Re: Over 100 Microsoft MVPs Have Signed Online Petition - Give Us Back VB!!

Dan Barclay wrote:
Just pointing out an obvious fact. You were trying to attribute the things you didn't like to lack of development or resources. 

I don't think I was - and if I did, I was wrong <g>.  Because like you say:

My points stands that MS tools are not development or resource limited, they're just targeted at something other than the developer market. 

Meanwhile:

I was talking about the MS data controls. They're not "VB". Still, even though you could, why would you want to use them in Delphi?

Now I'm totally confused. I was talking about the VB data controls. Why are they not VB?

I wouldn't ever want to use them in Delphi - or in VB; the VB controls are all broken.

Yet the data controls in Delphi work great - I use them all the time.

know what crowd you hang with. My code breaks down quite a bit differently. I have a handful of forms, no data controls. I've got about 3 1/2 megs of code (Subs and Functions, not including classes or forms etc). I've got (surprise) an interpreter and UI generator built in Basic. My data engine is pluggable, allowing my users to select MDB's or Btrieve as a base.

Your coding efforts in VB then are brilliant in their amazing extension of VB.

(It will be bittersweet to find out in one either wouldn't need it, could download it free, or buy it inexpensively in Delphi universe. See the 3rd-party newsgroup.)

More importantly though: Do you think you've gotten a dollar return on that investment?

I think the problem is that the recent obsolescence of VB6 by Microsoft is leaving you with a large codebase investment that can no longer be leveraged.

The same thing happened to me when FoxPro 2.6 was obsoleted by Microsoft with a new version that wouldn't compile the old code. I had a huge library of stuff that made FoxPro do things it could never do out of the box.

I vowed never to do that again.

I'd rather spend 25 to 350 bucks on a component (set) and let a component developer spread the time investment over many customers.

That covers 90 % of all VB apps. And another 9 % are glue apps and glue code within apps that support VB scripting. Only a small % of VB is used for anything else because Java, C, and Delphi are much better choices in most cases.


LOL. Where do you get your data? That doesn't represent the crowd I'm familiar with. I don't know a serious VB app in which the dev trusts data controls as far as he can throw them.

Or a non-serious VB app - because even if the dev trusted them to start with, they wouldn't work.

But still, 90% of all VB apps are data apps (and I didn't say VB "data control" apps).


Those guys are just not associated with the product any more 

And the culture was not passed on, apparently.

I've personally been down this road and it's too long a story for here. But based on my experience, Microsoft will put an evangelist (those are the people who tell you the company is "fully committed" to the technology you like) out there to front for the company, but the evangelist is no indicator at all of where Microsoft might actually be going.

You are exactly right regarding the evangelist strategy. 

Yeah, every once in awhile I get one right <g>.

However, that's not the folk I'm talking about. I was meeting with the "behind the firewall" developers...
...
Heck, for Christmas that year they even sent me a VB4 box (the big box) autographed by all the VB developer team. There are a bunch of them<g>. 

Good story.

But, like I said, when they cobbled together the VB7 team they pretty much started over. The current crop of folks are completely different and have very little background with either using VB or any previous development on VB.

This is standard operating procedure. There have even been stories claiming that iterative OS upgrades that had to be written from scratch because the original developers hadn't been retained.

I think you missed the point. I "prefer" End While as well. Others don't. The point is that there was no *reason* to change it after it was already established. So, if the next guy "prefers" Wend (or something else) he's free to change it back again, eh? 

Oh, now you expect *reasons* from changing things, do ya? <g>

Extending your earlier observation, they put a new team who had no idea of what it was like to actually develop in the language.

In addition, they've acutally *reused* keywords. No deprecation, just killed features and reused keywords. For example, in returning values from functions they could have extended the existing syntax by using "Exit Function <retValue>". Instead, they used the Return keyword. Why? Because the devs had a C background and not a Basic background. They simply didn't have the background to do it in a "language consistent" way.

