
Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic - bluedino
https://www.thurrott.com/dev/232268/microsoft-plots-the-end-of-visual-basic
======
rkagerer
I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been
more efficient in any other one.

As long as MS doesn't break my workarounds to run that old IDE or its EXE's,
I'm happy. VB.NET was a great stepping stone, but after switching to C# I
never looked back. The only thing I miss is global functions that don't need a
class qualifier in front of them. And I still find the Edit-and-Continue
debugging experience in C# hit-or-miss.

~~~
kjaftaedi
I used to think this too, but everything you can do in VB6 you can do in
powershell, and do it better. Try/Catch, windows forms.. literally anything
you can think of.

You can even mix powershell and C# together in the same script.

Once I realized I had a better version of everything I wanted, it became my
new favorite.

~~~
trent_lott
Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training?

VB6 got me into programming as a kid.

I mostly use python for stats stuff. I sorta understand how to run up a GUI
using tkinter, but it seems like a huge pain in the ass.

I'm sure Visual Studio offers the ability to do whatever VB6 could with a GUI,
but it isn't obvious how to get there.

VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand them in Windows.
Why the fuck is it so hard nowadays? VS isn't intuitive - it's a firehouse of
information and I feel like you need training to use it. That is a bummer.

I just want to Lego-assemble a cute GUI-based program that I can make into a
binary and email my wife to use. But I need to dedicate 70GB and two weeks of
study to get there, I guess.

~~~
ryanmarsh
A whole lot of us got into programming as kids because of VB. What do young
people have today like it?

~~~
nekeo9jd
No wonder so many programmers stick to boring business apps! ;-)

I got into coding qbasic (meh) & amiga (yeaaah) game engines in the 80s.

Currently teaching kids with Computercraft, to manipulate virtual worlds
rather than boring spreadsheets.

IMO that sort of computer work will be obsolete by the time today’s kid are
grown.

I’d probably avoid more than basic coding in general anymore and focus on
math-y stuff. Just my take on where need will be, and discussing this with
education researchers, and other thinkers.

I have a hard time believing we’ll carry as much code from the last couple
decades as we had to from the previous few.

So much of it these days is web ui’s with a short shelf life relative to
foundational code we shlepped forward in kernels, banking, and complex
industry systems.

~~~
pjmlp
I got into coding via Timex 2068 Basic, Z80/8086/68000 Assembly, Turbo
Basic/Turbo Pascal Demoscene meetups.

Maybe coding the Arduino/ESP32 game boy clones is appealing to today's kids.

------
smacktoward
The end of Visual Basic.NET, that is. "Classic" Visual Basic has been ended
for a long time now.

(And VB.NET is much less of a loss -- it was never as popular as classic VB.
Even when it first came out, it was clear that if you were a VB developer,
Microsoft _really_ wanted you to move to C#; VB.NET always felt like an
afterthought, a fig leaf they could use to say they really weren't abandoning
VB when they obviously were.)

~~~
mysterydip
Definitely. I was a huge fan of VB6, spent thousands of hours writing all
kinds of things. When I first heard of VB.NET, I was excited to see what new
features were implemented, expecting something like VB4->VB5->VB6. Boy was I
in for a surprise. It seemed more like C wrapped in VB syntax. I started
looking to other languages at that point, but as some other posters said I
never found anything quite able to match the rapid prototyping GUI and
debugging features of the VB6 IDE.

~~~
hermitdev
I never did VB6 or VB.Net, but I've done VBscript with classic ASP and VBA in
Excel. Glad I went with C# instead of VB.Net.

Not trashing VB, but C# was always more capable and fully featured than VB (VB
couldnt even do unsigned integers, and I dont it can even now), and almost
immediately more widely adopted in even .Net 1.0. Hell, C++ with COM was more
capable (if not extremely annoying amd error prone). Of course VBscript and
VBA share very similar syntaxes, but they're not the same languages or std
object models/libraries, just maybe 95% similar.

