Re: VB.NET 2008 not backward compatable?

"Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]" <hirf-spam-me-here@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OuZIZ8ewJHA.1088@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Alex Clark" <quanta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> schrieb:

Get real. If you're making proper n-tier business applications you're
going to be needing to partition code up into libraries, and VB6 sends
you straight to DLL hell in that case.

Which type of DLL hell? Sure, you have to keep binary compatibility in
mind, but I don't see any reason for a DLL here.

Multiple applications sharing the same DLL can quickly turn hellish if you
make alterations, even if they don't break binary compatibility. All apps
get "upgraded" and before you know it you've introduced hard to trace bugs
because an application that was working fine before the update is suddenly
producing unexpected behaviour, and nobody knows why because it was never
supposed to have been touched during the latest release.

How exactly does side-by-side compatibility work in VB6? With .NET, all I
have to do is register an assembly with the GAC if I want it to remain even
after new releases. Alternatively I can x-copy it into my app's directory
and never, ever have to worry about the joys of running stupid DLLREG
scripts. That's the way it *should* be - a powerful version control system
which you are not forced into using if you don't want to. In VB6 you had no
choice - everything had to be registered, and the compatibility system
sucked.


See Microsoft Singularity for details. It won't be Windows 8, but it may
just make it for Windows 9 or 10. The benefits of a managed operating
environment are already proving to be huge.

Which advantages are you thinking of? Windows Vista is pretty perfect,
IMO. All i'd look for is a real new approach to UI, which all vendors are
currently lacking. Most Linux distributions are still busy with copying
the Windows 95 UI and adding transparency to it.

Singularity has nothing to do with UI, and comparing it to Vista is like
comparing a carrot to a toaster oven. Singularity isolates every single
process, including device drivers, into their own sealed managed
environment. MS have already shown that there's a performance benefit, but
far more than that is the massive step up in stability. Dodgy drivers or
misbehaving devices don't blue-screen the system, they simply get shut off,
restarted, or diagnosed. SIPs (System Isolated Processes) are virtually
contained in what is effectively their own running "copy" of the operating
system, and can only communicate with others through dedicated OS channels.
Security & stability are massively enhanced with an approach like that, and
of course because the entire OS is .NET there is no framework required. You
can download it from MS Research and play with it inside Virtual PC, I think
the source code is available too.

A properly written VB.NET app will outperform an identical VB6
application. Easily.

I believe in > 90 % of the applications performance is not a problem at
all.

I was addressing Mayayana's insistence that .NET is slow, whilst he was also
defending VB6 as being a better choice. If performance is a concern, VB6
would not be a good first choice. Or second, third, etc.

I partly agree. However, the intrinsic WPF controls are still a rather
bad remake of the old Win32 controls. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't use
WPF for their applications at the moment and thus there are still some
huge problems like faulty ClearType support, etc. However, things will
get better when Microsoft is using WPF for their own applications, such as
VS and the graphical PowerShell UI.

ClearType is probably the biggest fault with WPF, and they've publicly
admitted it - as well as saying they've fixed it for the 4.0 release of the
framework. VS2010 will be fully WPF based which is probably what prompted
them to address it.

As for the intrinsic WPF controls being bad remakes of the Win32 controls,
this is not really accurate. MS are always going to include the standard
Windows controls in the toolbox, because every developer wants (and needs)
the ability to make a uniform app that a user can get to grips with easily
enough. If I created an app where every button was actually a ladybug, I
suspect a lot of computer-illiterate users would have a hard time using it.
Why should they have to relearn how to use a GUI just for the sake of my
app?

On the other hand, if I want to completely (and I mean *completely*) change
the appearance of any one of those intrinsic controls, WPF will allow me
to - I could even animate them and make them rotate in 3D space if I want
to.

Perhaps Mayana could tell us how easy all of that would be in VB6, seeing as
how it's supposedly better suited to creating desktop software than .NET is?




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