Basically this is what Figma could be if you could add behavior to the UI. Somehow the web has been running backwards for years now. We lost flash in favor of HTML 5, which sort of fizzled out in terms of creative people actually doing a lot with it. We used to have simple application builders in IDEs like Visual Basic, Delphi, Borland JBuilder. Even Eclipse had a simple swing UI builder thing for a while. For the web we had dream weaver, frontpage, etc.
I'm not saying those tools were perfect; because they weren't. But we never really got good substitutes for them. We now have people "designing" stuff in Figma and then handing over for implementation to some developer team that essentially then recreates the whole thing pretty much from scratch. There's something deeply stupid/wasteful about needing to do that.
> We now have people "designing" stuff in Figma and then handing over for implementation to some developer team that essentially then recreates the whole thing pretty much from scratch. There's something deeply stupid/wasteful about needing to do that.
I'm not sure how wasteful it is really. There is some overlap, but not loads in my experience. Most of the time spent on frontend is the stuff behind the components: behaviour; device interaction; security; API calls.
I've had a weirdly large fraction of my career spent on making UI rather than business logic.
That said, the business logic in apps is, half the time, a needlessly complex shim on what is ultimately "here's a REST API you can do in one or two lines via `Codable` etc. except we're anticipating needing to support several API providers… oh no the money ran out".
There is quite some overlap, but the CSS generated by Figma is not really useful and of a grade I’d want in my application. On the other hand, there is a gradient where building in all the behaviour you could want in a designer application, makes the application so complex that it become unusable for designers.
I don't think visual UI builders were ever the way forward. These work well for static UIs, but once you try to express dynamic constraints, they fall apart.
Figma shows this: I find it useful to absolutely position elements (and maybe work with symbols) for a quick prototype, but once I bring in autolayout, I end up dealing with exactly the same issues as with CSS-flexbox and grids - except in a vastly inferior system, where I don't have version control, refactoring tools and chatGPT. Also, subjectively, I find it much easier to work directly with XML-structure, than to double-click (or cmd-click) through 15 groups in order to select a specific component, and then modify its properties in a textual form.
I'm guessing that's why Apple and Android deprecated their interface builders in favor of DSLs.
VB6 was the best IDE by far for people that get things done right now.
I was installing PC based CCTV systems for a living back in mid 2000s, I had a restaurant customer have their mind blown by pandoras music service while demoing the PC. They asked "can I hear this over the restaurant speakers?". Yeah, I got 3.5mm to RCA to BNC in the car which I can run to your AMP.
Now he was really happy, felt like he got launched into the 21st century.
"Can I pause the music and make an announcement to my customers?". I made him a shortcut on the desktop to sndvol32.exe aka sound mixer so he can talk over the speakers and then resume the music and he was again floored.
"I want my staff to be able to do this but not here in my office but at the front counter".
Easy. "Give me a paper clip and 30 minutes". Went to the car to grab some stranded Cat 5 and an old beige two button IBM mouse. Ran the cables from the office to the reception area, soldered a cat-5 pair to the left mouse clicker, drove a sheetrock screw threw the mouse body to mount it on the wall like a taxidermied deer head. Back in the office I soldered the leads to the paper clip so I could have a solid connection to the LPT port on the PC (I didn't carry DB-25 back then).
It was easy from there: googled "VB6 Volume Mixer". Download that, open the checkbox for mute stereo mix, copy one liner into a timer, set interval for 100ms, check if the pins on the LPT are shorted, if so mute stereo mix, unmute the mic.
This was written in the field without any pre planning. I still have this customer to this day. What a great tool for us "jacks of all trades".
I'm pretty sure I read a reddit comment a few years ago where someone said they were a customer in a resturant, and they saw resturant employees click on a mouse attached to the wall to make an announcements (I think notify that an order was ready). It sounds like a very unique setup, so it was probably this one!
Edit: someone information about Lazarus deleted their comment, my answer;
I know about Lazarus yes; I use it for my old projects. I would like a modern version that also works in-browser and .NET seems good for that as this shows. Maybe based on this https://pascalabc.net/en/ .
Not kidding; I still enjoy Pascal/Lazarus (and common lisp) programming more than anything current; none of the anxiety and all of the joy and productivity.
Just because you can use some technology in .net on the client and inside the browser does not mean you should. Most of the time these frameworks have huge tradeoffs and once you are using it, you will quickly be locked in.
I.e it’s way easier to migrate from mvc to mvc than from webforms to blazor/avaloniaui/dotvvm
I was so productive in VB5/6 back in the late 90s/early 00s. I made tons of utility apps to solve all kinds of little problems. It was just so easy to put things together. I tried to make the transition to vb.net but it was not the same thing.
The VB6 Winforms builder here is almost 100% identical to the Winforms builder in the latest release of Visual Studio 2022 that came out today.
I use it for hours every day to just drag and drop a few components onto a form and add some logic and have a little desktop app up and running in a few minutes.
I (sadly) code in C# since 2021, because the support is better, but I honestly believe VB.NET was superior because of the increased readability of the code.
I know the feeling, I was the go to VB6 guy in college for writing test automation on equipment over GPIB, UART, RS422, etc. I made bank as a grad student from the EE department, I quit my TA position and they replaced me as instrumentation guy :) . Paid for my masters for the most part.
This reminds me of one of the best programming tools at the time. Moving from basic to vs basic was mind blowing. I still miss such tools in the Modern era. There are lot of so called no-code or low-code tools that does things very differently today. I still think the best low-code is what VB did.
And honestly, with the reactive programming approach ... a related UX for IDE should not be that hard either.
I think most framework developers unfortunately forget productivity as a key metric. Might be a bit unfair however, the lack of visual tools is disappointing.
The issue today is that developers would create their own framework, most likely something TypeScript-based running in Node or Deno or some Rust-based thing like Tauri, which all might be OK, but with their own opinionated UI styleguides and features, where then half of the native OS functionality then won't work.
You see a somewhat related degeneration in Redmond, where the new Windows Explorer doesn't have an icon in the address bar which is actually draggable so that a shortcut to the currently open folder can be created on the desktop or anywhere where such a shortcut can be used (think TrueLaunchBar). Now you have to go to the parent folder in order to Alt-Drag the folder to create a shortcut.
It's those little things which where smartly developed during the 80s and 90s, which "modern" developers seem not to have noticed and therefore just ignored while re-implementing applications like the Windows Explorer.
> And honestly, with the reactive programming approach ... a related UX for IDE should not be that hard either.
I think that's what Apple is attempting with SwiftUI previews in Xcode; given how long that took to not suck, I'd say it's probably harder than it seems.
It is funny I had the same exact journey but starting from VB4. I actually wonder what would have happened if instead of killing VB for .NET that Microsoft instead merged legacy VB into the Office team and actually updated it instead of the perpetual state of deprecation that it has been in.
Same. A pirate copy of VB6 and a download of some website which gave a reasonable introduction of how to do things. I remember doing things like using the Win32 API to get DMA to images so I could do pixel perfect collision detection between sprites etc. Fun times.
exactly how i did it as well! But it was a pirated copy of visual studio (6?) and it came in 6 CDs. I had no idea what it actually was, and just installed it and played around.
I'm so glad that i bought those pirated CDs off the street - it was a huge stack of disks for like $50 bucks, and it included a bunch of pirated games, pirated encyclopedia (brittanica at the time iirc), various music software (cakewalk pro, not that i ever used it).
There would not have been a chance in hell i'd discover these things by myself.
IMO that library is worth a submission as much as the VB6 recreation! The attention to detail is excellent, it makes me want to dive into Avalonia again.
Author of the demo and library here, thank you for kind words, this was my goal to achieve almost pixel perfect recreation of the original GUI (which is sometimes not very easy as some components look slightly different in different programs, I meant small differences in buttons sizes, paddings, etc.).
I miss those times. Every IDE had a line by line debugger.
Now those Angular/React applications, even after years, do not have one; and they still have a confusing syntax.
My experience with IntelliJ + a bunch of JS frameworks is that IDE-based browser debugging works quite well. Unfortunately, Firefox' remote debugging capabilities broke for me at some point, but adding a Chromium debug target in my IDE seems to work most of the time. As long as the Rube Goldberg machine that does JS transpilation includes a source map, frameworks just seem to work out of the box (as does raw JS, but that's not so common anymore).
That even includes debugging some languages compiled to WASM, like C#, interestingly enough.
What is written and what is actually running is so different that it’s better to think of SPAs as a different language. Firefox have a decent debugger for javascript which works well when the build tool output sourcemaps.
I added a button and double clicked it to open the code window. I added something simple like
MsgBox "Hello"
and clicked the x on the top right of the code window.
The code was not saved. You have to "Save" the project or "Run" the project for the code to be updated. This is a difference with the old VB IDE that remembers everything you type.
I remember in the 90s a lot of small companies ran on VB and Access. It really enabled a lot of non programmers. Wish we had something similar for the web. Some low code solutions are superficially similar but what made VB different was that you could grow into full blown apps without changing. I am always amazed how complex today's web CRUD apps are to develop and deploy.
is 2024 and I still maintain a VB6 project.