~~~
tastroder
Thing is, it was never about language capability. VB6 with COM was still
faster in terms of development cycles for people used to the woes back then.
Though I'd argue that the few differences there were between VBScript/VBA and
VB6 made it much more capable from a development perspective back then... Most
of my VB6 bubble moved to VB.Net during the transition, the widespread move to
C# with those folks came years later when it became somewhat inevitable. After
all, for the typical type of application, language is honestly mostly
irrelevant as long as it does not get in your way.

All this feels a little like history repeating itself. We even naively made up
a petition back then to keep VB6 around, somewhat glad that led nowhere in
retrospect. A few decades ago I loved that the VB ecosystem was approachable
and combined beginners and professional users. I somewhat think we have enough
other good tools that fit this description these days, some of which
incidentally even come with a good programming language.

------
marcus_holmes
I loved VB. I don't think I've ever been as productive as I was in VB - I
could literally knock together a complete desktop application in an afternoon.

It wasn't perfect. There were lots of problems with it. It would never win
prizes in CS competitions. But man you could build shit with it fast.

~~~
dole
“VB6 makes 95% of programming simple and the other 5% impossible.”

~~~
hu3
More like "95% simple and 5% possible".

VB6 can call win APIs and C++ code for when some arcane functionality is
needed.

~~~
throwaway5752
Take [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/win32/api/oaidl/ns-...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/win32/api/oaidl/ns-oaidl-variant?redirectedfrom=MSDN) and
[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/win32/api/winbase/n...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/win32/api/winbase/nf-winbase-readeventloga) and try to sensibly
read a bunch of _EVENTLOGRECORD's of varying lengths. "possible" is
technically true but charitable.

~~~
int_19h
You don't need any of that. VB6 had C FFI (Lib/Alias), structs, and function
pointers (AddressOf). So you could just implement a function in straight C,
compile it into a DLL, and invoke it from VB.

~~~
throwaway5752
I know but already function prototyping of a DLL your write to get around
language limitations isn't quite in the spirit of "things you can do in VB6".
And technical you could do it in VB, but it was pulling teeth. I could just as
easily write it in java and shell out to it. In VB it was hard pretty
difficult. But you are completely correct, that's the right thing to do. I
don't have bad feelings towards VB at all. Even today it was probably the most
productive GUI development environment I've ever seen. But function prototypes
returning structs / buffers? OnError GoTo <label>? Nostalgia only goes so far.

ps - noticed the employer on the profile. Powershell + .NET assemblies crushed
it, and VB.NET was a far superior language (though, just like all the jvm
languages have the same feel, all the IL based ones did and why not use C# at
that point?)

------
docandrew
VB the _language_ obviously has its limitations and frustrations, but VB the
_tool_ will be missed. It seems like every alternative mentioned here adds a
lot of additional friction for writing simple, one-off utilities.

I don't always want to dink around with the Visual Studio installer to make
sure the right version of the MSVC or .NET libraries are installed, or fiddle
with code to get a GUI layout to look nice, etc.

Having the IDE, compiler and GUI designer in one big coherent monolith had its
advantages.

~~~
wazanator
That's kinda what a C# .NET winforms project is. The WYSIWYG editor is pretty
easy and the basics are pretty well documented for all the premade widgets
that I feel like anyone who just needs to make a one off util program won't
have much trouble.

------
ripley12
My first real job was on a .NET stack that was 1/2 VB.NET and 1/2 C# for
legacy reasons. It was weird at first, but I mostly stopped noticing after a
few months - the two were completely interoperable and they both compile down
to the same .NET IL. In practice, coding in VB.NET was 99% the same as coding
in C#, just with a slightly more verbose syntax. Not my favourite language,
but much better than its dismal reputation would imply.

