A fantastic career awaits in a dead-end unsupport langage :P



  • Dear XXXX,

    I am sending this email to make you aware of a fantastic VB6 role I am working exclusively on, and believe me, you DO NOT want to miss out on this.

    Urgently seeking a VB6 developer who wants to take a challenging role in a forward moving innovative company.

    [snip]
    A fantastic salary is offered with a great career ahead of you in this rapidly growing popular company. This is a fantastic opportunity for and good VB6 Developer out there! They are looking to expand their team through out the rest of the year, and have new clients to take on over the course of the next 12 months. The future of this company is very bright, and now is a fantastic time to join.




  • I don't know what to make of this one. Okay, the advert is needlessly and irritatingly hyperbolic, but so what if they are still using VB6? Apps made with it will still work on Vista with minimal tinkering, and VB.NET isn't universally regarded as an improvement anyway. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.



  •  I agree VB6 can still be useful, just like you can still find uses for GWBASIC these days....

    However....

    @Jake Grey said:

    VB.NET isn't universally regarded as an improvement anyway

    WTF are you smoking?



  • @Jake Grey said:

    VB.NET isn't universally regarded as an improvement anyway
     

    Define "improvement". The only real disadvantage with VB.NET is that it isn't backwards compatible (but that's also an improvement in some ways).



  • I don't claim any strong personal feelings either way -I'm a hardware guy, not a coder- but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_.NET#Criticism raises a couple of issues with which I can kind of sympathise.



  • Reading the Wikipedia article the only real criticism is:

    VB.NET is not VB6 and it takes work to convert VB6 code to VB.NET

    Well, who would've guessed it...


  • :belt_onion:

    @silenceisdefeat said:

    @Jake Grey said:

    VB.NET isn't universally regarded as an improvement anyway
     

    Define "improvement". The only real disadvantage with VB.NET is that it isn't backwards compatible (but that's also an improvement in some ways).

     

    Oh my God!

    Please don't talk about things you obviously have no clue about.



  • @Jake Grey said:

    but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_.NET#Criticism raises a couple of issues with which I can kind of sympathise.
     

    WTF?

    Did you even read it?

    It basically consists of a bunch of retards who cannot adapt and change to new technologies. There is really nothing valid in there. I am sure a few good arguments of things that have been lost in the change could be made, but this certainly contains none of them.



  • @bjolling said:

    @silenceisdefeat said:

    @Jake Grey said:

    VB.NET isn't universally regarded as an improvement anyway
     

    Define "improvement". The only real disadvantage with VB.NET is that it isn't backwards compatible (but that's also an improvement in some ways).

     

    Oh my God!

    Please don't talk about things you obviously have no clue about.

     

     

    Oh my God!

    Starting posts like that is the perfect way to be taken seriously.


  • :belt_onion:

    @silenceisdefeat said:

    @bjolling said:

    @silenceisdefeat said:

    @Jake Grey said:

    VB.NET isn't universally regarded as an improvement anyway
     

    Define "improvement". The only real disadvantage with VB.NET is that it isn't backwards compatible (but that's also an improvement in some ways).

     

    Oh my God!

    Please don't talk about things you obviously have no clue about.

     

     

    Oh my God!

    Starting posts like that is the perfect way to be taken seriously.

     

    I had no intention of being taken seriously on this one. But after re-reading your post, I see that I should only have quoted Jake Grey.

    Still, you seem to underestimate the big improvements that have been made

     



  • @bjolling said:

    @silenceisdefeat said:

    @bjolling said:

    @silenceisdefeat said:

    @Jake Grey said:

    VB.NET isn't universally regarded as an improvement anyway
     

    Define "improvement". The only real disadvantage with VB.NET is that it isn't backwards compatible (but that's also an improvement in some ways).

     

    Oh my God!

    Please don't talk about things you obviously have no clue about.

     

     

    Oh my God!

    Starting posts like that is the perfect way to be taken seriously.

     

    I had no intention of being taken seriously on this one. But after re-reading your post, I see that I should only have quoted Jake Grey.