A client of mine (a aluminiun metalurgic compoany from sweeden) have all his machines controled but a central program in vb6. Since the machines are all old, they have integrations using windows COM+ protocol.
Its a offline application, that connects to SAP exchanging text files, so they have no reason to update so something more modern.
They use an old offline machine with winxp to run stuff in factory. But they are replacing for virtualmachines now that the old hardware is dying. other than that, it runs really well. Sometimes, months without rebooting.
The code in this case is plain text within the word doc — the hard part is that I don't have a copy of Word from 2002-ish (I don't know the specific Office version my teachers used), and it's spread over 261 pages because I was having too much fun writing it.
ChatGPT can probably do it, but my experience is that it starts hallucinating well before you'd expect from the context length.
> Which is why it takes so many seconds to first page view
I'm seeing a long load time in Firefox but in Chromium, loading takes maybe a second. Loading the entire .NET runtime isn't exactly lightweight, but it seems there's also some kind of browser engine problem in my Firefox setup that slows this page down artificially.
I must say I'm impressed that this approach even works with only 16MiB of data transferred over the line (though that 16MiB decompresses to about 50MiB).
Avalonia aims at compatibility with Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) XAML. The web platform is explicitly supported: https://avaloniaui.net/platforms#wasm.
The VB Form model must be implemented on top of this. This is for the UI part.
Something interesting is that the top bar text (File, Edit, etc.) is a little bit blurry, but when I click on one of them (e.g. File), the drop down text (e.g. New Project) is completely crisp with no antialiasing.
OMG, this is how I started programming. I was so happy creating small helpers with this toolchain, e.g. something like Spotlight to launch programs with with a hotkey + the name of the program, on Windows 98.
One nice side effect of having GUI builders in the IDE was standarized, optimized and "follow best practices" GUIs. No wonder we reached peak UI in the 90's-2000.
Then came the web and everyone and their mom had an opinion on how a button should look (for games that's fine) and we ended up here.
Oh the memories. How does this work? Is it built using an emulator of old VB6 code ? (didn't realize it was opensource) . Or is everything built from scratch?
Hey, author here, I built everything from scratch. It supports only a subset of VB6 so it wasn't difficult or long. I wrote an interpreter for VB6 code
Maybe you need to explicitly capture the errors to view the error number and/or message in a message box or something? I have no idea, just guessing based on some prior VBA work I did.
I owe my whole fascination with programming from childhood to Visual Basic 6.
I was 11 and I could hardly read English, yet VB6 with the WYSIWYG-editor and an introductory book by my side was intuitive and rewarding enough for me to learn the basics of programming.
I actually think QT is not too bad for small applications too. I wrote a Quake launcher over a few days because I was so tired of finding my Quake executable and setting the same configurations every time I load a mod. I knew zero about QT back then so someone could write it in an afternoon. I think it definitely can be used equally easy for something bigger, e.g. a frontend of a lc-3 VM.
Haha, it hit me with a tinge of pain that I probably saw the screen (the original one) a lot, thinking "Today is the day I learn VB6!", but I never got proficient with VB6.
Oh well, I still managed to have a career in IT, so...
I feel like the complexity around current day .Net is more due to Microsoft’s pathetic attempt at naming and branding and the confusion around their development products. One example is their desktop development frameworks. As someone that is in and out of Microsoft centric development stacks - I can't even keep up with it anymore.
I started in Visual Basic 3 and then moved to Delphi. My first job at 18 was working for one of the large ActiveX component libraries, providing technical support to many developers when I wasn't one myself yet!
On my first day, I found a book on my desk—"Learn Visual Basic 3 in 21 Days"—along with a brand new 486DX250 and a 14" monitor. I learned a lot quickly! We answered support queries by fax back then.
I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off. Building business apps beyond Access or Excel was so straightforward. It was great to get an .EXE that you could package up with InstallShield or Wise Solutions and send to anyone.
I guess the web came soon after, and trying to do WYSIWYG for HTML and CSS has never gone well—even today.
FrontPage came out but died soon after, and mixing desktop apps with web apps was never great.
Today, I feel .NET is overly complex and much harder for beginners compared to the old days.
Sometimes, I think there are only so many ways to control the appearance of business apps. I'd constrain visuals but provide the most straightforward visual builder possible.
The No-Code world is fascinating, and the best I've seen in this space is https://retool.com/, but it's expensive and locks you into their ecosystem.
Even today, small businesses need to build out simple apps that were simple to do back in the Visual Basic days—a stock control system, a basic support system, sales tools, etc. Today, it's a minefield of options that can quickly get expensive.
I'd love to have a visual builder that creates code you can host yourself — something like retool.com but with open source and self-hosting, or maybe I'm just too old for this now! :)
> I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off
My two cents --
A few reasons (briefly, I could have talked a lot more)
* Shift in platform: Windows is no longer the sole platform people want to build their apps for. Not a bad strategy by itself, and lots of companies still only develop for Windows (e.g. specialized software for instrument control etc), but people increasingly want their stuff to work on iPad, Chromebook etc and maybe even phones
* Shift in screen size: It used to be that everyone runs Windows on a 800x600 screen. That changed, and then changed quickly. Many different resolutions and screen sizes. The drag and drop thing just doesn't work well for that. The web model, where you write "responsive CSS" and the browser handles the rest for you, works better.
* Software and their UI got a lot more complex and require more expertise. On the other hand commercial software becomes easily available and accessible for those purposes. For the examples you mentioned -- stock control system, sales tool, they may be fine with VB6 for a prototype but can quickly get complex. And there is likely a commercial software you can buy and download within a few minutes at an affordable price.
* Shift to online/cloud: vast majority of "small VB6 applications" were used locally, and they never connect to the Internet. That's different now.
* Shift in language: BASIC/VB was often used for teaching, and it is indeed great as a first language to learn. Although Python already existed at that time, it became very popular, and I think many people would agree Python is a much better language than BASIC, in many ways. As a result, BASIC along with VB went out of fashion.
I've always found the use of anchors on UI controls to be light years ahead of what HTML/CSS have been doing. I always used to create UI forms with resizing and different screen sizes in mind. If you were coding for a hard coded 800x600 screen then that was just laziness.
It's a bit ironic how in the same breath you go from "it's impossible to build apps for multiple resolutions with drag'n'drop hence web" to "software and their UI has become more complex".
While the absolute vast majority of web-based software cannot hold a candle to UIs you could trivially build in VB (or Delphi and other RADs). Most web-based software is either trivial forms or a few screens of text and images they struggle to display with any acceptable performance.
As for "many different resolutions and screens", have you ever, I don't know, resized a desktop window? Desktop apps work at the number of crazy sizes the web would die at.
I think you left off the biggest reasons, commercial:
* No piracy. Can't crack code you aren't running.
* Immediate installs/updates. No need to tell people to ever update stuff, or to install your program in the first place.
* You can charge subscriptions. It's much easier to justify a subscription when you pay for server costs, even though the customer would be happier just running your application locally.
* Easier deployment. You can handle complex integrations on the server, without the customer having to open ports or whatever.
> Shift in screen size: It used to be that everyone runs Windows on a 800x600 screen. That changed, and then changed quickly. Many different resolutions and screen sizes. The drag and drop thing just doesn't work well for that. The web model, where you write "responsive CSS" and the browser handles the rest for you, works better.
This... really doesn't match my experience at all. I may be thinking of later UI development tools from the .NET era (I no longer recall if VB6 had proper support for linear layouts and the like, that was forever ago) but GUI builders with responsive controls were absolutely a thing, and they ran circles around any "responsive" CSS we have today, if only because they had instant feedback. I don't miss most aspects of programming from that age, but this is one that I do miss tremendously.
Edit: I certainly agree on the other points. I think this one was less of a technical limitation and more due to the humans in the loop; lots of people just didn't know better, information dissemination was far more limited (lots of us learned these things offline, from books and the like), and the platform didn't force you to do the right thing, either.
> Shift to online/cloud ... they never connect to the Internet.
The fall of VB6 style RAD (for CRUD) started earlier with shift from "workgroups" (shared files on LANs) to client/server. This severed the direct link (ADO api) between apps and their persistence.
Tragically, the ODBC (then JDBC) API interface didn't quite fully bridge the gap. Meaning some necessary metadata was no longer front and center (for both compile and runtime, like ADO had always had). Yielding mitigation attempts like DAO/DTO, ActiveRecord, ORMs, LINQ, templates, etc.
Of course, client/server had to happen. But the innovators (and critics like Neward) didn't fully understood what they were replacing, what parts were missing. (Lather, rinse, repeat.)
--
It took noob me a LONG time to figure this out. (All I ever wanted was to recover the special magick of VBA + ADO.) And then even longer to attempt mitigation (cuz am noob).
Maybe if we had the new "internet's hourglass shape" analytical framework from the beginning (vs say OSI's layer model), someone(s) could have prevented the oversight. https://cacm.acm.org/research/on-the-hourglass-model/
> Software and their UI got a lot more complex and require more expertise.