I sometimes miss VB.NET's XML Literals/Embedded Expressions feature. Back when
virtually everything spoke XML, it was very nice to have first-class support
for XML as a language feature. [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/dotnet/visual-basic/program...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/dotnet/visual-basic/programming-guide/language-features/xml/embedded-
expressions-in-xml)

~~~
hermitdev
Not completely interoperable. At least initially (and as far as I'm aware
ever). VB.Net never could understand the unsigned integral & char types. If
you used unsigned types in C#, those members wouldn't be BCL compatible and at
sufficient warning level, you had to annotate members with
[BCLCompliant(false)] if my memory serves correctly.

There were other language constructs at the time that werent 1:1 parity at
v1.0, but in nearly 20 years time, I forget.

~~~
cm2187
Well another one is case insensitivity. If you have a property and a function
in C# which name only differs by casing, will be a problem to consume in VB.
Not that it is good design in the first place.

------
anonymfus
That is so sad.

"There’s something deeply _right_ about how list indexing and function
application are the same operation". That is a quote from a recent submission
about K
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22504106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22504106)),
and that is a perfect example of how I usually get VB nostalgia attacks:
somebody talks about a thing in other language they consider amazing implying
that that thing is unique for that language despite it was implemented in VB
and earlier. Sometimes that somebody can ever be Microsoft as they brag about
adding more features into C#'s switch statement with increasingly ugly syntax
in every new version completely ignoring that they did them better in VB.

~~~
yyhhsj0521
I'm pretty sure that there are a few languages where array indexing is
basically calling a function that returns a reference to the cell you're
accessing.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Since C# 1.0, any type can have an indexer property defined that can accept
any parameter types and can can return anything - though it wasn't until C#
7.0 that we could return a first-class reference to a value, including array
members (`public ref int this[int idx] => ref this.someArray[idx]`).

------
signaru
VB classic was my first programming language since it was so easy to spit out
GUI programs that looked like any other program you use.

I'm afraid current popular languages like python and javascript do not offer
that "instant gratification" and is scaring beginners. With only terminal or
webpage output, they might get the feeling that what they're coding is far
from what "pros" use to write desktop software that is all around them.

Csharp is great, I use it everyday, but is not a real successor. First, it is
a massive install which can be an issue with others just starting out. The few
things I dislike with Csharp are that executables are dependent on the dot net
(or mono) framework and are not native, i.e. far easier to reverse engineer.

Lazarus/Delphi might be the next best things to a classic VB experience. There
are efforts to make something similar for Freebasic what Lazarus is for Free
Pascal. But they are nowhere close, and the next best alternatives are not
free.

I have no right to complain, and I fully understand, but I could be happier if
Gambas had native Windows support.

------
azhenley
I started programming in VB6 so this is a little sad, but I'm actually
surprised it has made it this far. I see C# everywhere but can't remember the
last time someone told me they were using VB.

~~~
tapland
Go make some nice word macros in VBA =)

~~~
toyg
VINV — VBA Is Not VB ;)

------
dwheeler
To me, this shows the huge risk of building on a language/platform that
depends on a single company.

This even happened earlier. Visual Basic .NET is grossly incompatible with
Visual Basic 6, so much so that Visual Basic .NET is essentially a different
language and was derisively called Visual Fred
[http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/V/Visual-
Fred.html](http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html) ... Of course,
it was possible to rewrite software so that would work with Visual Basic .NET,
but that completely misses the point. Most people in The Real World have
better things to do than rewrite working software just to keep it working.
Most of us want to solve new problems, not re-solve the same problem again.

Those who chose to use Visual Basic for non-trivial software got the shaft
twice, including the transition from vb6.

But don't worry, I suspect in a few years many people will forget about the
risks of tying yourself to a single company and will get the shaft again.
History so often repeats itself because people don't learn from history. I
wonder how many people will actually learn from this. Maybe the community of
software Ddvelopers will learn from this. But I fear it will just happen
again. If someone could prove me wrong that would be great. :-)

~~~
jeswin
As an ex-VB6 programmer, my view is that Microsoft has been fairly supportive
of VB users.