    Still, you seem to underestimate the big improvements that have been made

     

     

    Oh my God!

    I LOVE nested quotes btw.

    Big improvements eh? Like being unable to make an array that goes from 1900 to 2050?

    Hold on a second, that's not an improvement!



  • MPS: I was mostly referring to the fact that the .NET Framework is ten times larger than the old VB6 runtime library, but I also have some sympathy for anyone who's spent years getting used to the various quirks of a particular piece of technology only to find it's been dumped in favour of something only superficially similar with a whole new bunch of quirks that they'll have to start learning from square one. Shortsighted, perhaps, but also very human.

    Besides, I never even learned to like the revised Start Menu in Windows XP; who am I to pass judgement?


  • :belt_onion:

    @silenceisdefeat said:

    Big improvements eh? Like being unable to make an array that goes from 1900 to 2050?
     

    Use a freaking generic List<of type> or an ArrayList and use the ToArray function if you desperately want an array.

    So I have to correct myself.You REALLY do not know what you're talking about.

     



  • @silenceisdefeat said:

    Big improvements eh? Like being unable to make an array that goes from 1900 to 2050?
     

    If you still use arrays in this day and age, you should consider yourself dated anyway, but it sounds like you are using them for a fixed range of dates which might even be more of a WTF.



  • @Jake Grey said:

    the .NET Framework is ten times larger than the old VB6 runtime library
     

    And in this day and age it is a pretty safe bet you will have at least 2.x of the framework on any machine you deploy to.

    Also, you aren't supposed to be distributing it anyway, so it shouldn't be an issue.

    @Jake Grey said:

    I also have some sympathy for anyone who's spent years getting used to the various quirks of a particular piece of technology only to find it's been dumped in favour of something only superficially similar with a whole new bunch of quirks that they'll have to start learning from square one.

    I don't. It happens all the time. Welcome to computers.

    @Jake Grey said:

    Besides, I never even learned to like the revised Start Menu in Windows XP; who am I to pass judgement?

    Jesus, just put your head on the desk and quit. What can you be worth if something this trivial bothers you?



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    it sounds like you are using them for a fixed range of dates which might even be more of a WTF

     

    You really fell right into that one.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    It happens all the time. Welcome to computers.

    Which doesn't mean it's not bloody irritating, especially when there's no particularly compelling reason for the change; isn't that one of the things everyone hates about Vista besides all the bugs?

    As for XP's altered Start menu, it's not that I can't get by with it when I have to; I just find the old single-column menu easier to navigate with the keyboard, a habit I picked up from the inexplicable craze for stealing mouse balls that plagued my alma mater for five years, and set up my own computer accordingly.



  • @Jake Grey said:

    Which doesn't mean it's not bloody irritating, especially when there's no particularly compelling reason for the change;
     

    Are you really suggesting that there is no reason to change from VB6 to VB.NET??? WTF?

    @Jake Grey said:

    isn't that one of the things everyone hates about Vista besides all the bugs?

    Anyone who complains "zOMG they changed stuff in Vista!!!!" is a retard. Things change. Learn to adapt. Forward progress is what it is all about. Every OS changes... that is kind of the idea of moving forward.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    Are you really suggesting that there is no reason to change from VB6 to VB.NET?

    Not having worked with VB since school, I honestly couldn't say. But people have been producing perfectly good software with VB6 for the last decade, so why the tearing hurry to consign it to the dustbin of history? Apart from anything else, there's going to be a huge number of systems on which it will still work for years to come; there are plenty of five year-old or even older machines still out there in point-of-sale or manufacturing roles (I know of at least one call-centre still running Windows 3.1), whose owners probably can't afford to replace their hardware all in one go but might need a new set of mission-critical software, and I suspect getting a VB6 app to run on Vista will involve slightly less WTF-ness than .NET Framework on Windows 95.

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    Anyone who complains "zOMG they changed stuff in Vista!!!!" is a retard. Things change. Learn to adapt. Forward progress is what it is all about. Every OS changes... that is kind of the idea of moving forward.

