There are a significant number of programmers who are at a certain stage in life where they will not be able to make the next "transition." Imagine hearing, "We're sorry, but we will no longer be supporting algebra and English." Not everyone can be a Bill Gates and leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Business decisions which are made on the basis of sentimentality are not good business decisions, and ultimately benefit no one.
Bump
Bill Gates hasn't had to personally learn a new trick since he pulled the DOS wool over the eyes of his partner and of IBM way back in the 70's.
Well, they can just fork off the source tree, and start an independent project...oh, wait...that's right...they can't do that without the source code and an open source license, can they?
Gee...tough break, there fellas.
Yup. Welcome to the wonderful world of closed-source proprietary development tools.
Microsoft can do what they like. It's their product.
But here, suddenly, people aren't talking free markets. They're talking proprietorship, and a sort of command approach. Interesting.
The free market works differently. If there is something in VB or VBA that isn't found in .NET, and there may be, then some in the free market will hold both to older versions, and will seek a reliable substitute as equally as the substitute now offered by Microsoft. The sentimentality is all on the side of Microsoft. The practical view is that Microsoft provides a product. If that product doesn't meet the needs of customers, customers will look elsewhere - in a free market.
Just because VBA, say, in entrenched as the macro language of Microsoft suites is no reason to forever maintain it. On the other hand, THE ONE THING people point to as Microsoft's advantage is that they rigorously encouraged backward compatibility. The old DOS accounting programs could still be run on XP, they say. So here, Microsoft is abandoning that practice. In doing so, the abandon the ONE THING that set them apart from competitors. From a competitor's viewpoint, I might sugggest, Microsoft - go right ahead. It depends on whether they can use .NET to do what they used to do, even if in a different manner. If there's just no way, then great - obsolete your base. Anger your customers. It's a free market, and a proprietary product.
Crap - and I was just thinking of learning VB6. I guess I'll stick with my GWBASIC and hope they come out with GWBASIC.NET some day. ;-)
The instructor said that when you make your living with your knowledge, in IT you can expect that your value will decline by about 25% a year. I jokingly mentioned that in that case, at my current job I have a technical competancy level of -200%!
But he's right. Things change so rapidly in the IT world that you have to learn new things every day, otherwise your knowledge becomes obsolete, and so do you.
There are a significant number of programmers who are at a certain stage in life where they will not be able to make the next "transition." Imagine hearing, "We're sorry, but we will no longer be supporting algebra and English." Not everyone can be a Bill Gates and leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Sorry, but I disagree with you 100% here. That's just part of the job. Have you done much support for MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 lately? How about QEMM? Or SCO Xenix? OS/2 v2.0? NT Server 3.51? Configured many ARCnet or Token Ring networks lately? All of these were terrific technologies that were really leading edge at one time. But they've all fallen by the wayside.
As people in the technology field, we've all implicitly agreed to keep up with the technology, otherwise we'll be obsolete as surely as the technology that we're experts in...
Heck, I'm in a situation where I'm trying to come up to speed ASAP on Microsoft products. As a Novell specialist, they've got the technology, but they don't have the "mind share," as my instructor put it... Novell could sell a server that prints money, and still, nobody would be buying it. Because they lost the "mind share," and now they're losing the market share as well. (Thanks to Mark G for those statements... They're right on target.)
Mark
> ... intention to cut free support on March 31, a
> Microsoft representative said on Thursday afternoon.
MS reminding programmers why it's dangerous to build
your career on what is effectively a proprietary
programming language (that runs only on MS Windows,
and probably not all of the installed base thereof).
> The vendor has spent the past few years encouraging
> Visual Basic 6 programmers to migrate to the new Visual
> Basic .Net platform, which has had its share of
> complications. The Microsoft representative acknowledged
> that the company “dramatically altered the Visual Basic
> language-syntax in Visual Basic .Net.”
So does VB.NET run older VB.6 code, unmodified?
Does VB.NET run on all the deployed platforms where
VB6 apps exist today? Seems like there might be issues
here beyond annoying a community of programmers.
> “It’s a different language,” said Visual Basic
> programmer Don ...
And from what I hear from my relatives in IT, learning
a different language is the last thing that too many VB
programmers want to do.
"Who moved my cheese?"
or
How do you distinguish between an MS product and a mouse trap?
Presumably you can continue to run VB6 alongside VB .net.
I have a VB6 package that I installed in my computer because I still have a few legacy programs, and I've never had any problems with it.
I've also got ARJ and LHA still as backup unzippers, although I think I may dispense with these legacy programs when I move to my next computer.
I think I had VB4 and VB5 on my last computer, as well, to run old stuff, although I don't seem to have them anymore on this one.
I made the tranistion to VB.NET.. And it was a little tough.. having done one consulting gig in Java certainly helped (they basically copied many aspects of Java for .NET languages)...
I then transitionted to C#.. a little tough also (like trying to figure out how to pass optional variables to a function -- you can't have optional parms in C#, but the workaround is to use the SqlString datatype which accepts null values, hence making the values optional....)
