Robert Green - What is exciting in the next version of Visual Basic?

The Discussion

• 

  Robert, congratulations you have done your own little part in ruining a great language. You couldn't include enough pretty GUI stuff to ever make me switch to VB.NOT, it is NOT BASIC! I would like to see you guys rename it to something other than basic, like 'Visual.net' or whatever.
  
  [Gives VB.net team the finger]

• 

  Manip: actually, Robert Green was in marketing back when that decision was made. Christopher Brumme talked about the Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET transition. Turns out his team worked for six months on Visual Basic and there were some fundamental technical problems they couldn't get around. At least if they wanted to keep VB as a first-tier .NET language. Note, VB.NET today (er, or soon will) is object oriented, has advanced features like support for multi-threading and generics (is almost on parity with C#). That's a huge change from the 1990s when VB was way behind other languages in terms of features, access to APIs, and performance.
  
  But, I'd like to hear what you miss in VB.NET that VB 6.0 has. What, specifically, grinds your gears?

• 

  First off the fact that you guys didn't try and write a new VB but instead released the exact same thing as before is kind of offensive for all the people that have been waiting for you to update VB6 and have made suggestions. All you did was add functionality, I will give you that you added a few new features such as multi-threading but OOP already existed and very little has been added in this area.
  
  Some (not all) of my problems that immediately come to mind are:
  
  The Get/Set End Get/End Set statements bug me, they where a lot lot better in VB6 and made the code easier to read. Why mess something up that worked?
  
  The module/end module, useless syntax annoys me no end. 
  
  You haven't added reverse FOR loops yet (something we requested). You haven't added var++, var-- etc yet (again something we requested) 
  
  The Dim Var, Var2 as string = "Default", can't be done. You can't do, Dim Var = Value, var2 = "Something else" as string. The fact that the value is defined after the type definition bugs me and doesn't really make any sense. 
  
  These are the ones off the top of my head. Some of my problems where fixed recently but not all. :-/
   

• 

  scobleizer wrote:

  ... and generics (is almost on parity with C#).

  
  
  MYTH WARNING!!
  
  VB .Net has full generic support! See my post in TechOff about it:
  https://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=5731#5731

• 

  "but OOP already existed and very little has been added in this area"
  
  
  Are you tallking about VB.Net 1.0 to VB.Net 2.0 or VB 6.0 to VB.Net 1.0?
  If the latter, I couldn't possibly disagree more.
  

  • True inheritance. 
  • Better event handling and delegates.
  • Real constructors.
  • Namespaces.
    

  Those are major enhancements and very welcome ones in my book. You could argue that the second and forth bullets aren't strictly OOP, but there is no arguing the first and third.
  

• 

  Manip, How much have you worked with VB.NET?
  
  When I first started with VB.NET I was a little disorriented with all the changes from VB6. Once I just jumped in over my head, things just started to amaze me.
  
  Here is a list of thing that amazed me about VB.NET versus VB6:
  1) Alot of Win32 API calls built in the framework (not so confusing to use)
  2) Better OOP / True Inheritance (I use Inheritance to add little features to Forms/Controls, you have the code in one place now, instead of having to paste it on every form in your application)
  3) Better Delegate handling (You can have one function handle the same event for multiple objects, this also reduces the amount of copying and pasting code.)
  4) Dim myVar As String = "Sweet"
  5) You can have the code for multiple classes with in the same file. (That is why there is "Module/End Module")
  6) Try/Catch blocks for trapping errors, instead of just using On Error (nicer for doing different error trapping in seperate parts of the same function)
  7) "Get/Set End Get/End Set" (I think this make the structure of the code easier to read)
  8) Faster Code execution versus VB6
  9) No more DLL hell (Do I really need to explain this one)
  10) And there are many, many more...
  
  These are not listed in any particular order, that is just the order that they came to mind. There are many more reasons why I love VB.NET much more than VB6.
  
  Don't think that I am new to VB6 or VB.NET. I have been working with Visual Basic since about 1997, I am a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer with Visual Studio 6, and a Microsoft Certified Application Developer with The .NET Framework. I am an expert with the Visual Basic language (both VB6 and VB.NET).

• 

  I too was a bit confused about VB.NET when I first started to use it. It was a far cry from VB6. In fact, it threw me off so much that I ran back to VB6 refusing to use it. But then I tried it again and decided to look at it as a different language. I found that when I threw out all my preconseptions of what it's supposed to be like, I really liked the language alot! It gave me more power, better speed, and all around, a better environment to work in. I love VB6, we've had some good times together. But I believe I'm going to stick with VB.NET. It's just a better language.

• 

  Hi,
  I would hope, the most exciting thing is the faster loading of a huge .Net project.  And then a dragdrop of any .vb file into the ide.
  Not drinking coffee all the time. Maybe the intellisense can be switched off during such operations..