\- The IDE itself was supported for 10 years, till 2008

\- The runtime is supported till 2024, which is like 26 years. I think you can
get it to work on Windows 10 as well, though I haven't tried it myself. I
still see people using VB apps.

My view is that VB.Net should never have been created, since it was closer to
C# than it was to VB. Neither should it have been adopted by VB programmers
(if they did a fair analysis), but Microsoft messaging around that time may
have suggested it's a workable path forward.

~~~
roenxi
The typical working career is 40 years. If 10-26 years is considered an
acceptable lifetime for a language all your experience in the languages you
use will be forcibly reset fairly early in your career.

It isn't going to be major in itself, but becoming known for being a
specialist in a corporate sponsored language is a pretty catastrophic career
error. Anyone who learned C on the other hand looks pretty clever.

~~~
kungito
To be honest it sounds pretty not clever knowing only 1 language and having
your career depend on it

------
pfarrell
VB was a great and successful language. It empowered a lot of departments to
create bespoke programs that, while not having been built on solid comp sci
principles, were good enough and solved real business problems without having
to involve the IT department. That’s a strength and a weakness.

~~~
bluedino
VB is one of those things that let the determined create useful things. Not
unlike Microsoft Access.

Instead of actually learning principles and practices, and a 'good' language,
they could just hack something together than managed to just barely work,
armed with a $99 copy of Visual Basic and a 'Teach Yourself VB in 21 Days'
books from SAMS publishing.

And by the time they knew any better, they were up to their ears in shit.
Chances are, if you have a big project in VB, you also have the following
problems:

* You're not using version control. Or worse, you're running Sourcesafe.

* You're not using secure encryption or communication

* You're not using secure programming practices

* You're not using a modern, secure OS

* You're also using some 16 or 32-bit utility libraries that nobody has the code to

* You're employing developers who have 20 years of "1 year experience with VB"

~~~
appleiigs
On the other hand:

* No need to write a business case with fake ROI figures. No IT committee meeting. No need to teach a “solutions architect” who doesn’t really care to learn.

* Easier to evolve as requirements change because the front line person is fixing it.

* Proof of concept done already when you need IT involved for version control, security, etc.

------
rblion
In 2001, I was 11 and started my programming career with Visual Basic 6. John
Smiley book!

I was obsessed with theme parks and roller coasters at that age, so I made a
'theme park' application that let you look at maps, rides, and buy tickets.

Just having the basic logic of OOP down at 11 was a game changer, I started to
look at the world in a new way. I felt like I could solve any problem if I
could map it out on paper first.

------
sytelus
It's coincidental to have this announcement come on the same day Bill Gates
announced he is resigning from the Microsoft board (I'm sure completely
unrelated). Microsoft was founded on the idea of writing Basic interpreter by
Gates so a legacy of 45 years from both has ended today.

~~~
int_19h
Gates was still a huge fan of BASIC in 1990s, and I think VB would probably
not be what it became at its peak without him constantly pushing it to the
front of Windows dev stack.

------
jkingsbery
I first learned how to program in VB4. I can see why as a professional
programmer it lost favor, but it was a great learning language.

~~~
Koshkin
> _great learning language_

E.W.Dijkstra would disagree: "It is practically impossible to teach good
programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential
programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

~~~
freehunter
Has there ever, in the history of learning, been a subject like that? A
subject so damaging that it forever ruined anyone who learned it?

Or maybe Dijkstra was wrong.

~~~
jl6
Probably just hyperbolic. Bad habits are a common complaint in music and
sports education too. Not insurmountable, but not helpful, and it must be
frustrating as a teacher to have to unteach bad habits.

