcut applications for my wife and I. When I saw Jeff Greene demo the new “my” syntax for VB I praised his name. Finally they are putting the VB back in VB.NET. The only thing I don’t like about VB in general after programming in C# and Java is how much TYPING you have to do in VB. Ye Gods, I’d never noticed it before. Eh, it gives my fingers a good workout anyway.
Arguing over programming languages or operating systems is like running in the special olympics. Even if you win, you’re still retarded.
P.S.And “hear hear” on the death of case sensitive languages! We’re not in the 80′s anymore!
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