In the B2C space sometimes sure. We do business with many companies all over the world and if you can see the 100s of 1000s of apps they are using; you could've done all of them with Delphi/VB without any tricks. Except now some incapable but suave talking Nextjs fanboi walked in and pushed all that overly complex nonsense while it's not needed for almost anything we see used in companies. Spending fortunes on stuff you should just click together in a few minutes and hook up a db. But yeah, we make nice money because of it for both of my main businesses; 1) fixing completely broken stuff because the person who introduced the tech left quickly after introducing the misery 2) creating LoB/ERP custom applications. Both are goldmines and both are goldmines because of the tech losers (resume driven 'workers' almost always) around the world who preach to always use the 'best tool for the job' and then completely do the opposite, introducing tools that really have no place there, ever.
And then the joke of course that they are not even really good at them, which is the worst pet peeve of mine; ONLY yesterday, I was virtually (via Teamviewer) fixing a new LoB app made by 2 freelancers who came (apparently) highly recommended; it was made in Next 15 with React 18 and shadcn (that's not fully compatible yet... but that's normal in that ecosystem; nothing is). So I checked the Linkedin / github's of these freelancers and had a short call with them if they could help (no, they had no time; new clients!); they were Django/Bootstrap guys before, but that sells less well than Nextjs/shadcn/tailwind, so they switched recently. What a joke. Why is this not liable really... But again, we make very good money, so please carry on!
* Idiot developers like myself. Okay, I was a teenager back when I got infected by this idea, but it did persist for some time into my start of my career too - the idea that RAD tools are inferior, they are not "true programming", just some lazy no-code clicking to save monkeys from understanding the program they're building as a whole, etc.
I mean, sure, you could do a lot in RAD tools really quickly, and do it well - but that was cheating. Too good results for too small an effort. It wouldn't impress any of your IRC friends.
(Curiously, those few I know from my "generation" who wrote software for e.g. their parents' business, would happily use VBA or Delphi. Wonder why...)
This was all adjacent to and connected to other ideas that became influential with our cohort of developers, like "Windows suxx, Linux rulez", "plaintext is best", "CLI is best", "code generation is evil", etc. Those ideas are still deeply rooted in FLOSS, too.
VBA - was not C-like, you couldn't exactly put the whole project in SVN and diff nicely, it's tied to a specific platform (that sucked), a specific vendor (at a time when we all hated the evil M$ because it was the Right Thing to Do), and to a specific software suite (which was not vim). It's tricky for a technology to survive after a significant part of the fresh workforce tried to steer clear of it as a matter of principle.
My main issue with these is using the the cloud dev tools has a cost, normally usage-based - so if you use Firebase, if you're not careful, you can end up with a large bill.
I don't think the platform mattered much, this happened before macOS became popular, and remember that at that time mac developers would still use Interface Builder and Objective-C. There was a certain level of pride in making Mac apps look very much like Mac apps. Very rarely did developers target both Windows and Mac.
My take is: A lot of developers didn't feel like cluing components together in Visual Basic 6 or later Visual Studio, dragging and dropping UI elements, was "real development". VB-developers where looked down on as second rate programmers. If you used VB.NET and WinForms/WebForms who where not a real developer. You had to use C# and XAML, which was absolutely terrible, but "real programming".
Same with Delphi, not something you built "real" applications in, no you use Java if you're a real developer.
Shit like that was all to common, and yet WinForms are still around and working, but XAML is dead (Edit: Apparently it's not dead).
>The No-Code world is fascinating, and the best I've seen in this space is https://retool.com/, but it's expensive and locks you into their ecosystem.
>Even today, small businesses need to build out simple apps that were simple to do back in the Visual Basic days—a stock control system, a basic support system, sales tools, etc. Today, it's a minefield of options that can quickly get expensive.
A RAD tool like Visual Basic, Borland C++ Builder, Borland Delhi, QT Designer doesn't mean no code. Rapid application design helps the developer quickly build the UI using already made components and using some predefined behaviors like gluing a database table to an UI component. But the developer has still to provide the application logic and to write whatever else is not covered by the RAD tool. It helps you build faster, write less code, but it isn't no code.
Delphi is still around and filling a niche for boring business apps where usability, accessibility and quick UI development is more important than following design trends. You won't get any VC money for Windows XP styled apps, but if you make industrial hardware and need control and maintenance software Delphi is a reasonable and somewhat popular choice.
> I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off.
First and foremost -- the world wide web.
Suddenly, we had a much more flexible way to deliver applications.
If I remember it correctly, Visual Basic couldn't write to STDOUT -- so it couldn't be used as a scripting language for the web.
Microsoft tried to push VBScript as an alternative, but it was linked to their expensive ecosystem, while LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL Perl and PHP) was free.
Developing visually with VB(A) RAD-like dev tools to build websites without wallgardening and cleanly generated html, css, js, server side code & whatever, is a huge niche to be filled. Incredible that it doesn't exist yet.
Maybe I'll do it myself.
We've been using ToolJet (the open source version) at my company with good results. It is self hosted, open source and you can export created apps in some JSON format.
I've successfully setup a dev-stage-prod flow where we export from one env and import into another pretty seamlessly.
The coolest thing about that is that I was able to hire a very Jr. Frontend dev to immediately start working building internal dashboards.
I've used retool in another company but found problematic not having the source code for the lack of control.
>Today, I feel .NET is overly complex and much harder for beginners compared to the old days.
I often see similar statements like that but that's not what I experienced. I did IBM DOS BASIC, MS GWBASIC and worked on VB3 to VB6 at a corporate jobs.
The C#/NET workflow feels much the same rapid-development simplicity as classic VB6: Drag some GUI components like text boxes and buttons onto a form, code the controls' event handlers, build the exe.
In contrast, the examples of GUI dev kits that had more complex language syntax and build steps than VB6 were original Apple iOS Objective-C, C++ Qt, Java AWT.
Sure, C# is a bigger language than Visual Basic in VB6 but C# also does a lot more. E.g. in VB6, it didn't even have a built-in way to check the existence of a file. Instead, you had to declare a "win32" API monstrosity such as :
VB6:
Private Declare Function OpenFile Lib "kernel32" ByVal lpFileName As String, lpReOpenBuff As OFSTRUCT, ByVal wStyle As Long) As Long
Function FileExists(FileName As String) As Integer
Dim RetCode As Integer
Dim OpenFileStructure As OFSTRUCT
Const OF_EXIST = &H4000
Const FILE_NOT_FOUND = 2
RetCode = OpenFile(FileName$, OpenFileStructure, OF_EXIST)
FileExists = (not OpenFileStructure.nErrCode = FILE_NOT_FOUND)
C#:
File.Exists()
In many ways, VB6 being "simple" means it created a ton of extra complexity for the programmer to do basic tasks. Another example is that VB6 didn't include a datagrid. You had to buy 3rd-party VBX/OCX controls for that. C# WinForms includes a datagrid.
EDIT reply to: >most definitely open files in VB, and therefore the "File.Exists()" function would at worse be comprised of a exception handler (on error ...) and a open call,
From my memory the "pure" VB6 way checking existence of a file by opening a file with error handler had issues (other processes using exclusive access and/or other issues) causing false-negatives or false-positives. Therefore, the recommended way back in 1990s was the win32 api declaration using OF_EXIST flag. It looks convoluted but it was more reliable.
You chose a very poor example, since you can most definitely open files in VB, and therefore the "File.Exists()" function would at worse be comprised of a exception handler (on error ...) and a open call, as in many other languages. No need to import OpenFile for sure.
Public Function Fso() As Object
Static s_oFso As Object
If s_oFso Is Nothing Then
Set s_oFso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
End If
Set Fso = s_oFso
End Function
Fso.FileExists("path")
The sub thread this created of people not recognizing this as a problem is pretty interesting.
It's probably one of many ingredients that went into how so many of these apps are so half baked and buggy.
Not just the obvious that the language was aimed at and used by junior programmers and so of course much of the code is not robust in general.
But here is an example of the toolbox missing a tool. You can't really fault people for doing whatever seems natural using the tools they are given.
Not being experienced developers otherwise, they didn't know that something necessessary was missing, and made things that only mostly worked without it.
To be clear they would have often mis-used the tool if it existed too. In this thread people have thought the way you would use exists is to check before doing some actual operation. The inexperienced coder aspect is also true, seperately.
But the combination of a missing tool combined with a language explicitly aimed at users who don't come with their own experience and don't know anything but what the language provides, seems a little extra nasty.
I know this is a bit of a first-world problem but back in those days[tm] you just slapped 2-3 DLLs into the exe directory and it worked. Yes, I know there were also different versions for different runtimes, but overall it was a couple of DLLs and fine. Since .net you really need to install the distributable by MS, and every new .net upgrade it's the same. Just 2 days ago I apparently needed the .net 8 runtime and even after installing it the app in question didn't work (without a reboot maybe, I will find out later today).
Overall, strictly as a consumer, C# and .net apps have been mostly great, except the practice (is it a best practice?) that some of them end up somewhere in my home dir's Local dir and not in c:\program files.
This is the worst example you could give. Just add filesystem dll or whatnot from the .net framework as a reference to your project and you can use File.exists from VB.