    Change to address a specific deficiency, I'm all in favour of. Change purely for the sake of change when nobody had ever complained about it before, particularly with regards to things I have to know exactly how to do in order to earn a living, I will continue to resent. I don't care if that makes me a dinosaur, a Pharisee or any other insult you can think of; Microsoft's insistence on reinventing the wheel from XP onwards annoys the hell out of me.



  • @Jake Grey said:

    and I suspect getting a VB6 app to run on Vista will involve slightly less WTF-ness than .NET Framework on Windows 95.

    Considering it is supported, I still cannot figure out what the hell you are talking about....

    I suspect you are just talking out of your ass though.

    If you have applications written in VB6, you should be porting them to VB.NET. That is all there is to it. Arguing that MS should continue to support the platform, despite providing a clear alternative with many advantages is just stupid.

    @Jake Grey said:

    I don't care if that makes me a dinosaur, a Pharisee or any other insult you can think of; Microsoft's insistence on reinventing the wheel from XP onwards annoys the hell out of me.

    What the hell are you even going on about?

    OMG They improved the start menu! How dare they!



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    If you still use arrays in this day and age, you should consider yourself dated
    Then how do you propose to represent a string of characters?

    char [] helloString = {'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'l', 'd', '!', '\0'};

    If there's a better way than that, I would like to see it!



  •  @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    If you have applications written in VB6, you should be porting them to VB.NET. That is all there is to it.

    I really don't see why it's necessary to spend hundreds of man hours porting/refactoring code just to get it to compile cleanly under VB.NET when it works perfectly with VB6. When a solution already perfectly fits a problem, there is no "advantage" in spending that much developer time to only make it work as well as before...

    On the other hand, "new" applications should be written in VB.NET.



  • @silenceisdefeat said:

    there is no "advantage" in spending that much developer time to only make it work as well as before...
     

    There sure is, when you can use the new features of the new operating systems in the new languages/platforms.



  • @silenceisdefeat said:

    I really don't see why it's necessary to spend hundreds of man hours porting/refactoring code just to get it to compile cleanly under VB.NET when it works perfectly with VB6.

    Well the fact that VB6 is completely unsupported by Microsoft as of March 2008, would be a good reason. It would be crazy to develop any new applications in it, or try to stick with it for existing applications which are still being delevoped. 



  • @Ixpah said:

    Well the fact that VB6 is completely unsupported by Microsoft as of March 2008, would be a good reason.

    Neither is Windows 95, but you still see that out in the wild. There's still money to be made writing stuff that'll run on technically obselete hardware and OSes; you'll have a lot of trouble getting a CTO to pay up for your programming contract and the replacement or upgrade of every computer more than about seven years old in the firm the way the economy's going right now.

    As for MPS's comment about the new features, I guess it depends on whether porting to .NET enables you to add extra capabilities to the program; if it's going to do the same tasks in the same way at the same speed, however, it's probably not worth the bother.



  • @Jake Grey said:

    Neither is Windows 95, but you still see that out in the wild. There's still money to be made writing stuff that'll run on technically obselete hardware and OSes; you'll have a lot of trouble getting a CTO to pay up for your programming contract and the replacement or upgrade of every computer more than about seven years old in the firm the way the economy's going right now.

    As for MPS's comment about the new features, I guess it depends on whether porting to .NET enables you to add extra capabilities to the program; if it's going to do the same tasks in the same way at the same speed, however, it's probably not worth the bother.

     

    Any business that actually thinks this way is destined for a future of suffering and poverty.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    Any business that actually thinks this way is destined for a future of suffering and poverty.

    Personally, I'd say that fate is more likely to befall any business that junks still-functioning hardware and software every time a newer model with extra bells and whistles comes along. Isn't it you who still drives an '86 Fiero?



  • @Jake Grey said:

    Personally, I'd say that fate is more likely to befall any business that junks still-functioning hardware and software every time a newer model with extra bells and whistles comes along
     

    I don't know of anyone who considers Windows 95 to be 'still functioning' nor would they consider the same thing about the hardware it would run on.

