VB6 - Cobol of the future?

[Shimano105]

S'alright Tay.

I did start off with a tongue in cheek comment about VB6 being in demand, but the underlying driver of this demand is the business, which seems to be forced to migrate by MS.

[AtW]

Plan C perhaps?

No. It sounds more like Plan vB

[AtW]

Do they need any FORTRAN IV?

I can do that.

Gisajob.

Only if you don't get Internet access there as otherwise you will be too busy increasing your ridiculous post count - slow down!!!

[DiscoStu]

Only if you don't get Internet access there as otherwise you will be too busy increasing your ridiculous post count - slow down!!!

<AtW>

Consecutive posts!

</AtW>

[AtW]

Jealous?

No. Next...

[xoggoth]

Ok, maybe CUK is not the place to air my greivances about .net. I am retired from contracting (at 23!) and no longer work in the corporate environment where having the latest high spec Vista PC is the norm and where there is an army of IT support staff to cope with problems.

I do have a business supplying educational software to schools and other small organisations who do not always have the latest kit and where installation is done by non experts. Our latest program installs in 15s flat on Vista or machines that already have the .net framework. Otherwise, they have to click on another pop up box and wait about 5 bleeding minutes for the framework to instal, most of which is completely irrelevant to the application. Drawing of thumbnail pictures that was almost instant on a six year old machine in VB6 using PaintPicture is now barely adequate on a 2ghz dual core processor using this drawimage crap. When describing the minimum spec disk requirement I have to put 11Mb for Vista or other machines with the Framework or 640Mb for 64 bit machines without the framework.

.net has many nice features but MS need to be taken by the scruff of the neck and forced to recognise that the really important thing is the final product as it appears to the user! We need more speed and better economy of disk usage and memory.


they do not

[AtW]

.NET consits of a number of parts that differ in design quality. The core and the best part is CLR/C#. WinForms however is a complete sh1te that was made by person who should have been fired on the spot - all they had to do is hook into Win32, but they managed to screw this one up too.

.NET 3.5 might be better as they have created new API for Forms, but I have not tried it - chances are it is as carp as WinForms.

[TimberWolf]

Looks like VB6 apps will work with Vista too...

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbrun/ms788708.aspx

The Visual Basic team’s goal is that Visual Basic 6.0 applications that run on Windows XP will also run on Windows Vista...Microsoft will ship key components of the Visual Basic 6.0 runtime with Windows Vista in order to enable customers to run Visual Basic 6.0 applications on Windows Vista.

Hope that includes calls to Windows API's

.Net really crucifies my el. cheapo laptop, anyone got a copy of VB6 enterprise edition they don't mind being 'evaluated' for a few days? I've lost my copy (binned by accident, duh).

[Joe Black]

Our latest program installs in 15s flat on Vista or machines that already have the .net framework. Otherwise, they have to click on another pop up box and wait about 5 bleeding minutes for the framework to instal, most of which is completely irrelevant to the application. Drawing of thumbnail pictures that was almost instant on a six year old machine in VB6 using PaintPicture is now barely adequate on a 2ghz dual core processor using this drawimage carp. When describing the minimum spec disk requirement I have to put 11Mb for Vista or other machines with the Framework or 640Mb for 64 bit machines without the framework.

I'd agree with some of your points Xog, but I don't think Vista/.NET is as bad as you suggest.

With regard to drawing images, if you really have a problem then perhaps the code simply needs updating.

Certainly my last project, and this one, involves creating a lot of images on 'the fly'. Thumbnails, as well as cropped, re-sized/re-coloured, VGA size images. In the current case up to 10 layers put together.

On my humble P3 desktop today that took about 50ms...

[VectraMan]

.net has many nice features but MS need to be taken by the scruff of the neck and forced to recognise that the really important thing is the final product as it appears to the user! We need more speed and better economy of disk usage and memory.

I agree, sort of. I haven't seen much .NET, but I see the same with Java that some people insist on using. It's sitting in my system tray now telling me it needs updating. I don't want Java, I don't care about Java, I just want applications that install and run and the idea that non-techy end users care enough to want to install other frameworks that your application needs is beyond insanity. They don't; it just scares them. If you're really unlucky they think "what's this" and then uninstall it.

Great for web based server apps where it's set up and managed by techies (though quite why you need a cross platform system when you control the platform I don't understand either). Should never be allowed on the desktop.