Re: VB.NET 2008 not backward compatable?

"Alex Clark" <quanta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> schrieb:
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.

So you don't use any COM DLLs either? Are you shipping tic-tac-toe games?

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.

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.

Back in the days of dialup, the VB6 runtime was not an insignificant download at all.

This has been a huge problem because back in the late 90ies internet access was rare at all, at least in Austria, Europe. Software distribution was mainly carried out using floppy disks and CD-ROMs. However, because of the size of the VB runtime distribution even of smaller applications on a single floppy disk were problematic.

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.

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.

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,

I'm not sure if you're still so stuck in the dark ages of VB6 that you haven't heard, but have you even looked into WPF? Using it, you can create .NET desktop apps that simply aren't in the same league as the clunky VB6 apps of old. It's very likely that the latest version of the framework isn't just good for "Windows software", but is in fact better suited to creating Windows Desktop apps than *anything* else on the market today.

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.

--
M S Herfried K. Wagner
M V P <URL:http://dotnet.mvps.org/>
V B <URL:http://dotnet.mvps.org/dotnet/faqs/>

.

Relevant Pages

  • RE: WPF v Windows Forms
    ... there is no real need for 3D graphics and animations, ... WPF is at v1.0 and Vista desktop penetration will take a while. ... WPF is Microsoft's unified presentation subsystem for Windows and is ... Letting WPF applications use these existing controls can make sense in some ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.windowsforms)
  • Re: Wer verwendet WPF wirklich in seinen Programmen?
    ... Ich möchte auf Benuteraktionen auf diese Controls ... um diesen auch unter WPF weiterzuverwenden und weiterentwickeln zu können. ... seinen Sinn & Potential nahezu verlieren. ... Windows Forms Syntax voll entfalten können... ...
    (microsoft.public.de.german.entwickler.dotnet.vb)
  • Re: Change from vb6 to vb.net
    ... If you are going from VB6 to Windows Forms I would second the recommendation for http://www.vbmigration.com/. ... WPF browser app ... If you have your business & data logic separate (class libraries) from your UI, then you should be able to use vbmigration partner to migrate those class libraries. ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.vb)
  • Re: VB.NET 2008 not backward compatable?
    ... you straight to DLL hell in that case. ... How exactly does side-by-side compatibility work in VB6? ... WPF for their applications at the moment and thus there are still some ... As for the intrinsic WPF controls being bad remakes of the Win32 controls, ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.vb)
  • Re: Unicode in VB6 form?
    ... >I have problem with Unicode text in VB6 forms. ... In Windows NT, the controls in VB6 show ... To make Unicode controls, you could use CreateWindowExW depending on the OS ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.winapi)