Havegooda

Hey,

So I've been looking to get back into some easy VB coding. Before jumping in, I noticed that MS has ended their support for VB6, and the successor is Visual Basic .NET.

Is there that much of a difference between VB6 and VB.NET? Does the code "change"? Are there significant differences between the two? Will I need to REALLY use VB.NET even if I don't plan on distributing whatever I decide to toy with?

Thanks for any answers

~Gooda~

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emperor_choad

If you don't ever plan on making a public or licensed distribution, then keep on coding in VB6. I still do. I find VB6 a lot easier than VB.net simply because of my experience in it. VB6 does have limitations, but if you are familiar with it, and don't mind the limitations, then there are no complications to worry about.

There are ample tutorials on VB.net for anything you possibly could want to do if you decide to go that route... As there are still ample tutorials on VB6.

What I tend to do is consider what my target audience is for the application I am writing and then chose my language accordingly.

That being said, there are ample reasons to move to the .net, especially in terms of threading and use of multiple core processors. But if you are simply writing an application that is small and does not require heavy processing power, stick with what you know.

Hope this is helpful in some way.

Havegooda

Well, I'm downloading the free version of .NET now only because I can't find my Visual Studio disks anywhere. Unless VB6 is free now, I guess I'm swapping over to .NET. Guess it's for the best?

Thanks for your input

~Gooda~

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hometoast

Where .NET can be compiled with freely available software, VB6 definitely requires visual studio 6.

A caution: VB.NET is entirely different than VB6 -- think C# (or Java) in VB syntax.

quick reads:
http://www.thescarms.com/vbasic/vb6vsvbnet.aspx
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/053001-1.shtml

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Butterbum

Stick with whatever programming language works for you. Hopefully once you grasp a basic knowledge of VB6, you can move onto C or C#. VB is considered by some to start programmers off with bad habbits and while it is "apparently" easier than C/C#/CPP, i find that C# is much much simpler and it is very well supported by MS.

BiG O

I agree with you on C#. I think they really made a good language this time. It's really the easiest, most well rounded language to start with. It helps that it's very similar to java :P.

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brettjv

Expect a fairly steep learning curve. vb.net is fundamentally *quite* different from vb6. It's not necessarily 'harder', but it's ... different, for sure. And trying to code in it 'off the top of your head' is going to be a nightmare. I would *NOT* recommend trying to jump into programming in vb.net without the benefit of Visual Studio.net at your disposal. I definitely learned most of what I know by using VS.net and then looking 'under the covers' to figure out what it was doing. Best of luck in any case

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ghell

For all my .net needs, I use C#. I find it vastly nicer than VB.NET. However, the biggest problem that I run in to with any .net language is that users have generic problems with .net that have nothing to do with my application.

For my thousands of users, I get at least 3 or 4 a week with problems that I simply cannot fix. Problems such as MyProgram.exe.config (internal configuration?) being corrupt, machine.config being corrupt, System.Xml.dll not existing (despite the fact that it does, and upgrading to .net 2.0 or repairing whatever is currently installed does not help), and lots of other generic problems that they get when running any .net application at all, even a "Hello, World!" app.

VB6 is native, so it doesn't have these problems. However, I would definitely suggest either moving to VB.NET, C# or avoiding .net altogether and using C/C++/Java/Python etc. I hate Delphi about as much as I hate VB6 so maybe you will be comfortable there.

hometoast

thread hijacking? what hijacking?

Funny though, visual studio handles vb syntax much more elegantly than c#. while I hate #region , I hate the automatic outlinging in C# on every code block even more. I like that I don't have to back up to the "." to get intellisense to kick in.

I still do all my work in VS 2005 though, '08 might've fixed these things.
Lordy! you're doing something wrong with your references. I've never ran into a problem with framework dependencies. I've sure as heck created some of my own, but if they've got the framework installed; it should run without complaint.

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ghell

It's not hijacking, the discussion is moving towards C# and .net. If you're going to move to .net, you may as well choose between C# and VB.NET, as you are going to have to learn something quite different to VB6 anyway.

Ctrl+Space

I also use VS 2005 Pro. I see no point in upgrading to 08 as I don't use .net 3.5 at all.

You obviously do not have a user base of thousands. These are very rare problems but they are problems that are posted to MSDN non stop that never get a decent answer from any MS MVP. I am not doing anything wrong. As I said, these users have problems running any .net application on their computer. They can't even run "Hello, World!" applications written in .net.

If this thread is still active next time someone sends me one of these problems, I'll send you a link to many mailing list, forum (msdn, technet, etc), nntp, etc posts asking for help with the problems and no solutions. Actually, generally reinstalling Windows from scratch solves the problem but this is something that users obviously don't like doing. Luckily most of my users have multiple machines and can just use another machine that does not have the problem.