Or... cough-cough ... maybe one of the development managers had a Delphi background... ahem... can't think of who though... <clears throat>.
<g>

One of the things that has really ticked me off at MS is that they convinced me in the previously discussed meetings that they *did* intend to treat VB as a real developer tool. You may or may not be aware of the internal politics of the time but VB was moved between the applications and languages group a couple of times. We were involved in those "discussions".

Putting a native compiler back in VB, along with a lot of assurances, made me feel comfortable recommending VB again, and I did. I've had to apologize to some folks for that. 

We all get burned - you did what you thought best at the time.

Because I always knew they would.


Then you were psychic. For MS to leave behind such a huge crowd of developers, locked into their *proprietary* language is idiotic, even for MS. It was completely unexpected by *anyone* who knows anything about MS or even raw marketing. FWIW, MS didn't *intend* for this to happen. They were as shocked as anyone. 

Only through a similar painful experience over FoxPro.

For the record, it's "forward compatibility", not "backwards". From *our* perspective as users, we want our code assets to be forward compatible.

Makes sense - never heard it that way though - usually we think "backwards compatibility" because that's a feature of an upgrade version - that it's "backwards compatible" with code written in prior versions.

I guess "backwards compatibility" is a feature and "forwards compatibility" is a promise.

"post-RAD" WTF is that! 

Just made it up just then, actually.

With a long lived app you need to be planning and moving with the long term in mind. The objective is to deliver the app to your customer base. The task is to do that on a platform your users will have. If you wait until your app won't run on a new OS to do anything about it your business is dead.

No, the users can just stick with the old OS. That's not actually my approach, but it works for lots of products out there.

Oh, wait. I forgot that you build thin apps. You can probably do that in a long weekend. 

<g>

I think you had called it "thin covers over data". I do "thin covers over data", but it covers a lot of data, and as much of the intelligence is in the database design as possible.

Meanwhile, the core areas of the application are heavily designed to present complex data in an understandable and manageable way.

One can handle complex requirements with sophisticated arrangements of *simple* parts.

"Nothing upsets [the VB dev team] more than when they see the negative things on the newsgroups and the negative people slamming their product. These guys just don't sleep at night, they're so bummed about it." Dave Mendlen, Lead Product Manager for Visual Studio.NET (Microsoft), Love, VB Style, VBPJ, August 2001 " 

Nice PR.

Not in this case. It's done. We didn't get a Ressurection at Easter<g>. Another quote from the page above:

"It's over. There's nothing left for you here. Wake up. Go home. Your children are waiting." Bruce McKinney, Noted Visual Basic Author, The End of Hardcore Visual Basic 

Like I said, I went through this same emotional process with FoxPro.

The days of religious fervor and total language immersion ended for me in the early 90's.

I guess the "music died" for you in the last year or two.

But there will be another generation coming up and they will embrace the next great solution to everything.

I remember telling my mainframe-coding uncle about how PC's were practically the savior of mankind and that he was a dying breed. Meanwhile he was working on the first ATM-development team.

And he knew enough just to smile quietly at my proselytizing.

But we must all grow past the disillusion, grasshopper <g>.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: VB or C#
    ... Your response which I (and probably Clinton, although I can't speak for him) ... JavaScript is seldom OOP used, this can as well with C#, ... however with that you are in my idea misusing the language. ... for the developer to be familiar with not only the server-side programming ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.general)
  • Re: VBclassic petition
    ... they decided Basic was not a "real" programming language. ... I started with CP/M versions of Microsoft Basic. ... The developer group at MS is entirely different now. ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion)
  • Re: Computer time -> Developer time -> User time?
    ... I don't think that the reasons Beth gives ... Linux is starting to look a whole lot like Windows. ... the language being used. ... It's the developer, not the language, that determines the result. ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: VBclassic petition
    ... >>I have found in the 20+ years that I have been programming, ... And then to think that Microsoft owes its very existance to Basic (and its ... Not only do I need to learn an entirely new language, ... MS does *not* consider VB to be a real developer ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion)
  • Re: PHP security (or the lack thereof)
    ... language is not the problem. ... PHP has been introduced as a tool for the web developer. ... Programmers know this. ... regexps, prtinf-style format strings, HTTP headers and so on. ...
    (Bugtraq)