Panopticon Central

a blog on Visual Basic, .NET and other stuff
  Home :: Contact :: Syndication  :: Login
  491 Posts :: 19 Stories :: 3241 Comments :: 623 Trackbacks

News

The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

My Book

Picture

My Recent Posts

Article Categories

Archives

Post Categories

Microsoft Blogs

Samples

Technical Blogs

VB Links

Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

A month or two ago, Paul Yuknewicz and I sat down to record a Hansselminutes podcast with Scott Hanselman, talking about the past, present and future of Visual Basic. It was a lot of fun, check it out!

Also, here's a little holiday love for VB from some Microsofties you might recognize:

posted on Thursday, December 27, 2007 4:07 PM

Feedback

# re: Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 12/28/2007 3:46 AM sandeep
what future scope of visual basic

# re: Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 12/28/2007 11:56 AM sandeep j
yesterday vb 6.0 it was too good
today it is drastically changed so as to learn it from scrach, it's too complicated to learn and to work with now
Tomorrow is again hope for some way to get our old vb back with just control improvements and new controls

# re: Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 12/28/2007 1:31 PM George
Where can I get 64-bit ocx vb controls? I installed VS 2008 Pro (licensed copy). Could not find any 64-bit OCXs.

Thanks very much.

George

# re: Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 12/29/2007 4:03 AM Gordon
Speaking of yesterday, I recall using Basic on a HP85 back in the years 1980-1985.
More recently, I have used VBA for the last 10 years, compiling to COM and running under Microsoft Excel.
There is no comparison in my mind. The HP product was the best by a mile.
Sorry bout that!

# re: Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 12/30/2007 11:13 AM Sudhir
Can we see a day when we can write Kernel drivers in VB?
regards
Sudhir

# re: Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 12/30/2007 5:16 PM Billy Hollis
Wha????? Do we have some sarcasm going on in the comments? Kernel drivers? 1980 HP Basic being superior? For what, writing to a character-based screen? Old VB coming back?

Sorry, guys, I just don't get where you're coming from here.

# re: Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 12/31/2007 2:19 PM Csaba
Hi,

For intance, creating a scientific graph was just so simple with HP85: on the screen, plotter or printed. What has VB and .net compared with that? Already the HP9830 computer from the 70-ties could simply create scientific graphs on a plotter. (And, yes HP9830 just had a single line LED display - not even a CRT)

Yes, HP85 and HP9830 had imaginary numbers - just imagine that! Eveyrthing has NOT improved the last 30 years of "personal computing"! Just remember, Simula 67 is from 1967!

Further, it was just so simple to control external instruments with the HP documentation, regardless if which 9800 HP workstation it was. You just read the documentation and then programmed! No courses needed, no helpdesk needed, no question via Internet needed! .net is NOWWHERE close when it comes to that documentation, not even if you buy 5-10 books about VB programming.

But yes VB2005 has a number of advantages that the old HP "Rocky Mountain" Basic and HP Pascal lacked. Yes, WinForms and WPF is much better for fancy meningless games for boys of all ages and sexes but it is useless to present scientific data! Unless you wrte you own modules/classes.

Then we have the stability issue. Do anyone of you remember a time when a control and measurement program was reliable "because it was controlled by a computer". Now that is more or less a joke!

Happy new year!
Csaba

# re: Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 2/8/2008 3:55 PM David
My hope for the future of VB is that we actually get Visual Basic back. What's being delievered now is not Visual Basic. It's some other language that is slower to develop in and slower to execute.

I look forward to the day VB7 is released. Take VB6, fix the few minor bugs, make it work properly on Vista and ship it.

# re: Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 2/27/2008 5:27 AM Ulu
Don't listen to these guys! Who said VB is for scientific graphs? Yes, if you want it, just take one of a hundred available libraries and make your graph in any color, any resolution, in a sec.

Controlling external devices from a workstation :))))

VB.Net is the best.

One thing is sad, however. Why do we are always one or two features behind C#? I mean, stuff like the My namespace are great (which is not a part of the language but an IDE feature), but I missed the anonymous delegates a lot, and here we are, VB9, we have lambdas but only Functions, not Subs, and Subs are much helpful sometimes (e.g., if you need an even handler). Same thing with iterators and other minor stuff.

Anyway, it feels like VB is more for applications, while C# is for component development. This is one of the reasons why the "serious" programmers frown upon VB. Hopefully this thing changes when VB becomes more dynamic.

ulu

Post Feedback

Title:
Name:
Url:
Comments: