Re: VB.NET 2008 not backward compatable?

"mayayana" <mayaXXyana@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eJZxgVHwJHA.3676@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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.

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.

Works fine for me, I'm selling a .NET apps that are now targeting the 3.5
framework - and these aren't even business apps, they're for home users.
I'm not sure if you still think the majority of users are on Win95, but...
well, they're not. Not in 1st world countries anyway.

Deployment of the framework has never been problematic for me, but then I
know how to create a Setup project properly rather than just zipping up a
single EXE and trying to sell that.

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. I can remember making a simple game and when it was
packaged up with the Deployment Wizard with all the support files it closed
in on 8MB. That was relatively huge in the 56K days. In fact, broadband is
often touted as being 10x faster than dialup (at minimum) so comparing that
to 88MB of files isn't unrealistic.

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.

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.


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...

Java is FAR slower than .NET, and its front end support sucks. You're
comparing a Lada Cossack with a Range Rover on the basis that they can both
off-road. They're very different animals.

..NET apps can be obfuscated to the point that decompilation is virtually
impossible. And VB6 apps weren't exactly speedy or immune to decompilation
either.

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

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.


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?

Perhaps because most people now have a computer with more than a 1GB hard
drive? Disc space is no longer a point of contention when creating apps.
Working set still is, but actual space used is not. Download times also
matter far less, not just due to higher speed connections but the lack of
actually dialling up and tying up a phone line.

Take it from someone who successfully sells .NET desktop software: the users
that don't actually have .NET installed yet (and that's less than you might
think), don't care about installing it. All they care is that the app will
take care of the entire install process for them, and a properly built Setup
app handles that easily.


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.

Possibly the most ridiculous thing you've said so far in this post, and
that's really saying something.

MS don't invest needlessly into technology they're about to kill off. They
scale down support and stop releasing updates.

Lately we've seen the release of .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 3.5SP1, entirely
new desktop-GUI technologies like WPF, and new desktop GUI APIs are being
previewed to take full advantage of the new UI glitter of Windows 7. This
simply is not the MO of a company about to kill off desktop software. Not
even close.

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.

Whatever you may think, one most definitely should not be fooled into
thinking that VB6 is still even remotely relevant in today's market for
anything other than a calculator/tic-tac-toe application. Times have
changed and Microsoft *did* eventually kill one thing off - classic VB. And
about time too.





.

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