    Having a business critical system running on either would be incredibly stupid.

    @Jake Grey said:

    Isn't it you who still drives an '86 Fiero?

    No, I am not poor, and I am not stupid.



  • @Jake Grey said:

    Personally, I'd say that fate is more likely to befall any business that junks still-functioning hardware and software every time a newer model with extra bells and whistles comes along.
    I don't think MPS is advocating an across-the-board replacement each time a minor upgrade is released, but maintaining dead platforms becomes increasingly harder and more expensive each year. There's a very small pool of good reasons to still be using a 13-year-old computer, and cost to upgrade is not one of them.


  • :belt_onion:

    @Ixpah said:

    @silenceisdefeat said:

    I really don't see why it's necessary to spend hundreds of man hours porting/refactoring code just to get it to compile cleanly under VB.NET when it works perfectly with VB6.

    Well the fact that VB6 is completely unsupported by Microsoft as of March 2008, would be a good reason. It would be crazy to develop any new applications in it, or try to stick with it for existing applications which are still being delevoped. 

     

    I'm in the middle of a 'request for proposal' for a client that wants to upgrade a working ASP/VB6/COM+ application to .NET. Their motives:

    • Business risk: VB6 not supported by MS anymore. For any problem involving a non-supported application you pay a big fee before MS even considers to investigate
    • Consolidation: their VB6 framework has been migrated to VB.NET. Several mandatory features have been added to their .NET framework but not anymore to the frozen VB6 framework.
    • Features: Take advantage of new built-in features like garbage collection, regular expressions, generics, ...
    • IDE: Visual Studio IDE is more productive than the VB6 for developing new features and bugfixing
    • Staff Turnover: hard to find motivated developers for VB6.
    I'm sure MPS can find many more

  • :belt_onion:

    @belgariontheking said:

    char [ helloString = {'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'l', 'd', '!', '\0'};

    If there's a better way than that, I would like to see it!

     

    Dim text As String = "Hello World"
    Dim chars As Char() = text.ToCharArray



  • @bjolling said:

    I'm sure MPS can find many more
     

    Actually, I think you summed it up pretty well. 

    Considering the other side of the argument is formed out of stupidity and a complete and total lack of anything resembling business sense, I don't think there needs to be much more argument from this side.



  • @bjolling said:

    Dim text As String = "Hello World"
    Dim chars As Char() = text.ToCharArray
     

    Still uses an array, which was the entire point of BTK's joke.



  • @bjolling said:

    I'm in the middle of a 'request for proposal' for a client that wants to upgrade a working ASP/VB6/COM+ application to .NET. Their motives:

    • Business risk: VB6 not supported by MS anymore. For any problem involving a non-supported application you pay a big fee before MS even considers to investigate
    • Consolidation: their VB6 framework has been migrated to VB.NET. Several mandatory features have been added to their .NET framework but not anymore to the frozen VB6 framework.
    • Features: Take advantage of new built-in features like garbage collection, regular expressions, generics, ...
    • IDE: Visual Studio IDE is more productive than the VB6 for developing new features and bugfixing
    • Staff Turnover: hard to find motivated developers for VB6.

     I'm sure MPS can find many more

    Just an other few:
    Portability (mono), stability, maintainability, speed, scalability, access to thousands of third party components, etc.

    If you hesitate to upgrade your systems to the latest shiny stuff, you will soon find that your competitors already did so and they were actually smart enough (opposed to you) to see how the new shiny stuff could leverage their business, and by then you've lost because it is too late.



  •  There are very few absolutes in this world, and many topics are certainly open for debate.  Apple versus Microsoft, Coke versus Pepsi, and on and on. Of course many attributes of the products we compare are subjective and as such one person's needs, experience and perspective might make one product superior to them, but the opposite might be true for another.

     Having said all that, there are some absolutes in this world that are rock-solid facts.  And one of them is this: 

    VB.NET is superior to VB6 in every single conceivable manner from every single conceivable perspective. End of story.  

