Re: Access .NET classes from VB 5/6?

***,

Express compiles, just like "The BIG BOYS."

Thanks. We took a smaller project (a simulator) and converted it to VB 2005. The MAJOR problem with 2005 is that they removed EVERYTHING that supported NON-object oriented programming. While OO is great for lots of things, it is most decidedly UNusable for some applications and is most decidedly UNusable in some places in MOST complex applications, ESPECIALLY in simulators and state machine logic.

The "choker statement" in the smaller project was a gigantic On GoSub statement that apparently must be converted to a gigantic Select Case statement. This mixes main simulator logic with specific component logic in a most UN-OO way.

The present program (not the smaller project) contains a gigantic ON GoTo statement as part of a state machine module within an NNTP client, as the NNTP protocol is horribly designed without any concept of layering - e.g. you can be interrupted at any point for authentication, with all outstanding requests being summarily discarded even where the authentication is successful. This sort of mess demands a state machine approach. Again, VB 2005 will force us to mix the state machine switching with the action logic - UGLY by any standard and hard to maintain because it spreads what should be a single long statement across dozens of pages of nearly unrelated logic.

To further illustrate, The state machine is now easy to read in VB5, with what looks like single-thread logic and an occasional GoTo followed by a label, where control is returned to the state machine controller to be returned to the following statement at some time in the long distant future as the result of one of many potential future events. Either I must scrap this easy-to-maintain structure, or change the On GoTo to a much larger Select Case statement where every case consists of just a GoTo Statement (which I will probably do to preserve readability of the remainder of the program).

All in all, they obviously had some BAD MANAGEMENT at Microsoft in the program to develop .NET/2005, which concentrated WAY too much on preserving the weaknesses of the arcane C/C++/C#. Didn't Microsoft learn ANYTHING from those countless C bugs in Windows that they keep patching - that you couldn't create in VB if you tried? Now with fast processors and large memories, there is NOTHING (that I can see) to recommend C/C++/C# over more protected environments like VB. Of course, with VB you can always turn the protections off and have pretty much the same mess that you now have in C/C++/C#.

Don't get me wrong, I have written more C/C++ than I have written VB. That is enough to know that C/C++ is NOT suitable for complex applications or simulators where comprehensive testing may be impractical or downright impossible. Not unusual, some of my projects started off with fully coded systems that even their authors couldn't make work right - a pretty much unknown situation in VB. The idiots that haven't learned this (yet) are now poisoning VB with their continuing ignorance.

Anyway, I have my answer - yes, VB 2005 DOES appear to be marginally usable, though the downsides probably equal the upsides. My applications are somewhat complex/slow client-side applications that are NOT suitable for making web sites from, so there is little need for .NET/2005 aside from a few neat subroutines like IsPunctuation, which is where this entire discussion started.

Thanks *** and everyone for your continuing help and guidance.

Steve Richfie1d
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