Friday, May 29, 2015

A comment by Brandon Stewart !

by Brandon Stewart - written for https://www.facebook.com/MicrosoftVB !
Judging by the quality (or lack there of) of other open source applications I've dealt with, I shiver at the thought of the world's most popular design system being open sourced... and ruined - with bugs and compatibility issues. Instead, I would like to see Microsoft sell VB6 to another company that will hold true to VB6's current syntax, platform, and legacy, while continuing to update it for the future which would include making it both x64 and cross platform. But we all know that isn't going to happen because rather than letting consumers determine the market and companies producing goods which meet those demands, Microsoft is attempting to force the market in a direction that solely benefits them. In other words, the technologies of tomorrow will be what a small hand full of corporations want them to be in a manner that fits their business models instead of those technologies being shaped by the wants or needs of consumers. And of course, you will be expected to bow and be ever so thankful that these monopolies are willing to offer you inferior sub-quality products in exchange for your hard-earned cash. If VB6 is open sourced, then Microsoft will be competing against one of its own products that it has no hope of beating. So, much like fuel efficient carburators, VB6 will eventually be buried where no one else can get their hands on it
Bill Gates began Microsoft in the early 1970's, originally for hobbyists. It was we hobbyists, hackers, and pirateers who built Microsoft into the powerhouse giant that it was for Gates. But somewhere along the line at the beginning of the new millenium, the d***heads with MBAs and greed in their hearts moved in to take hold of the company, slowly pushing Gates out and Microsoft away from his mission and purpose, doing so while keeping Gates on during the last decade purely for his iconic market value, with a compliant board of directors stripping him of any decision making power regarding either development or the future direction of the company, and making life for him there so unbearable that he finally decided to call it quits altogether at the urging of investors.
When this cout d'etat began in 2000, the huge cluster f*** known as the .NET platform was born along with an ensuing avalanche over the coming decade of inferior bloatware and piss-poor/unstable operating systems. It's no small wonder that Microsoft finally realized its stupidity and based Windows 8/8.1 on the older COM platform instead of the failed .NET platform. But too late! The damage has already been done. Developers and programmers are dumping Microsoft en mass in favor of open source. So too, are businesses dumping the Windows operating system and moving to Linux.
This sans Bill Gates version of Microsoft is a condemned whale, slowly dying on a beach of abandonment, while its Office line of products is the only thing keeping it afloat for the time being. I have several issues of my own with Gates, and I'm definitely not a member of his fan club. However, with that being said, I do still hold a twisted sense of loyalty, both toward him and to the legacy of the old Microsoft that he provided for us hobbyists and hackers. It would not hurt my feelings in the least if we all banded together to cripple the new Microsoft with endless DoS attacks on their servers. But such things are illegal and I would never suggest anyone partake in illegal activities. I do suggest however, that we encourage as many people as possible to abandon Microsoft altogether, to let the wimpering giant die an exasperating death on its own.
Microsoft is a dying entity that likely will not be around many more years. Perhaps it's time we all let go of VB6 and finally jumped shipped from them, and move on to other venues.


Saturday, May 16, 2015

VB6 isn't just awesome, it's far more so than C# or VB.NET

VB6 isn't just awesome, it's far more so than C# or VB.NET. Aside from it's ease of installation, use, compatibility - which are all far greater than .NET, how about just looking at what's happened to Microsoft since VB6 was killed. No Microsoft .NET is no longer used in any University of Washington courses, and am hard pressed to find any CS departments anywhere that use it. Java has become the replacement. This even though MS tools are the only ones that have edit and continue capability, though .NET didn't have this until late in its "evolution". .NET has failed. VB6 can't be killed. MS should stop listening to CS majors who dream of writing the next compiler and start listening to the people who actually support it, or at least used to.

The real motivation for .NET was MS losing the battle for Java with Sun (now Oracle). It was a neurotic response, coincident with MS stock going flat for over 10 years. Why would anyone trust MS whatever they did now, having abandoned their developer support. MS needs to come clean at long last and make amends by releasing an backward compatible, but cleaned up version of VB6 for 64-bit Windows and a promise to maintain backward compatibility in the future.

francis greene commented  ·  

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

.Net is to VB6 what Win 10 is to Win 7 users: an ugly duck!