PowerBuilder too. I worked for an S&P 500 corporation from 2000 to 2006 trying to replace several business critical PowerBuilder apps in Java using a bloated commercial framework called Windchill. The original apps were written by a handful of developers over the years. The new team was fifty developers that struggled to replicate the old app functionality. We did manage to reimplement a couple of the old apps but they took a lot longer than anticipated and were incredibly slow.
The corporation chose Java/Windchill for the rewrite instead of PowerBuilder because Java was trendy. Both the original and replacement apps were desktop applications. During development of the new apps, browser based applications became trendy and some of the developers really wanted to switch to browser-based. Fortunately, that shipped had sailed. Can you imagine writing business critical apps for the browser in 2002?!
Because for the most part, you don’t need desktop applications in 2024. They are harder to maintain when used across multiple computers and you can’t access them from anywhere like web apps.
And most companies that need to build the things you mentioned can use a SaaS.
Also, those “simple apps” end up being an unmaintainable mess after a couple of years. In 2024, to a first approximation, no company should be writing software that is not core to their business.
Most problems are not special snowflakes. Someone has already solved their problem and created a customizable SaaS around it.
Yes I’m old enough to have used VB6 professionally from 2001-2008 (when it was way past its prime). But my first programming was on an Apple //e in BASIC and assembly and programming professionally in C and C++ from 1996-2008
In some context, I think desktop apps are far better than the web, and it's now super simple to roll out desktop apps using tools like Intune.
However, I'm talking about general business apps here.
The likes of Zoho, Salesforce, and, to some extent, Dynamics are covering some of this space—but again, they're expensive.
The main point of my post was that if I were 18 today and starting my first job, it'd be much harder to acquire the skills needed to grow. With VB or Delphi and a book, you could become pretty productive within a year or so, and the cost of entry was very low. The skills you learned opened the door to a whole new world for little cost. Especially, as others have mentioned, finding "DVDs lying around" :) which, of course, doesn't work for web tools in 2024! I was lucky my company provided, but i know friends who learned from the other approach.
These web based NoCode companies should provide people starting out with free, fully functional accounts—but then restrict live users to about 5. Atlassian/JIRA was always good at this with their $10 entry point. While it's not a programming tool, this approach is why it's found everywhere. It allowed someone wanting to experiment and learn to pay just $10 for access to the complete platform.
You might say there is plenty of open source out there, and this is correct, but again, in companies, this is not always used. They want the known companies.
What the generation do have today which we never did is access to high quality training beyond books - and now AI! Wish I was 18 again!
> providing technical support to many developers when I wasn't one myself yet!
This reminds me of my days as a Lab Tutor at the programming lab at my college. I was only one or two semesters in helping people with Advanced Java homework while taking basic Java.
I think one aspect is that business requirements for many of these apps became more complex, which is why we now often use process management or case management tools instead of smaller local programs.
Visual basic was the best way to build business apps ever. We just got these features in visual studio. Some we may never get (drag and drop dbs, form builders, etc etc). The closest I have seen was Flash. But if you say Flash or visual basic you are downvoted. I will let people get back to their js frameworks.
You're completely right, however the market for business desktop apps is over; not just because of the web, which is still inferior to VB in many respects, but because companies restrictions of what can be installed in a corporate desktop. It is much easier to use a web service than having permission to install a desktop app in a corporate computer. The huge Windows vulnerabilities destroyed the desktop as a viable business software platform.
Small businesses don't want to pay for simple apps. They want to pay a percentage of their sales to a large middle man who takes care of sales. It's too much for them to pay a few thousand (or hundred) dollars for a bespoke solution, but they have no problem paying tens of thousands per year to a middle man.
Almost none of those reasons are managing what are generally trivial costs for a growing business.
Small businesses remain small because they: cant scale, have a small tam, require direct labor from the founder to get the job done, the market is fairly well established but the founder has some special skills which are difficult to impart, especially in the context of the business.
Market conditions, the ability to get capital, and a lot of luck have way more to do than is your SaaS bill a little too high, you can always just use some google sheets and google docs and get 80% of what you'd need in most SMB situations.
Say what you like about Visual Basic (and a lot has been said that is less than complimentary), but for a huge number of people and workplaces this was the tool that moved people from trying to fudge Excel or Access into a workflow and actually trying to write some software.
My first language was BASIC on 8-bit machines (actually, it may have technically been Logo on a BBC, but I remember BASIC on a BBC as an 11 year old more clearly), and by the time VB came along I'd moved onto compiled languages like C and interpreted languages like Perl and PHP, and was a bit sniffy about the point and click nature of it all. I had one friend at college who refused to move on from QBASIC - I once saw him write a 3D game engine in that could about 30 frames _an hour_ on a Pentium - and the general atmosphere of being pro-FLOSS/anti-MS, plus a ton of really badly written apps encountered out in the wild when I did some small business IT consultancy made me very averse to VB in general.
But you know, it wasn't the fault of the environment or the language. It was powerful, useful and better than the alternatives for a lot of people. Its main contemporary competitor - Delphi - seemed all the rage before it didn't. And I now wish we'd been able to get a little more down the simpler visual programming domain for a while, because the modern equivalents like XCode feel massively confusing to the novice, so the learning curve feels very steep by comparison.
> a ton of really badly written apps encountered out in the wild when I did some small business IT consultancy made me very averse to VB in general.
A lot of VB has been historically written by people who had no background in writing software. They were jack of all trades, needed some quick and dirty and they learned just enough to have some working code
This might be classic "that's not a bug, it's a feature", territory.
I love the idea that somebody could just get something working - it is fantastic that was possible, and a shame that we've lost it a bit.
The fact that a professional might look at the code produced and die a little inside is where a lot of bad rep comes from, but hey, working software is better than no software, particularly in the days when that software probably is running on a single machine that is not connected to the internet, and when it is, it's only connected a couple of hours a day via dial-up modem.
I see lots of comments about how good VB6 was. I agree it made programming super-easy and practical.
However, it is evident to me how the whole thing fell appart by the late 2000's, and now we have much more powerful, yet complex programming environments:
- Rust, C, C++: Extremely complex but powerful.
- HTML, JS, CSS: You have to learn 3 different technologies and won't be able to leverage the easy, powerful native APIs the OS provides. It's cross-platform though.
- .net: Not as easy as VB6 (and C# becomes actually more and more complex, more powerful as well, though). You have to learn XAML as WinForms is still a thing but considered legacy.
- Python: Easy (maybe more than VB, but not by much?), but no native, easy GUI toolkit for Windows. There are native bindings for GTK, but Linux is not a big desktop platform, and more so in business, and still GTK is much, much more complex than VB6 + Winforms + COM.
So basically, it seems we have traded easy of use and practicality for power/performance and cross-platform compatibility? What do you guys think?
I often muse over there not being a VB-alike approach for Python.
It would surely be reasonably straightforward to automate the creation of the GUI boilerplate code from a form designer, and then within an accompanying IDE hide most of that code from the user, only making the specific parts visible that correlate with different UI interactions?
> creation of the GUI boilerplate code from a form designer
why? i think the approach of of the form designer generating code instead of generating serialized objects that your code interacts with at runtime is a serious flaw. java got it wrong, cocoa got it right there.
VB6 made writing Windows GUI applications very easy (on screen form designer), particularly when interfacing with COM libraries written in languages such as C++. No-one would use it if performance was an issue. Better was Borland's Delphi, with much the same features, but that ship sailed long ago.
VB6 is a terrible, quirky programming language, and it’s a pain to debug, especially if you’re used to modern development tools.
Microsoft killed it to push .NET (although originally, VB.NET was promoted as the main GUI language). People went to .NET, but also chose the "adult" language of C# along the way. Also, WinForms isn’t deprecated (it was in maintenance mode for some time, but now it gets some new features).
Language history aside, browser-based UIs are easier to develop and deliver, so they won over desktop applications.
> browser-based UIs are easier to develop and deliver
Compared to the ease of a VB6 winforms app, they are way harder to develop. It's just the delivery that's a little easier - as well as the portability to non-Windows platforms like phones.
VB6 is how I got really started off with programming and building games. There were project files you could find online of games made in VB6 of such immense complexity (one was an 'MMORPG' with networking, file save/load and data serialisation via RTF blocks, etc.) that it made my head spin. I don't know if I would have gotten into programming at such a young age otherwise.
Are you by any chance talking about Mirage online (and it’s many other servers)?
I remember loving that game (or the Jerrath Online server anyways) and being amazed by it. I knew enough about computers to know it was programmed in VB 6, but not enough to actually code.
But the desire to eventually make something like it definitely had to do with my interest in coding later on.
Is this supposed to work? It does not for me. Probabbly my privacy settings are prohibitive for it?
