Re: Advice Needed...

That was his story, anyway. I don't know how much of it was fact and how
much conjecture, but it certainly sounded like a plausible explanation of
why VB7 changed so much from VB6,

Sounds like complete rubbish to me. I don't see why the IL has any bearing
on it at all.

Wasn't that cited in the original VB.NET as being the reason that some
features couldn't be maintained? I seem to remember it was, though I won't
claim certainty on that.

I can't agree with that. Compatibility can be a good thing but it also
holds things back *considerably*. Quite often the best gains are made from
breaking compatability.

Really? Access hasn't had to break backwards compatibility
since...well...ever, yet it performs fantastically for a local database, and
continues to add features with each release. All the other Office apps are
pretty much the same. The Windows API hasn't broken compatibility
(significantly, anyway) across all 32-bit versions, and has compatibility
layers for 16-bit versions (and of course the 64-to-32 bit layer in the
64-bit versions). But looking strictly at languages, C++ hasn't had any
major breakage since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, nor has Delphi, or HTML,
or...I'm sure if I thought about it, I could go on for a while. So why is
VB "special"?

But let's say there were significant gains to be made by breaking
compatibility, you'll never convince me that things like forcing all arrays
to start with the same base was a *necessary* compatibility break in order
to make VB.NET "better" somehow. I suppose you might argue that it lends to
more structured programming, but if that were a concern in VB, there
would've been a lot of other things removed or altered as well. They may
also have wanted to consider the concept that if they were going to break
compatibility, they should have designed the new language in such a way that
an upgrade could actually do a half-decent job instead of just littering
code with ToDo statements.



Rob


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