As a business principle, a company ought to bring consumers the product they want. In many business schools, that would be the number one rule for success.
MS is doing some of that : in VS, you got your C#, C++, VB, use whatever you prefer. But the Classic VB way of doing things is gone. Of course, VS has a few tricks easier to do than VB6, but that is only because MS has been putting their money on the framework only for now ohhh so many years. And they are pretty much s*** deep into it to recognize that a vast number of people just don't like those managed languages. It's not a secret that internally, the OS people loathe managed code, and that there is nothing wrong with COM (windows is mostly COM, framework more like a layer on top) if it benefits from continued development. The Windows kernel (low level api, gdi, MCI, COM) MS will never be able to get rid of and may very well outlast framework and managed code. If that's the case, come Win 11, 2018, 2024 and well after that, VB6 could still be a desired option for which it will not be wise to end support. Industry likes long lasting standards... CNC machining is still being done with HPGL or G-Code engineered in the seventies, just like a car still has four wheels, and for a simple good reason : IT WORKS!
Who can tell where and what VB6..7.. could do nowadays if development had been put on it at the same rate as the hit-and-run (and flee the scene) products MS has been serving for years (obsolete framworks that will still need be supported, Win RT, Silverlight, etc.)
It was once Bill Gates's own vision that one day, Windows apps would be as easy to write as a basic program was back then. And that path was followed for a while (VB6). But then the world crumbled and what was to follow only succeeded in putting programming out of reach of the masses. I don't doubt that some programmers at system level want and need something real powerful (OOP and it's paradigms) etc.. but for one techie that wants to wet his dreams with OOP and polymorphism, there are hundreds who simply need to fire an IDE and write a custom spreasheet for their office, or a bill calculation, or... the list is endless.
To all these people, MS is saying : NO. You want the Windows programming experience? Be ready to feel the pain. Look at simplest way to write a Metro APP. Borderline ridiculous : lots of very advanced computer topics you have master before even doing the simplest thing.
In my view, there is no reason WHATSOEVER for which you could not write the "Hello World" app for any platform anymore complicated than a simple : print "Hello World"
VB6 can do that with the less amount of effort in Windows history. A true RAD. Wake up MS, this is what we expect from you : write a compiler where YOU take care of the nitty-gritty, and leave us, common mortals, more time to achieve productivity and write products instead of being swamped by the complexities of the programming system.
With it's constant change of directions, MS, the very company that writes the OS is trailing the pack as far as writing portable applications is concerned. IE is the worse of the browsers. It's laughable really. Better watch out if someday, Google or Java decides to venture into the OS business.
OK, so MS fanboys can revel in their C++, C# or .NET, why not a parallel product? I am just saying here, out of my head ... let's call it : VB7-64 bits. My bet is that it would outsell in a flash any of the VS products.
Actually, I don't only see it as an alternative, but rather as a Golden Opportunity to get back to bases, and re-engineer the product almost from scratch, keeping of course its governing principles and easy syntax while aiming at the same time at platform portability. Truth is VS has become a much too big animal, and admit it MS, you barely have the resources and qualified staff to continue mantaining and growing this thing much longer and keep up tying up the loose ends.
Oblivion is menacing a company that does not fullfill the real needs and desires of it's user base, much less acknowlodging them. Win 8 was lesson... a while back NASA was served a lesson too, comittees concluded a CHANGE OF CULTURE was the biggest element to bring about solutions for their problems. I find the term wholly appropriate to the situation at MS.
Feels like déjà vù!
MathScienceAndGraphics commented  · on   


Microsoft will continue huge investments and development in just about everything, while succeeding at nothing !

So where does Microsoft stand this April 2015? You can read some here and draw your own conclusions.
I believe the talk at Build will be mostly evangelistic in nature and they (MS) will be pushing some more of their self-deprecating bloatware.
A revamped VB6, designed on the original syntax and guidelines, and built with cross-platform in mind could change all that and bring some of the excitement back about programming. It could also bring a huge number of new apps to all platforms in no time at all.
The alternate scenario (most likely) is that Microsoft will continue huge investments and development in just about everything, while succeeding at nothing.
Please bring Visual Basic 6 back!
MathScienceAndGraphics commented  ·    


With the NET framework the performace drops by more than 40%

By 2015 our VB6 Application is being sold all over the World, we got it translated to English, Spanish, Portugues and Italian, it runs perfectly on PCs from Windows XP up until Windows 8.1. Now more than ever we need a sollid path for the future. We benchmarked some of our kernel critical algorithms on the .NET Framework, and the results were surprisingly poor. With the NET framework the performace drops by more than 40% even after doing some re engineering to optimise it. VB.NET is definitively not our path, not only because of the huge time, resources and money required, but also because of the poor performance expected at the end.

Anonymous commented  ·