And why is this mania putting everything into the browser that does not belong there? Is the reason putting there is just to have it there? Why not desktop app? Any sensible reason? Is it for pepole not owning a computer and have to fly from borrowed one to borrowed one where only the browser access is stable for them? So many things are particular with browsers for the purpose navigating the web or other source of information that it negatively interferes with usability for generic purpose app if not running the extra miles to get a workaround for it (and most do not care to run the extra miles). Pushing the wrong button in the browser f.s up something and others are cumbersome too, back utton, refresh, context menus, working with files, mixed with anything else in the tabs, even the address bar is in the way, etc. The few sensible web apps were either narrow use trivial ones doing a simple task thing mostly accessing a client service (human client) or put into a thin client (now its a computer) for clarity. Not user friendly at all. But hey, today's computer "engineers" give no fuck for the user but all for the technology, we all must enjoy that! (No)
This is an application built on Avalonia. You can compile it into a desktop application if you want (https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6), but because of the framework you get the web version for free. Seems rather ridiculous to complain about a web version of a hobby project just... existing.
You completely missed the fact that this is built using Avalonia, which means that you can run this on desktop (win, linux, osx), mobile (android or ios) AND browser (using wasm) with almost the same codebase.
check https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6, and feel free to try the desktop ones.
The second part was an adjacent complain about the generic trend of putting things to the web too much. As it is obvious. It wasn't about this very project (the "putting everything" =/= 'putting Avalonia based Visual Basic 6', obviously, even the 'everything' is a rhetoric expression here used widespread in generic discussions and not a literal 100%, obviously). Please review it carefully this time, thanks.
"And why is this maniac putting everything into the browser that does not belong there? Is the reason putting there is just to have it there?"
Haha, relax a bit. If it wasn't a browser application i wouldn't have tried it at all (most people here would not have either). I see it more of a toy than a development environment - but the fact that it seems fully functional and in the browser is impressive to me.
Anyways, 99.99% anyone using VB6 today is doing it for nostalgic purposes, not to develop real useful code - and that's probably what the project had in mind. Just a fun project.
If you did want an accurate no-changes recreation of vb6 on the desktop, just download the original vb6.
It is a desktop app as well. It's written in C# and Avalonia. You can compile it to Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. You can also compile it to WebAssembly, which is what has been done here for this demo:
Basically this is what Figma could be if you could add behavior to the UI. Somehow the web has been running backwards for years now. We lost flash in favor of HTML 5, which sort of fizzled out in terms of creative people actually doing a lot with it. We used to have simple application builders in IDEs like Visual Basic, Delphi, Borland JBuilder. Even Eclipse had a simple swing UI builder thing for a while. For the web we had dream weaver, frontpage, etc.
I'm not saying those tools were perfect; because they weren't. But we never really got good substitutes for them. We now have people "designing" stuff in Figma and then handing over for implementation to some developer team that essentially then recreates the whole thing pretty much from scratch. There's something deeply stupid/wasteful about needing to do that.
> We now have people "designing" stuff in Figma and then handing over for implementation to some developer team that essentially then recreates the whole thing pretty much from scratch. There's something deeply stupid/wasteful about needing to do that.
I'm not sure how wasteful it is really. There is some overlap, but not loads in my experience. Most of the time spent on frontend is the stuff behind the components: behaviour; device interaction; security; API calls.
I've had a weirdly large fraction of my career spent on making UI rather than business logic.
That said, the business logic in apps is, half the time, a needlessly complex shim on what is ultimately "here's a REST API you can do in one or two lines via `Codable` etc. except we're anticipating needing to support several API providers… oh no the money ran out".
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There is quite some overlap, but the CSS generated by Figma is not really useful and of a grade I’d want in my application. On the other hand, there is a gradient where building in all the behaviour you could want in a designer application, makes the application so complex that it become unusable for designers.
> I'm not saying those tools were perfect
Bite your tongue. Flash was perfect.
I don't think visual UI builders were ever the way forward. These work well for static UIs, but once you try to express dynamic constraints, they fall apart.
Figma shows this: I find it useful to absolutely position elements (and maybe work with symbols) for a quick prototype, but once I bring in autolayout, I end up dealing with exactly the same issues as with CSS-flexbox and grids - except in a vastly inferior system, where I don't have version control, refactoring tools and chatGPT. Also, subjectively, I find it much easier to work directly with XML-structure, than to double-click (or cmd-click) through 15 groups in order to select a specific component, and then modify its properties in a textual form.
I'm guessing that's why Apple and Android deprecated their interface builders in favor of DSLs.
VB6 was the best IDE by far for people that get things done right now.
I was installing PC based CCTV systems for a living back in mid 2000s, I had a restaurant customer have their mind blown by pandoras music service while demoing the PC. They asked "can I hear this over the restaurant speakers?". Yeah, I got 3.5mm to RCA to BNC in the car which I can run to your AMP.
Now he was really happy, felt like he got launched into the 21st century.
"Can I pause the music and make an announcement to my customers?". I made him a shortcut on the desktop to sndvol32.exe aka sound mixer so he can talk over the speakers and then resume the music and he was again floored.
"I want my staff to be able to do this but not here in my office but at the front counter".
Easy. "Give me a paper clip and 30 minutes". Went to the car to grab some stranded Cat 5 and an old beige two button IBM mouse. Ran the cables from the office to the reception area, soldered a cat-5 pair to the left mouse clicker, drove a sheetrock screw threw the mouse body to mount it on the wall like a taxidermied deer head. Back in the office I soldered the leads to the paper clip so I could have a solid connection to the LPT port on the PC (I didn't carry DB-25 back then).
It was easy from there: googled "VB6 Volume Mixer". Download that, open the checkbox for mute stereo mix, copy one liner into a timer, set interval for 100ms, check if the pins on the LPT are shorted, if so mute stereo mix, unmute the mic.
This was written in the field without any pre planning. I still have this customer to this day. What a great tool for us "jacks of all trades".
I'm pretty sure I read a reddit comment a few years ago where someone said they were a customer in a resturant, and they saw resturant employees click on a mouse attached to the wall to make an announcements (I think notify that an order was ready). It sounds like a very unique setup, so it was probably this one!
I love VB6 too, but what you've described is only 10% VB6 and 90% MacGyver. The Phoenix Foundation needs you.
> VB6 was the best IDE by far for people that get things done right now.
No, it was second-best. The best was Delphi. (And now possibly Lazarus.)
Very nicely done, now a Delphi and I can finally be happy about the state of development again.
Sourcecode: https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6
Edit: someone information about Lazarus deleted their comment, my answer;
I know about Lazarus yes; I use it for my old projects. I would like a modern version that also works in-browser and .NET seems good for that as this shows. Maybe based on this https://pascalabc.net/en/ .
Not kidding; I still enjoy Pascal/Lazarus (and common lisp) programming more than anything current; none of the anxiety and all of the joy and productivity.
Just because you can use some technology in .net on the client and inside the browser does not mean you should. Most of the time these frameworks have huge tradeoffs and once you are using it, you will quickly be locked in.
I.e it’s way easier to migrate from mvc to mvc than from webforms to blazor/avaloniaui/dotvvm
Needs more Turbo Pascal/C++
I was so productive in VB5/6 back in the late 90s/early 00s. I made tons of utility apps to solve all kinds of little problems. It was just so easy to put things together. I tried to make the transition to vb.net but it was not the same thing.
The VB6 Winforms builder here is almost 100% identical to the Winforms builder in the latest release of Visual Studio 2022 that came out today.
I use it for hours every day to just drag and drop a few components onto a form and add some logic and have a little desktop app up and running in a few minutes.
I (sadly) code in C# since 2021, because the support is better, but I honestly believe VB.NET was superior because of the increased readability of the code.
sounds cool.
can you give a few examples of such apps that you created?
i have used VB in the past too, v4 and 5, and even a free v2 copy that I got from the net long back. but mainly did business apps with them.
see the History section here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(classic)
I know the feeling, I was the go to VB6 guy in college for writing test automation on equipment over GPIB, UART, RS422, etc. I made bank as a grad student from the EE department, I quit my TA position and they replaced me as instrumentation guy :) . Paid for my masters for the most part.
It was rad!
This reminds me of one of the best programming tools at the time. Moving from basic to vs basic was mind blowing. I still miss such tools in the Modern era. There are lot of so called no-code or low-code tools that does things very differently today. I still think the best low-code is what VB did.
> I still miss such tools in the Modern era. There are lot of so called no-code or low-code tools that does things very differently today.
You don't have to miss it, there's still one that does things similarly: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
And honestly, with the reactive programming approach ... a related UX for IDE should not be that hard either.
I think most framework developers unfortunately forget productivity as a key metric. Might be a bit unfair however, the lack of visual tools is disappointing.
The issue today is that developers would create their own framework, most likely something TypeScript-based running in Node or Deno or some Rust-based thing like Tauri, which all might be OK, but with their own opinionated UI styleguides and features, where then half of the native OS functionality then won't work.
You see a somewhat related degeneration in Redmond, where the new Windows Explorer doesn't have an icon in the address bar which is actually draggable so that a shortcut to the currently open folder can be created on the desktop or anywhere where such a shortcut can be used (think TrueLaunchBar). Now you have to go to the parent folder in order to Alt-Drag the folder to create a shortcut.
It's those little things which where smartly developed during the 80s and 90s, which "modern" developers seem not to have noticed and therefore just ignored while re-implementing applications like the Windows Explorer.
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> And honestly, with the reactive programming approach ... a related UX for IDE should not be that hard either.
I think that's what Apple is attempting with SwiftUI previews in Xcode; given how long that took to not suck, I'd say it's probably harder than it seems.