------
vibrolax
I had 7 years of C# experience in 2015 when I had to make an unanticipated job
change. With some trepidation, I took a position with another company in the
same industry whose codebase was all vb.net. I used Telerik's code converter a
lot to bootstrap my proficiency with vb syntax. The boss said I could just
write in C# if I wanted to, but I saw no need to make more mental work for the
rest of the team.

~~~
hu3
> The boss said I could just write in C# if I wanted to, but I saw no need to
> make more mental work for the rest of the team.

You're a real team player. That's both rare and invaluable on current days of
resume-driven-development.

------
daxfohl
Interestingly I was in a meeting with Brendan Burns (of k8s fame) last year
where he was extolling the virtues of VB. Not that it was the greatest
language or anything, but that it brought programming to the masses, the
ability for shirt and tie managers to do little things that increased their
productivity.

------
Hokusai
I evaluated Visual Basic as an alternative to Borland C++ to develop Windows
programs. It was just not there. Borland C++ allowed easy GUI design and was
easy integrated with Windows APIs for any low-level needs.

Several years later the jump in quality was astonishing. Good ODBC drivers and
easy linking between database rows and your UI make it a fast development tool
that fit many needs.

I do not miss the big colored buttons that many developers used at the time.
Never as bad as Access applications used to be, thou.

~~~
papito
I took a VB course in college and was immediately hooked. Then I immediately
switched to Borland. There is something about being able to compile a runtime-
free, native binary.

~~~
Koshkin
Yeah, for many programmers writing code in an unmanaged language would be like
a breath of fresh air these days.

------
kerng
Still hoping Microsoft will open source VB 6. It indeed was a language for the
masses back then.

There would have been no need for Python syntax or Golang with Visual Basic's
simplicity

~~~
MichaelMoser123
> There would have been no need for Python syntax or Golang with Visual
> Basic's simplicity

in a windows only world.

~~~
kerng
Not if they would have made it open source 2001 - or anytime later for that
matter.

~~~
int_19h
The semantics of VB6 are basically that of OLE Automation (or vice versa - it
can be hard to tell sometimes). That doesn't make it impossible to port to
other platforms, but it would require extra effort. And the result wouldn't
have all the benefits VB had on Windows, where COM was pretty much OS-level
native at the time.

------
innocentoldguy
I think VB6 served a useful purpose. I used it for internal utilities all the
time when I worked for Microsoft.

I haven't used any of these tools in probably 20 years but in addition to VB6,
I also liked Delphi and C++ Builder quite a lot back in the day. Delphi was
probably my favorite of the bunch. Embarcadero still sells both Delphi and C++
Builder but their pricing is far too expensive, I think.

Anyway, thank you, VB, and thanks for all the fish.

------
Vaslo
Wonder what is going to happen to Visual Basic for Applications? I hope it
pushes Microsoft to move toward a new language like Python to automate Excel.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
The two are completely district languages. Kind of like comparing Java with
JavaScript.

I'm sure in general Microsoft would love to scrap VB in Excel but there's too
many companies that run entire areas of business on it, or the whole business
itself.

It is the typical legacy/back compat problem. Python or even Powershell would
be a vast improvement, but you're going against billions in sunk
cost/skills/knowledge.

VB.Net was slowly losing popularity, VB in Excel isn't.

~~~
Exmoor
Would it be impossible for Excel to allow coding in multiple languages? I
totally get that there's a huge (disturbing) amount of business critical stuff
using the current scripts, but they really should move on to something more
modern.

~~~
applecrazy
That’s a thing now, but for add-ins: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/office/dev/add-ins/referenc...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/office/dev/add-ins/reference/overview/excel-add-ins-reference-overview)

------
willtim
Python seems to be the new "beginners" programming language (the "B" in
Basic), it's taught in schools now and makes Basic look rather archaic in
comparison. So I would say the writing is on the wall. What was good about
Visual Basic was the IDE and GUI builder. Sadly this has no real modern
competitor in terms of ease of use.

------
mplewis
The adblocker doorslammed me. Here's the text of the article.

Microsoft said this week that it will support Visual Basic on .NET 5.0 but
will no longer add new features or evolve the language.

