Microsoft Remains Firm On Ending VB6 Support
From Slashdot:
Microsoft Remains Firm On Ending VB6 Support
This presents some problems, of course. As the Slashdot poster laments:
If only VB were a F/OSS project instead of a proprietary [one] customers could be assured of continued support as long as there was demand.
Is Gambas the answer?
I can’t give you a firm reply, as I’m not a VB developer — although I intend to become a Gambas developer as it seems to be set to fill the role of VB on Linux. Although Python and others are arguably at least halfway there already, Gambas is an actual BASIC, and that’s got to help when it comes time to port the HUGE amount of “software capital” that corporate America has sunk into applications written in Microsoft’s Visual Basic.
From the Gambas home page:
What is that new animal ? Well, Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, like Visual Basicâ„¢ (but it is NOT a clone !). Read the introduction for more information.
With Gambas, you can quickly design your program GUI, access MySQL or PostgreSQL databases, pilot KDE applications with DCOP, translate your program into many languages, create network applications easily, and so on…
Personally, I’d rather see PHP-GTK grow into that role. It seems like a logical progression of things, given how widespread PHP is becoming for web development. The skill base will be there in the workforce, it’s cross-platform and PHP 5 is sufficiently object-oriented that some people have trouble telling some of it apart from Java. I imagine that smaller companies without as much sunk into prior “in house” software development will ultimately find PHP-GTK their best choice in the near future — while the less agile larger companies will have to start looking at stuff like Gambas, which only runs on Linux.
You see, VB.NET is not VB — it’s something else. As Richard Grimes noted:
VB.NET simply isn’t VB: As Karl’s site shows, there are multiple incompatibilities between the language of VB and VB.NET. Further, VB is single threaded, does not have exceptions, and was typically used to write non-OOP code. VB.NET was provided with a “porting†tool, but most people I know who have used it (including me) have found that the tool simply comments out large amounts of the incompatible code. My advice early on was that VB developers should not port their code, and instead they should convert it to VB classes that could be called by .NET code through COM interop. That way, the VB code remained in the environment where it was designed to work. Microsoft, of course, perpetuated the myth that VB.NET was VB and promoted the porting tool.
If the same Mommy who told you to eat your vegetables was an IT consultant, she’d tell you to switch to Linux desktops — they’re good for you.
Share This