Whoa. VB6 was totally what got me into software development as a kid. A blast from the past I needed today, thanks.
Same. But it didn't take me long, with the exuberance of youth, to declare BASIC a worthless language, and then moved to MS Visual C++ 6.
C++ and MFC was worse for different reasons, but then I discovered Linux and the rest is history.
Still, haven't found anything as powerful as VB6's RAD. These days we lay out UIs by hand or by writing XML, like absolute cavemen.
> Still, haven't found anything as powerful as VB6's RAD
We could easily do this now if companies would accept standard UI component styles instead of everyone inventing their own.
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It is funny I had the same exact journey but starting from VB4. I actually wonder what would have happened if instead of killing VB for .NET that Microsoft instead merged legacy VB into the Office team and actually updated it instead of the perpetual state of deprecation that it has been in.
Cavemen had declarative UIs?
Same. A pirate copy of VB6 and a download of some website which gave a reasonable introduction of how to do things. I remember doing things like using the Win32 API to get DMA to images so I could do pixel perfect collision detection between sprites etc. Fun times.
> A pirate copy of VB6
exactly how i did it as well! But it was a pirated copy of visual studio (6?) and it came in 6 CDs. I had no idea what it actually was, and just installed it and played around.
I'm so glad that i bought those pirated CDs off the street - it was a huge stack of disks for like $50 bucks, and it included a bunch of pirated games, pirated encyclopedia (brittanica at the time iirc), various music software (cakewalk pro, not that i ever used it).
There would not have been a chance in hell i'd discover these things by myself.
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I have a very similar memory, building a Spacewar-type game and experimenting with low level stuff to try to get things flicker-free
VB was the absolute sweet spot when you used Visual C++ to create performant DLLs which you could then use in VB.
Perusing the authors Github, it looks like they also maintain the UI library for the classic Win9x look and feel: https://github.com/BAndysc/Classic.Avalonia
I love it, I might have to try making my own app using it
IMO that library is worth a submission as much as the VB6 recreation! The attention to detail is excellent, it makes me want to dive into Avalonia again.
Author of the demo and library here, thank you for kind words, this was my goal to achieve almost pixel perfect recreation of the original GUI (which is sometimes not very easy as some components look slightly different in different programs, I meant small differences in buttons sizes, paddings, etc.).
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I miss those times. Every IDE had a line by line debugger. Now those Angular/React applications, even after years, do not have one; and they still have a confusing syntax.
I hadn't thought about it like this, but you're right. React has decent browser plug-in tools, but it is still painful to get things back to the IDE.
My experience with IntelliJ + a bunch of JS frameworks is that IDE-based browser debugging works quite well. Unfortunately, Firefox' remote debugging capabilities broke for me at some point, but adding a Chromium debug target in my IDE seems to work most of the time. As long as the Rube Goldberg machine that does JS transpilation includes a source map, frameworks just seem to work out of the box (as does raw JS, but that's not so common anymore).
That even includes debugging some languages compiled to WASM, like C#, interestingly enough.
What is written and what is actually running is so different that it’s better to think of SPAs as a different language. Firefox have a decent debugger for javascript which works well when the build tool output sourcemaps.
Nice! Small bug report:
I added a button and double clicked it to open the code window. I added something simple like
and clicked the x on the top right of the code window.
The code was not saved. You have to "Save" the project or "Run" the project for the code to be updated. This is a difference with the old VB IDE that remembers everything you type.
This works with a button control, but it seems a label control does not want to fire the Click event no matter what I try.
I didn't add a handler for the click event for labels, fixed now :))
IIRC labels don't have the clic event.
I remember in the 90s a lot of small companies ran on VB and Access. It really enabled a lot of non programmers. Wish we had something similar for the web. Some low code solutions are superficially similar but what made VB different was that you could grow into full blown apps without changing. I am always amazed how complex today's web CRUD apps are to develop and deploy.
The web is a really terrible platform for apps. It's so popular for two reasons:
(1) No installation, and no need to deal with OS packaging because all our OSes are horrible.
(2) SaaS is DRM -- host software in the cloud and it can't be pirated and you can easily charge monthly rent.
A third I guess is that it makes collaborative features easier to build, but that only applies to some software.
(3) you can’t run a Windows app on your phone.
(4) The world isn’t Windows only anymore.
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PowerApps. Built into Office365.
is 2024 and I still maintain a VB6 project. A client of mine (a aluminiun metalurgic compoany from sweeden) have all his machines controled but a central program in vb6. Since the machines are all old, they have integrations using windows COM+ protocol.
Its a offline application, that connects to SAP exchanging text files, so they have no reason to update so something more modern.
Not being able to replace hardware easily seems like a disaster in waiting.
They use an old offline machine with winxp to run stuff in factory. But they are replacing for virtualmachines now that the old hardware is dying. other than that, it runs really well. Sometimes, months without rebooting.
Running old versions of Windows in emulation or virtualization is really easy.
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Oh, interesting. I should see if I can get my 22 year old coursework running in it.
Assuming I can get my source out of the Word document, because it predates git and I don't have the original source files: https://github.com/BenWheatley/A2-coursework
If you can't open it in a modern Office install, Microsoft used to have the option to download input filters for old and unusual formats.
It seems like you can write VBA to extract stuff from Microsoft Office files. It might be worth a try. Here is what I found: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49724/programmatically-e...
The code in this case is plain text within the word doc — the hard part is that I don't have a copy of Word from 2002-ish (I don't know the specific Office version my teachers used), and it's spread over 261 pages because I was having too much fun writing it.
ChatGPT can probably do it, but my experience is that it starts hallucinating well before you'd expect from the context length.
This is amazing... I am much away from .NET world so can someone elaborate how does it get from C# to browser?
All I see is this main.js[0] and everything is drawn on a canvas! (probably explains why text is not as sharp as I remember back in the day)
[0]. https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/main.js
There's a bootstrap loader at https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/_framework/do... which downloads the application, which has been compiled to WASM, and the dotnet runtime. Which is why it takes so many seconds to first page view.
The Avalonia framework is a third party UI toolkit.
> Which is why it takes so many seconds to first page view
I'm seeing a long load time in Firefox but in Chromium, loading takes maybe a second. Loading the entire .NET runtime isn't exactly lightweight, but it seems there's also some kind of browser engine problem in my Firefox setup that slows this page down artificially.
I must say I'm impressed that this approach even works with only 16MiB of data transferred over the line (though that 16MiB decompresses to about 50MiB).
They seem to be using this framework: https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
Avalonia aims at compatibility with Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) XAML. The web platform is explicitly supported: https://avaloniaui.net/platforms#wasm. The VB Form model must be implemented on top of this. This is for the UI part.
Now for the code part, the dotnet toolchain has supported WebAssembly (wasm) generation for some time: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/extending-web-assembly... I suppose the C# code is translated to MSIL then wasm.
> text is not as sharp as I remember
Something interesting is that the top bar text (File, Edit, etc.) is a little bit blurry, but when I click on one of them (e.g. File), the drop down text (e.g. New Project) is completely crisp with no antialiasing.
Lol, that's amazing, as soon as it loaded up i was laughing at how accurate it was . So many memories from simpler times coding as a kid.
OMG, this is how I started programming. I was so happy creating small helpers with this toolchain, e.g. something like Spotlight to launch programs with with a hotkey + the name of the program, on Windows 98.
What I really want is a form designer that would let me create a UI for any language instead of every language reinventing it.
One nice side effect of having GUI builders in the IDE was standarized, optimized and "follow best practices" GUIs. No wonder we reached peak UI in the 90's-2000.
Then came the web and everyone and their mom had an opinion on how a button should look (for games that's fine) and we ended up here.
Immediately after seeing the page, got "oh, those were the times" feeling. Really great.
I miss VB 6, because it was so easy to teach people how programming works as the visual nature was very intuitive.
I have felt for a long time a modern version would be so useful.
You can do the exact same thing, with a nearly 100% exact user interface in the latest version of Visual Studio 2022 that came out yesterday.
I've been building desktop apps like this for 30 years. I still build them every day and the designer looks no different today.
I did not know that, thank you.
I guess the windows pc I have won’t be exclusively for gaming anymore!
I sometimes wonder if something like this using Lua wouldn’t be a great way to quickly build native desktop apps.
I miss RAD tools. I never played with Visual Basic but I enjoyed Borland C++ builder.
Really cool! Makes me weep that most web apps today have a mere fraction of this kind of depth and functionality.
Oh the memories. How does this work? Is it built using an emulator of old VB6 code ? (didn't realize it was opensource) . Or is everything built from scratch?
Hey, author here, I built everything from scratch. It supports only a subset of VB6 so it wasn't difficult or long. I wrote an interpreter for VB6 code
Man hats off to you. Great work
Ahhh... first programming language I ever played with was VB3 and VB4 writing 'proggies' to knock other AOL users offline. Good times!
As someone building a JS type low code tool (yazz.com) which is also open source I am very impressed. Well done!
I can't get it to actually do anything, is it supposed to work to run programs in the browser? (mac, chrome)
It does! Drag some controls onto the form and hit the play button.
