Re: RealBasic, is it ready?

Mike,

Thanks for the info, very interesting.

Dave


On Aug 16, 7:55 am, "MD" <m...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
I tried converting a VB6 project to RB but have put that project on hold. A
few comments:

1. The Visual Basic converter supplied with RB is a dead loss. You are
better off writing from scratch. There are many contributors to the RB
forums that concur with this thought. There are many issues, but the one
that caused me the most pain was the RB doesn't support "With" / "End With"
and the converter doesn't correctly convert your code. So if you have
something like "With myArray(k)" followed by a heap of dot references you
end up with a lot of compilation errors that you need to sort out.

2. RB does not provide a "Validate" event for controls (and obviously
therefore does not provide a "Causes Validation" property). This, for me, is
a show stopper. I did raise a Feature Request for this about 10 months ago,
but that hasn't got anywhere. That amazes me. I've worked for years with VB6
and with Oracle Forms and both these languages have a "Validate" event and I
have used it extensively in both environments. RB seem to think you can use
the "Lost Focus" event, but that is not always a complete solution.

3. If you want to use container controls, and I have several in my program,
you need to buy the Professional edition (US$500) rather than the standard
edition ($99), and either way you only get 6 months free updates. If you
want to continue getting updates then it will cost you $US250 a year for
Professional, or $US50 a year for Standard.

4. The size of the compiled code is enormous. My VB6 program compiles to a
3Mb .exe file. With RB it currently comes in at over 15Mb and I haven't
finished yet. RB's response to criticisms of the size of the executable is
that with RB you deploy the entire executable environment and do not rely on
DLL's such as msvbvm60.dll and others. That's all very well if you only
deploy occasionally, but if every time a user wants an update they have to
download a 15Mb executable that's not good news.

Having knocked RB for the above points, I will mention that is does have
some very good points. I find the object model easy to work with, probably
because RB virtually forces you to the OO approach and so you need to get to
understand how to use it properly. The inbuilt facility to multi-thread is
great and easy to implement. There is also an impressive selection of
controls to include in windows, but you will still probably end up shelling
out even more dollars to certain third parties because of the controls that
are missing or inadequate.

RealBasic, is it ready? Not for me.

Mike

"Dave" <dave...@xxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:1187023441.946082.287070@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



Is RealBasic ready for primetime? I did a search here but failed to
come up with any current threads on the subject.
Anyone here have any opinions or stories about RealBasic being a
*good* migration from VB? The vendor seems to think so.

Environment here is quite "lite"....W2K, VB6 front end, Access back
end. Will probably take a leap to Vista in the near future.

Thank you as always,
Dave

PS: I did see *** Grier recommend RB as a *possible* solution on July
9 of this year.
If you're here ***, thanks for that buffer code you gave me earlier
this year...all scanners are running great!- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -


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