Microsoft won't "Bring back Classic Visual Basic" | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft won't "Bring back Classic Visual Basic"

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8 pointsacqq10 comments

This seems to be a copy-and-paste of [1], which is dated December 2012.

I'm not sure why anyone would think that resurrecting VB6 is a good idea. If com is the reason then VB.net does com interop just fine. But really its way past time to move on.

[1] http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...

The response matters and is dated "June 03, 2014."

Primary source: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...

I once asked michkap on the now-dead blog about a new version of Classic VB based on VBA 7 (used in Office 2010 and later). BTW, I wonder why LongLong isn't in 32-bit VBA 7.

Is there really a market for "Classic VB" in 2014? I mean, hell, I have fond memories of it (and learned DirectX using it, shudder) from when I was young, but I honestly can't see any use-case for it these days that isn't suited better by other languages, runtimes, and tools.

You are overlooking the myriad legacy apps that are entrenched VB6. The owners of these apps would like to graduate to 64-bit and Unicode, to satisfy the customers that continue to use the apps and generate revenue. Without rewriting a million lines of code.

The best route is to import the vb6 project into VS2008, which will attempt to convert it to vb.net. Then open the project in a later version of Visual Studio. As far as I know VS2008 was the last version to support conversion.

I've never actually tried this, having not had the pleasure of being a VB programmer. From what I remember, small projects tended to migrate reasonably well but larger ones could be problematic.

Their current problem seems like a fair price to pay for having used a proprietary corporate-backed technology for something as fundamental as the programming language.

I hope they'll learn. Looks at C#

I think the .NET Framework will last a very long time though. Some part of Windows itself depends on it for example.

It's a higher level than C and C++ and generates native code. With .NET Microsoft tried to make "a better Java than Java," and the next VB was for that target.

The advent of mobile platforms resurrected the awareness that the most effective code is the native code. Google has Go which has GC but is otherwise native. Apple obviously developed Swift since 2010 which is a high-level native-targeted language. Microsoft on their part, it seems, still has a different vision, the one still dependent on the .NET VM.

Is the .NET technology so good that the benefits of the native code should be ignored? I honestly don't know and I'd like to hear informed opinions.

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