Event handlers don't seem to run (I couldn't get the simplest MsgBox to work, at least). Is the actual language implemented?
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turns out I had a typo and it doesn't report errors as far as I can tell
Maybe you need to explicitly capture the errors to view the error number and/or message in a message box or something? I have no idea, just guessing based on some prior VBA work I did.
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Syntax Errors reporting was missing indeed, but I just added it now and it would show a message box (while you write the code)
My first bit of paid programming work was a VB6 project in 2001. Such happy times!
I want a desktop version of this that runs on Mac and Linux.
It runs on Mac and Linux! https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6 It even supports dotnet's NativeAOT, meaning you can get a native x64/arm64 binary!
I owe my whole fascination with programming from childhood to Visual Basic 6.
I was 11 and I could hardly read English, yet VB6 with the WYSIWYG-editor and an introductory book by my side was intuitive and rewarding enough for me to learn the basics of programming.
My college thesis was writing complete inventory management using VB6, then making sure the program works inside the company. Good times!
This is the kind of content I am here for
This reminds me of Bindows framework. Seeing Windows interface in browser is hard to forget.
Site doesn't load for me other than the powdered by avalonia message, on Safari.
It takes a while to load on a slow connection, but then it works fine on my iPhone (IOS 18).
This is an incredibly impressive demo of what Avalonia is capable of.
I actually think QT is not too bad for small applications too. I wrote a Quake launcher over a few days because I was so tired of finding my Quake executable and setting the same configurations every time I load a mod. I knew zero about QT back then so someone could write it in an afternoon. I think it definitely can be used equally easy for something bigger, e.g. a frontend of a lc-3 VM.
After going to Help > Avalonia on the Web, the UI stopped responding
This is amazing. I love the nostalgia, it made my day.
Haha, it hit me with a tinge of pain that I probably saw the screen (the original one) a lot, thinking "Today is the day I learn VB6!", but I never got proficient with VB6.
Oh well, I still managed to have a career in IT, so...
Visual FoxPro as well, please :)
Wow, really nice !!
And very interesting project too...
Thanks !
This is at most something lat "looks like" Visual Basic 6. Most of the actual functionality is not there.
- ActiveX and custom controls? Not available
- Debugging/Single-Stepping? Nope
- Add-Ins? negative
- Also, many of the menu items just don't do anything when clicked on, or they open a dialog where everything is greyed-out
I mean, yeah, it's cute for someone who has never seen how VB6 looked like... But calling it "rebuilt in c#" is stretching it a bit...
You must be fun at parties
I feel like the complexity around current day .Net is more due to Microsoft’s pathetic attempt at naming and branding and the confusion around their development products. One example is their desktop development frameworks. As someone that is in and out of Microsoft centric development stacks - I can't even keep up with it anymore.
So cooool!
Wow.
I started in Visual Basic 3 and then moved to Delphi. My first job at 18 was working for one of the large ActiveX component libraries, providing technical support to many developers when I wasn't one myself yet!
On my first day, I found a book on my desk—"Learn Visual Basic 3 in 21 Days"—along with a brand new 486DX250 and a 14" monitor. I learned a lot quickly! We answered support queries by fax back then.
I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off. Building business apps beyond Access or Excel was so straightforward. It was great to get an .EXE that you could package up with InstallShield or Wise Solutions and send to anyone.
I guess the web came soon after, and trying to do WYSIWYG for HTML and CSS has never gone well—even today.
FrontPage came out but died soon after, and mixing desktop apps with web apps was never great.
Today, I feel .NET is overly complex and much harder for beginners compared to the old days.
Sometimes, I think there are only so many ways to control the appearance of business apps. I'd constrain visuals but provide the most straightforward visual builder possible.
The No-Code world is fascinating, and the best I've seen in this space is https://retool.com/, but it's expensive and locks you into their ecosystem.
Even today, small businesses need to build out simple apps that were simple to do back in the Visual Basic days—a stock control system, a basic support system, sales tools, etc. Today, it's a minefield of options that can quickly get expensive.
I'd love to have a visual builder that creates code you can host yourself — something like retool.com but with open source and self-hosting, or maybe I'm just too old for this now! :)
> I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off
My two cents --
A few reasons (briefly, I could have talked a lot more)
* Shift in platform: Windows is no longer the sole platform people want to build their apps for. Not a bad strategy by itself, and lots of companies still only develop for Windows (e.g. specialized software for instrument control etc), but people increasingly want their stuff to work on iPad, Chromebook etc and maybe even phones
* Shift in screen size: It used to be that everyone runs Windows on a 800x600 screen. That changed, and then changed quickly. Many different resolutions and screen sizes. The drag and drop thing just doesn't work well for that. The web model, where you write "responsive CSS" and the browser handles the rest for you, works better.
* Software and their UI got a lot more complex and require more expertise. On the other hand commercial software becomes easily available and accessible for those purposes. For the examples you mentioned -- stock control system, sales tool, they may be fine with VB6 for a prototype but can quickly get complex. And there is likely a commercial software you can buy and download within a few minutes at an affordable price.
* Shift to online/cloud: vast majority of "small VB6 applications" were used locally, and they never connect to the Internet. That's different now.
* Shift in language: BASIC/VB was often used for teaching, and it is indeed great as a first language to learn. Although Python already existed at that time, it became very popular, and I think many people would agree Python is a much better language than BASIC, in many ways. As a result, BASIC along with VB went out of fashion.
I've always found the use of anchors on UI controls to be light years ahead of what HTML/CSS have been doing. I always used to create UI forms with resizing and different screen sizes in mind. If you were coding for a hard coded 800x600 screen then that was just laziness.
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It's a bit ironic how in the same breath you go from "it's impossible to build apps for multiple resolutions with drag'n'drop hence web" to "software and their UI has become more complex".
While the absolute vast majority of web-based software cannot hold a candle to UIs you could trivially build in VB (or Delphi and other RADs). Most web-based software is either trivial forms or a few screens of text and images they struggle to display with any acceptable performance.
As for "many different resolutions and screens", have you ever, I don't know, resized a desktop window? Desktop apps work at the number of crazy sizes the web would die at.
I think you left off the biggest reasons, commercial:
* No piracy. Can't crack code you aren't running.
* Immediate installs/updates. No need to tell people to ever update stuff, or to install your program in the first place.
* You can charge subscriptions. It's much easier to justify a subscription when you pay for server costs, even though the customer would be happier just running your application locally.
* Easier deployment. You can handle complex integrations on the server, without the customer having to open ports or whatever.
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> Shift in screen size: It used to be that everyone runs Windows on a 800x600 screen. That changed, and then changed quickly. Many different resolutions and screen sizes. The drag and drop thing just doesn't work well for that. The web model, where you write "responsive CSS" and the browser handles the rest for you, works better.
This... really doesn't match my experience at all. I may be thinking of later UI development tools from the .NET era (I no longer recall if VB6 had proper support for linear layouts and the like, that was forever ago) but GUI builders with responsive controls were absolutely a thing, and they ran circles around any "responsive" CSS we have today, if only because they had instant feedback. I don't miss most aspects of programming from that age, but this is one that I do miss tremendously.
Edit: I certainly agree on the other points. I think this one was less of a technical limitation and more due to the humans in the loop; lots of people just didn't know better, information dissemination was far more limited (lots of us learned these things offline, from books and the like), and the platform didn't force you to do the right thing, either.
Yes and:
> Shift to online/cloud ... they never connect to the Internet.
The fall of VB6 style RAD (for CRUD) started earlier with shift from "workgroups" (shared files on LANs) to client/server. This severed the direct link (ADO api) between apps and their persistence.
Tragically, the ODBC (then JDBC) API interface didn't quite fully bridge the gap. Meaning some necessary metadata was no longer front and center (for both compile and runtime, like ADO had always had). Yielding mitigation attempts like DAO/DTO, ActiveRecord, ORMs, LINQ, templates, etc.
That sad state of affairs is described in Ted Neward's famous "ORMs are the Vietnam of computer science" essay. https://web.archive.org/web/20060813030731/http://blogs.tedn...
Of course, client/server had to happen. But the innovators (and critics like Neward) didn't fully understood what they were replacing, what parts were missing. (Lather, rinse, repeat.)
--
It took noob me a LONG time to figure this out. (All I ever wanted was to recover the special magick of VBA + ADO.) And then even longer to attempt mitigation (cuz am noob).
Maybe if we had the new "internet's hourglass shape" analytical framework from the beginning (vs say OSI's layer model), someone(s) could have prevented the oversight. https://cacm.acm.org/research/on-the-hourglass-model/
> Software and their UI got a lot more complex and require more expertise.
In the B2C space sometimes sure. We do business with many companies all over the world and if you can see the 100s of 1000s of apps they are using; you could've done all of them with Delphi/VB without any tricks. Except now some incapable but suave talking Nextjs fanboi walked in and pushed all that overly complex nonsense while it's not needed for almost anything we see used in companies. Spending fortunes on stuff you should just click together in a few minutes and hook up a db. But yeah, we make nice money because of it for both of my main businesses; 1) fixing completely broken stuff because the person who introduced the tech left quickly after introducing the misery 2) creating LoB/ERP custom applications. Both are goldmines and both are goldmines because of the tech losers (resume driven 'workers' almost always) around the world who preach to always use the 'best tool for the job' and then completely do the opposite, introducing tools that really have no place there, ever.