“Starting with .NET 5, Visual Basic will support Class Library, Console,
Windows Forms, WPF, Worker Service, [and] ASP.NET Core Web API … to provide a
good path forward for the existing VB customer who want [sic] to migrate their
applications to .NET Core,” the .NET team wrote in a post to the Microsoft
DevBlogs. “Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language
… The future of Visual Basic … will focus on stability, the application types
listed above, and compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework
versions of Visual Basic.”

When Microsoft released the .NET version of Visual Basic, originally called
Visual Basic .NET, alongside C# at the beginning of the .NET era, the two
languages were evolved together and had roughly identical feature sets. But
this changed over time, with professional developers adopting C# and many fans
of classic VB simply giving up on the more complex but powerful .NET versions
of the environment. Today, virtually all of Microsoft’s relevant developer
documentation is in C# only, with VB source code examples ever harder to find.

Worse, Microsoft in 2017 announced that its original C#/VB co-development
strategy was over. Only C# would get all of the new features, while VB would
focus on the simpler and more approachable scenarios that it once dominated.
But that never really happened, and Microsoft effectively abandoned VB. This
week’s announcement just makes it official.

What this means to VB developers is that they might be able to bring their
existing codebases forward to .NET Core or, soon, to .NET 5.0, which will
replace both the traditional .NET and the open-source and cross-platform .NET
Core when it’s released in late 2020. The issue is that not all legacy
technologies will be supported going forward, so developers using WebForms,
Workflow, or Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) will need to stick with
classic .NET. Those applications will continue to work and be supported until
the underlying Windows versions are retired; classic .NET support life cycles
are tied to the Windows versions on which they were initially deployed.

Microsoft also notes that VB developers will occasionally benefit from
improvements to Visual Studio.

“Visual Studio regularly adds new features to improve the experience for
developers, including those using Visual Basic and either .NET Core or .NET
Framework,” the .NET team adds. “An example is the recent addition of
IntelliCode for Visual Basic.”

This is a sad day, and one that hits me personally. I started my writing
career with Visual Basic 3, went on to write several books about VB and its
various variants, and most recently wrote an entire Notepad clone called
.NETpad in Visual Basic, Windows Forms, and the .NET Framework.

~~~
taspeotis
At the bottom you can click “move on to site.”

~~~
wideasleep1
Which has me wondering...what will Paul do when M$ is no more? Ah, click 'move
on to site'.

------
iso1631
VB3 was my first real language. I'd attempted stuff before on spectrum and BBC
BASIC and later QBASIC, but VB3 not only allowed easy development of a GUI
application, it allowed you to distribute an EXE -- a real grownup program,
not a ".bas" file. I wrote my first commercial program in VB3 or VB4, to look
after book orders, had an access database behind it, and all sorts of oddness
to do printing if I recall rightly. Used VB4 as well, and I guess I used VB5
as well.

I moved on, to the web, to things like TCL/TK, Java, and Perl. Some things
never change, I have a full screen vim window with a brand new perl script on
my right-hand monitor as I type this.

Despite having dumped windows 20 years ago, I've still got a place in my heart
for visual basic.

~~~
dceddia
I'll always fondly remember Visual Basic as the language that let me make real
Windows applications with the language I already knew and understood.

I was just a kid, maybe 10 or 12, when I learned to program with QBASIC and
later VB5. I remember strongly feeling that a ".bas" file wasn't a _real_
program. I so much wanted to be able to run my programs as real .EXE files.
There was some kind of QBASIC compiler that made an .EXE but I felt like that
was just... still not real enough. That desire for making a real bonafide .EXE
was one of the driving reasons I (tried to) learn C.

------
leommoore
I got started with VB1 and did my first commercial product in VB3. I wrote
many applications in VB6 over the years and I was maintaining one application
continually from 2000 to 2019. It worked great, with excellent debugging but
was getting a bit long in the tooth over the last few years and the big fear
not so much VB itself but the continued compatibility of third party
components.

Like most developers I migrated to the curly braces languages (C# ->
JavaScript -> TypeScript) but my first love will always be VB.

------
zchrykng
As long as they give me something to use in the place of VBA, I can't wait for
all forms of Basic to die. It hurts to use it, but I have to because there
isn't anything else in Excel.

------
jimnotgym
I wonder what the cost of creating a vb6/ Delphi style environment with Python
as the language would be. This could be a very popular project if someone
could get it off the ground. Something like a vscode plugin?

I have no idea how that would work, but I would put real money into a
kickstarter for someone who did know.

I hate GUI programming in Python. Even simple 'click here' to run involves
more concepts than my kids want to know yet