.Net indeed has it's own problems, and I will admit not everyone is cut out to be a OOP programmer -- which one reason why VB became so popular in the first place. However, these people just need to apply themselves and stop whining... They never bothered to learn .net -- I had to do it on my own and in my spare time...
The benefits of .NET are awesome, especially for websites... Nothing like populating a datagrid with a few lines of code..
Now I understand what SAP brought me in for an interview for. Or maybe not. No body knows which way the tides are going on this -- C#, Java, .NET. Not MS, Ballmer, Gates even.
The old Tower of Babel redux.
Probably a time when the small will whoop the big -- because the big and the herd that follows their every fart as if it is a deep mighty nuance are wandering blind and headed into the swamp at dusk.
Well, I just ordered up a VB 5 package today in order to support a product I helped develop years ago. We'll see.
Why not circulate a petition to require COBOL and FORTRAN to be around just long enough till folks retire? Why stop at Visual Basic.
While VB6 was _released_ in 1998, the long haul to .NET meant that it was only replaced at all less than four years ago, and only replaced by a practical replacement (I tend to ignore VB.NET 2002/.NET Framework 1.0) under two years ago. That isn't long enough to migrate.
However, the petition calls for something impractical - integration into the current Visual Studio IDE. 'Classic' VB is just way too different. The designers aren't going to work in the new environment. The debugger is based on an out-of-process model, unlike VB6's in-process host (where your code ran inside the VB6.exe process, and could crash the IDE). Debugging is one area of many where VB.NET is simply massively superior to its predecessor.
Businesses do have quite large numbers of legacy VB6-based line-of-business applications. As a bespoke solution provider, we've written a number of them - we now do new work in C# or VB.NET but maintenance and extensions to older projects are much cheaper without translation, which would take longer and hence incur extra costs.
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I work for a large global corporation that employs close to 50,000 people. We have quite a few applications written in house in VB6. These aren't toy apps, these apps are used as front ends to systems that process tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. .net isn't an enhancement to VB, it's a replacement language. Dill weeds like yourself that state 'spare us the complaints' and 'it's time for an intervention' clearly have absolutely no idea what life in the real world is like. It seriously *******me off when people make such stupid blanket statements. It only serves to prove your absolute ignorance.
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Try to see this from a corporate programmer's point of view. Microsoft so drastically changed the grammar and rules of this new language, it made porting many of the existing VB6 apps near impossible. And with corporate budgets as tight as they are, people are stuck using VB6 even today.
What M$ should have done is made the first update after VB6 more of an incremental upgrade - changing some things for the better, but leaving others alone; ease the burden of porting our corporate RAD applications. Then, the next version could enhance that even further. SPaced properly apart, these "baby steps" would have helped developers migrate. Instead, M$ chose to jump five steps forward, leaving developers to either buck up the large amounts of cash to perform these insanse ports to the new platform, or wither and die with their now legacy apps.
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Hey Dill Weed who works for the little 50,000 user company; I am the assistant to the CIO for our company that employees over 79,000 world-wide. We too have quite a few VB6 apps litering our operations and a few of them contribute to the multibillion dollar operations we run. My reaction to the end of VB6 support is: So what? It's not like VB6 will stop working or will any of the apps written in it. Not that we'll have any shortage of VB6 era programmers (unfortunatly) and there are mor than a ton of 3rd party add-ons that still work just fine with VB6. You act as if a switch was to be thrown that would turn all these apps off.
AND, Paul is right - time for an intervention. Start now using .net, slowly move to the current generation of tools/code. Just because you work for such a large company it's obvious that you are not in charge there because your shortsighted knee-jerk reaction sounds like that of a VB6 programmer who has no .NET skillz and is therefore worried about losing his job to someone who does.
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Another aspect to the still prominent use of VB6 is it's compatability with VBA code inside office apps such as Excel and Word and Access. As an Architect, I have developed many apps in VB6 that integrate to VBA seamlessly. I can write an app using a combo of VB and VBA without any problems using COM interfaces. At this point, VB.net addins loaded into Autocad cannot be unloaded from AutoCAD without a restart; not a very viable development model. Until the .net platform is as ubiquitous and well integrated as VB6 into the wide range of business applciations, the older version will still be in high use.
If Microsoft ( and other companies integrating their technologies ) would give me a good enough excuse to switch, I would...
Hmmph. It's been a long time since I carefully rubber-banded my pile of punch cards after coding in Basic or COBOL or PL1 or whatever it was 25+ years ago....
I never liked .net. I bought the VS.NET after it came out but didn't like the editor/interface changes so I went back to my nice and comfy MSVC++ 6. I write to the Windows APIs so all the extra goop in .net isn't for me. I thought MFC (aka More F&%$ing Code) was bad enough, .net is huge.
This whole "save vb" thing is kind of silly. By now, any bugs have workarounds so updates aren't really needed.
Isn't it what you do with a language that's important, anyway?