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Off-Topic Discussion => Programming => Topic started by: Kosh on November 05, 2008, 02:17:02 am

Title: Why did they mangle VB?
Post by: Kosh on November 05, 2008, 02:17:02 am

I've been wondering for a while, why did MS take VB 6.0 and twist and mangle it into VB .net?

Title: Re: Why did they mangle VB?
Post by: blackhole on November 05, 2008, 02:21:57 am

Because MS fixes everything that isn't broken.

Title: Re: Why did they mangle VB?
Post by: Spicious on November 05, 2008, 02:22:29 am

Why would you use VB anyway?

Title: Re: Why did they mangle VB?
Post by: portej05 on November 05, 2008, 06:43:24 am

I think the answer lies partly in that they only wanted to have to work with one runtime (the CLR?). AFAIK VB and C# and all the .NET languages compile into MSIL which is then run on a virtual machine (I haven't actually used any managed languages, just C++ and FORTRAN here, so guessing!). Which is why they end up with the language like it is. Or I'm totally off the track somewhere. I did at one point have some VB6 code... but it stopped working when VB.NET came along  :(

Title: Re: Why did they mangle VB?
Post by: Kosh on November 07, 2008, 07:15:15 am

Quote from: Spicious on November 05, 2008, 02:22:29 am

Why would you use VB anyway?

It was my first programming language. It still has some advantages in that you can quickly build various applications with it. VB6 was great for the kind of work VB was intended to do, there really was no reason to change it. Hate to see if fade into the land of deprecation........

Title: Re: Why did they mangle VB?
Post by: phatosealpha on November 30, 2008, 12:30:14 am

Out of curiousity, what exactly are these quick applications that you can't do with vb.net?