~~~
strategarius
Scratch is probably the most logical choice for teaching programming to kids
(at least in an age when it's still hard for them to concentrate on multiple
concepts before seing some results)

[https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)

------
gwbas1c
I started my career on a project that was 90% C# and 10% VB.Net. Most of the
work in VB.Net was junk code that I had to refactor; ultimately, it didn't
make any sense to use VB.net for that code.

I could never really understand why there was VB.Net. It had some language
features that C# didn't have, but they were features I'd never use in an
industrial strength program.

------
erel
The spirit of VB continues to live and prosper in B4X. B4X is a cross
platform, native, RAD tool for mobile and desktop apps. There is a large
community of B4X developers and many of them were previously VB developers.
Most of the tools, including B4A - native Android apps, are completely free
and the framework is open source. You are all welcome to try it.

------
Quarrelsome
Many fond memories here, can't say I share them. Throughout my career, vb code
or programmers/architects from a vb background have been the bane of my
existence.

The kind of language that supports the construct:

> on error resume next

(i.e. if any errors happen, just run the next line regardless), needs to die.
I appreciate this is harsh but IMO, good riddence.

------
csense
Previous submission at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22559045](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22559045)

I thought HN was supposed to collapse duplicate submissions to a single topic?
URL appears to be identical. Is there some kind of cache issue in HN's
backend?

~~~
wolfgang42
Caching issue is unlikely, given that HN runs as a single thread on a one
server, writing to a flat-file backend. As far as I'm aware the main cache
involved is the OS's page cache.

To your main point, the dupe detector seems to be fairly limited; I think it
only checks for the same URL in the past 12 hours or 100 posts or something.
It seems to be just to keep the same post from showing up multiple times in
/new.

~~~
Jaruzel
This isn't true. I tried to submit something yesterday but got auto-redirected
to a previous submission of the same url, from _seven months ago_.

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dwarfland
We'll soon have something for people who like Visual Basic and want to keep
using it (for more platforms that just .NET, too):
[http://elementscompiler.com/elements/mercury/](http://elementscompiler.com/elements/mercury/)

------
scarface74
I never understood the purpose of VB.Net. My second job out of college was a
mixture of VB6 and C++ where we would use C++/ATL (COM) to mix and match
languages. Of course the VB6 IDE was miles better than the C++ IDE.

But, Windows Forms with C# was just as easy as VB6 and VB.Net was just as
complicated and more verbose than C#.

~~~
badsectoracula
> I never understood the purpose of VB.Net.

Microsoft politics after hiring Anders Hejlsberg who designed C# as a
competitor to Java so Java's compile-once-run-anywhere wont take a foothold on
the desktop market and thus endanger the dominance of Windows, required that
everything related to developing software for Windows was focused on C# and
.NET to drive home to ISVs that this is the future, but up until that point
VB6 was wildly popular - and absolutely incompatible with anything related to
C# or .NET. So they reskinned C# with some VB clothes and paraded it in front
of VB6 developers, hoping they wont notice the sharp bits sticking out - which
worked as well as you'd expect. But with Microsoft having full and absolute
control over VB6, it isn't like anyone could do anything about it, so over
time people moved on. VB.NET never managed a hint of VB6's popularity and was
always in the shadow of C#, which made perfect sense since outside of liking
QBasic-like syntax more than C-like syntax, there wasn't any reason to use
VB.NET.

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peter_retief
I started with Visual Basic 3 which I loved. Other programming I was doing at
the time was with PIC micros. Never really got into VB6, got into Linux and
used PHP, Ruby, Java, C/C++ and Python. Drifted in and out of electronics,
chemistry and software. What a time to be alive.

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davchana
In about 1998 I got introduced to programming beyond CMD prompt through VB. My
first form was just an input box, a button, when clicked, alerted the box
contents onto a dialogue box. My mind was blown when I found that using & in
label makes the Alt+ keyboard shortcut.

------
carlsborg
On Error Resume Next

