Re: VB.NET 2008 not backward compatable?

No dependency for VB6 software which does not make use of any ActiveX
controls which are not part of the operating system or have not yet been
installed on the computer. Most VB6 applications made use of ActiveX
controls such as the Windows Common Controls ActiveX controls.


Most? None of mine does. (And it's not past tense,
incidentally. There's plenty of VB software still used and
being written.)
One can use ActiveX controls or not. I think of them as
sort of like training wheels.

Either way, the only reason I posted in the first place
was to point out the silliness of bickering over this
issue from a .Net point of view. .Net may have various
strengths, and it seems to be popular for corporate intranet
software. But compactness or suitability for writing
distributed software is notably *not* a .Net strength.
Al Reid was implying that the 88+ MB runtime needed
on many systems for .Net is roughly equivalent to the 1MB
VB6 runtime -- which is almost universally pre-installed -- in
terms of inconvenience and dependency issues. That's
just plain silly.

I've always found it odd that so many people using .Net
defend its use for everything. Microsoft said .Net is replacing
compiled code and people just accepted that claim. Some people
in this thread are still hanging onto the notion that .Net will
be the basis of an OS in the future. Yet Java has been around
far longer than .Net and distributed "Desktop" Java software is
almost non-existent. Why? Because it's relatively slow, it can be
decompiled, it requires a massive runtime... It's just plain not
suited to the job. Just like .Net. But Java people don't try to make
Java suited to a job where it doesn't belong. Nevertheless, when
Microsoft came out with their own Java knock-off and said it's the
best thing for Web *and* Desktop, people bought that hook, line
and sinker. So now people who don't know any better write
Windows software in .Net, and if I mistakenly decide to try such a
program it will try to sneak off during install *without asking me* to
download and install 88 MB of useless bloat! What's wrong with
this picture?! How did the whole situation get so unbalanced that
people are writing Windows software in .Net and trying to *sneak*
88 MB of support files past unsuspecting, potential clients?

Of course if those same people are questioned about that they'll
say something absurb like, "Ah, 88 MB is nothing with today's large
hard disks. What, you can't afford a modern PC?" They don't realize
that they've been enlisted into Microsoft's cloud experiment
bandwagon, and that MS has no intention of them writing Windows
software with .Net. MS want you to be writing web-based applets
that will run on Azure, where MS can get a cut of the action. Windows
software is to be phased out because it threatens DRM and
eliminates the need for expensive cloud services.

So if you want to write cloud applets or take a shot at Silverlight,
then .Net is probably what you want, but one shouldn't be deceived
into thinking that .Net is an "evolutionary" development in Windows
programming.




.

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