    Anyone who feels otherwise has not used both languages and their respective IDEs extensively.

    So, why don't we just put this whole "vb6 vs. vb.net" thing to rest so you can move on to other more "trollable" topics.



  • @Jeff S said:

    So, why don't we just put this whole "vb6 vs. vb.net" thing to rest so you can move on to other more "trollable" topics.
    Coke is way better than Pepsi.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    It basically consists of a bunch of retards who cannot adapt and change to new technologies.

     

    You might be surprised to find that you can make intelligent points much more effectively if you avoid calling people "retards".



  • @Jeff S said:

    You might be surprised to find that you can make intelligent points much more effectively if you avoid calling people "retards".
     

    Why would I want to hide the truth?



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    If you have applications written in VB6, you should be porting them to VB.NET.
     

    Assuming it takes more than a few hours, who will pay the bill?



  • @ammoQ said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    If you have applications written in VB6, you should be porting them to VB.NET.
     

    Assuming it takes more than a few hours, who will pay the bill?

    Microsoft. Just call up Steve Ballmer and tell him I sent you.



  • @ammoQ said:

    Assuming it takes more than a few hours, who will pay the bill?
     

    Your continued sales and existence?



  • @ammoQ said:

    Assuming it takes more than a few hours, who will pay the bill?

    That's a whole different flame war. :P

    The inability of management to see that the benefits of migrating to the new platform out weigh the costs.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    @ammoQ said:

    Assuming it takes more than a few hours, who will pay the bill?
     

    Your continued sales and existence?

    For a standard product that sells many times, you are right. But VB has often been used for custom software that is used by only one company. In such cases, porting to VB.net is something nobody wants to pay for.



  • @ammoQ said:

    In such cases, porting to VB.net is something nobody wants to pay for.
     

    Sure, no one may want to pay for it, but they will eventually, one way or another.

    It is bad business sense to leave it as is and not have an upgrade path.



  • @ammoQ said:

    For a standard product that sells many times, you are right. But VB has often been used for custom software that is used by only one company. In such cases, porting to VB.net is something nobody wants to pay for.
    Eventually, you always pay. It is the goal of management to determine when it makes fiscal sense to pay. But just not upgrading is hardly a long-term solution.



  • @bstorer said:

    @ammoQ said:
    For a standard product that sells many times, you are right. But VB has often been used for custom software that is used by only one company. In such cases, porting to VB.net is something nobody wants to pay for.
    Eventually, you always pay. It is the goal of management to determine when it makes fiscal sense to pay. But just not upgrading is hardly a long-term solution.
     

    In many cases, they will not bother with upgrading the program, but start a project to do a complete rewrite - to fix the design flaws, include new features, increase buzzword compliance etc. It's by far easier to sell when the output is not just a 1:1 copy of the well-working old program.

    But I also know cases where old software (as in: written in Clipper Autumn'86) is still supported, running in vmware. I'm sure most of you also know that quite a lot of software is still written in Cobol, software that is in some cases older than most of us are.



  • @ammoQ said:

    I'm sure most of you also know that quite a lot of software is still written in Cobol, software that is in some cases older than most of us are.
     

    Yes, many huge financial apps for the most part AFAIK.

    Do you really think any large financial apps are really running on massive VB6 apps?



  • @ammoQ said:

    I'm sure most of you also know that quite a lot of software is still written in Cobol, software that is in some cases older than most of us are.
    And the Y2K thing is an excellent example of how you always pay in the end. Think of all the money paid out to drag COBOL programmers out of retirement to bring those systems up-to-date. When your platform becomes obsolete, everything to do with it becomes rare, and subsequently more expensive.



  • @bstorer said:

    everything to do with it becomes rare, and subsequently more expensive.
     

    Kind of like Unix?



  • There are certainly clients written in VB6 -- I remember one vendor touting that as a "feature" for an accounting system we were once considering.

    As for the server component, probably not -- but then again, many large-scale server applications have large portions written in VBScript (i.e., ASP).


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