~~~
pcdoodle
I used this all the time and I'm still alive.

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protomyth
Microsoft started with BASIC, so this is pretty sad news. I made cash with VB
and really liked the whole "buy some VBX/OCX components, hook the together,
and ship app" economy. I cannot help but think that this is bad for other
reasons.

------
orionblastar
It is a shame that Microsoft never open-sourced cLassic Visual BASIC. Let the
fans support it with donations. I made a lot of money by programming in
Classic Visual BASIC.

VB.Net is not the same thing, it has C# features added to it.

Now I move to Python from Classic Visual BASIC.

------
orionblastar
There is Jabaco which is a VB6 Java-based language. It hasn't been updated in
a long while.

[http://www.jabaco.org/](http://www.jabaco.org/)

I wonder if anyone wants to help them update it to make it better?

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formercoder
This is gonna be like Python 3. There is an innumerable amount of “production”
VB.

~~~
jeremyjh
Is there really a lot of production VB.NET? I wouldn't be at all surprised to
learn there is more production VB 6 code and development on that stopped two
decades ago.

~~~
pjmlp
Yes, it is the to go programming language in life sciences corporations when
Office users outgrow their VBA skills and get to have IT install VS on their
computers.

I know a couple of places like this, no R, no Python, VB all the way.

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tomaszs
Visual Basic was one of first languages i have learned. A lots of its spirit
was moved into C#. Maybe its good, but on the other hand we loose a good one
leaving more Space for JS and the creature called TS.

------
changoplatanero
Is it a coincidence that this happens the same day Gates leaves the board???

------
makz
Delphi > VB

------
bullen
OT: Does anyone know the legal implications of redistributing the cl.exe
compiler? Visual Studio is so clunky, but the compiler actually works well!

------
zubairq
I loved Visual Basic too. So much in fact that I am trying to build a modern
web based take on Visual Basic using nodejs and JavaScript at yazz.com

------
jitendrac
I hope they do same for Ms Office, Add parallel support for javascript/python
in office products and gradually deprecate vb.

~~~
aspaviento
Isn't 365 doing that already? Add-ins for that version must be implemented in
JavaScript.

------
coretx
Does this include VBA, virtual basic for applications? If so, what would
Microsoft's preferred alternative be ?

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spacechild1
It was so easy to create GUI apps and small games in VB. It definitely got me
into programming!

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devit
VB.net is already equivalent to a subset of C#, and it can mostly be
automatically translated.

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exabrial
Given a silverlight impl just got hn three days ago... We live in incredible
times

~~~
tdy721
silverlight? you must be from an alternate reality... Sauce? There was a
silverlight app on HN?

~~~
tdy721
On the other hand, if a flash bug just owned everyone... Wait, flash didn't
own anyone?

Times...

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okonomiyaki3000
Nothing nostalgic about this for me. Good. Riddance.

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yarone
Ahh, I've got fond memories of VB3 thru VB6...

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ackbar03
entire bank trading teams basically run on visual basic excel macros, could be
a pain in the ass at some point

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majkinetor
It was a god damn time.

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pwdisswordfish2
Oh no, how are we going to track IP addresses now?

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lerie1982
make it open source.

~~~
squarefoot
It already is, ...sorta.
[http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html](http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html)

Not a clone and definitely not 100% compatible, though.
[http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/doc/diffvb](http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/doc/diffvb)