And then the joke of course that they are not even really good at them, which is the worst pet peeve of mine; ONLY yesterday, I was virtually (via Teamviewer) fixing a new LoB app made by 2 freelancers who came (apparently) highly recommended; it was made in Next 15 with React 18 and shadcn (that's not fully compatible yet... but that's normal in that ecosystem; nothing is). So I checked the Linkedin / github's of these freelancers and had a short call with them if they could help (no, they had no time; new clients!); they were Django/Bootstrap guys before, but that sells less well than Nextjs/shadcn/tailwind, so they switched recently. What a joke. Why is this not liable really... But again, we make very good money, so please carry on!
I'd add another reason:
* Idiot developers like myself. Okay, I was a teenager back when I got infected by this idea, but it did persist for some time into my start of my career too - the idea that RAD tools are inferior, they are not "true programming", just some lazy no-code clicking to save monkeys from understanding the program they're building as a whole, etc.
I mean, sure, you could do a lot in RAD tools really quickly, and do it well - but that was cheating. Too good results for too small an effort. It wouldn't impress any of your IRC friends.
(Curiously, those few I know from my "generation" who wrote software for e.g. their parents' business, would happily use VBA or Delphi. Wonder why...)
This was all adjacent to and connected to other ideas that became influential with our cohort of developers, like "Windows suxx, Linux rulez", "plaintext is best", "CLI is best", "code generation is evil", etc. Those ideas are still deeply rooted in FLOSS, too.
VBA - was not C-like, you couldn't exactly put the whole project in SVN and diff nicely, it's tied to a specific platform (that sucked), a specific vendor (at a time when we all hated the evil M$ because it was the Right Thing to Do), and to a specific software suite (which was not vim). It's tricky for a technology to survive after a significant part of the fresh workforce tried to steer clear of it as a matter of principle.
https://www.flutterflow.io/ is an interesting option for cross-platform web-based low-code.
My main issue with these is using the the cloud dev tools has a cost, normally usage-based - so if you use Firebase, if you're not careful, you can end up with a large bill.
Funny thing is that there are more Windows devices out there than all iOS,MacOS, and chromebooks combined.
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I don't think the platform mattered much, this happened before macOS became popular, and remember that at that time mac developers would still use Interface Builder and Objective-C. There was a certain level of pride in making Mac apps look very much like Mac apps. Very rarely did developers target both Windows and Mac.
My take is: A lot of developers didn't feel like cluing components together in Visual Basic 6 or later Visual Studio, dragging and dropping UI elements, was "real development". VB-developers where looked down on as second rate programmers. If you used VB.NET and WinForms/WebForms who where not a real developer. You had to use C# and XAML, which was absolutely terrible, but "real programming".
Same with Delphi, not something you built "real" applications in, no you use Java if you're a real developer.
Shit like that was all to common, and yet WinForms are still around and working, but XAML is dead (Edit: Apparently it's not dead).
>The No-Code world is fascinating, and the best I've seen in this space is https://retool.com/, but it's expensive and locks you into their ecosystem.
>Even today, small businesses need to build out simple apps that were simple to do back in the Visual Basic days—a stock control system, a basic support system, sales tools, etc. Today, it's a minefield of options that can quickly get expensive.
A RAD tool like Visual Basic, Borland C++ Builder, Borland Delhi, QT Designer doesn't mean no code. Rapid application design helps the developer quickly build the UI using already made components and using some predefined behaviors like gluing a database table to an UI component. But the developer has still to provide the application logic and to write whatever else is not covered by the RAD tool. It helps you build faster, write less code, but it isn't no code.
VB6 fans looking for a modern approach should try twinBasic which after many years is about to release v1.0 https://twinbasic.com/
Never seen this before - thanks. Looks interesting.
Delphi is still around and filling a niche for boring business apps where usability, accessibility and quick UI development is more important than following design trends. You won't get any VC money for Windows XP styled apps, but if you make industrial hardware and need control and maintenance software Delphi is a reasonable and somewhat popular choice.
They even cleaned up their licensing a bit, offering a free version for hobby use: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter
> I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off.
First and foremost -- the world wide web.
Suddenly, we had a much more flexible way to deliver applications.
If I remember it correctly, Visual Basic couldn't write to STDOUT -- so it couldn't be used as a scripting language for the web.
Microsoft tried to push VBScript as an alternative, but it was linked to their expensive ecosystem, while LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL Perl and PHP) was free.
> I'd love to have a visual builder that creates code you can host yourself — something like retool.com but with open source and self-hosting
I believe this is the promise of AppSmith: https://www.appsmith.com/
I haven't tried it myself, curious for others' experiences
Developing visually with VB(A) RAD-like dev tools to build websites without wallgardening and cleanly generated html, css, js, server side code & whatever, is a huge niche to be filled. Incredible that it doesn't exist yet. Maybe I'll do it myself.
We've been using ToolJet (the open source version) at my company with good results. It is self hosted, open source and you can export created apps in some JSON format.
I've successfully setup a dev-stage-prod flow where we export from one env and import into another pretty seamlessly.
The coolest thing about that is that I was able to hire a very Jr. Frontend dev to immediately start working building internal dashboards.
I've used retool in another company but found problematic not having the source code for the lack of control.
>Today, I feel .NET is overly complex and much harder for beginners compared to the old days.
I often see similar statements like that but that's not what I experienced. I did IBM DOS BASIC, MS GWBASIC and worked on VB3 to VB6 at a corporate jobs.
The C#/NET workflow feels much the same rapid-development simplicity as classic VB6: Drag some GUI components like text boxes and buttons onto a form, code the controls' event handlers, build the exe.
In contrast, the examples of GUI dev kits that had more complex language syntax and build steps than VB6 were original Apple iOS Objective-C, C++ Qt, Java AWT.
Sure, C# is a bigger language than Visual Basic in VB6 but C# also does a lot more. E.g. in VB6, it didn't even have a built-in way to check the existence of a file. Instead, you had to declare a "win32" API monstrosity such as :
In many ways, VB6 being "simple" means it created a ton of extra complexity for the programmer to do basic tasks. Another example is that VB6 didn't include a datagrid. You had to buy 3rd-party VBX/OCX controls for that. C# WinForms includes a datagrid.
EDIT reply to: >most definitely open files in VB, and therefore the "File.Exists()" function would at worse be comprised of a exception handler (on error ...) and a open call,
From my memory the "pure" VB6 way checking existence of a file by opening a file with error handler had issues (other processes using exclusive access and/or other issues) causing false-negatives or false-positives. Therefore, the recommended way back in 1990s was the win32 api declaration using OF_EXIST flag. It looks convoluted but it was more reliable.
You chose a very poor example, since you can most definitely open files in VB, and therefore the "File.Exists()" function would at worse be comprised of a exception handler (on error ...) and a open call, as in many other languages. No need to import OpenFile for sure.
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The sub thread this created of people not recognizing this as a problem is pretty interesting.
It's probably one of many ingredients that went into how so many of these apps are so half baked and buggy.
Not just the obvious that the language was aimed at and used by junior programmers and so of course much of the code is not robust in general.
But here is an example of the toolbox missing a tool. You can't really fault people for doing whatever seems natural using the tools they are given.
Not being experienced developers otherwise, they didn't know that something necessessary was missing, and made things that only mostly worked without it.
To be clear they would have often mis-used the tool if it existed too. In this thread people have thought the way you would use exists is to check before doing some actual operation. The inexperienced coder aspect is also true, seperately.
But the combination of a missing tool combined with a language explicitly aimed at users who don't come with their own experience and don't know anything but what the language provides, seems a little extra nasty.
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I know this is a bit of a first-world problem but back in those days[tm] you just slapped 2-3 DLLs into the exe directory and it worked. Yes, I know there were also different versions for different runtimes, but overall it was a couple of DLLs and fine. Since .net you really need to install the distributable by MS, and every new .net upgrade it's the same. Just 2 days ago I apparently needed the .net 8 runtime and even after installing it the app in question didn't work (without a reboot maybe, I will find out later today).
Overall, strictly as a consumer, C# and .net apps have been mostly great, except the practice (is it a best practice?) that some of them end up somewhere in my home dir's Local dir and not in c:\program files.
This is the worst example you could give. Just add filesystem dll or whatnot from the .net framework as a reference to your project and you can use File.exists from VB.
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PowerBuilder too. I worked for an S&P 500 corporation from 2000 to 2006 trying to replace several business critical PowerBuilder apps in Java using a bloated commercial framework called Windchill. The original apps were written by a handful of developers over the years. The new team was fifty developers that struggled to replicate the old app functionality. We did manage to reimplement a couple of the old apps but they took a lot longer than anticipated and were incredibly slow.
The corporation chose Java/Windchill for the rewrite instead of PowerBuilder because Java was trendy. Both the original and replacement apps were desktop applications. During development of the new apps, browser based applications became trendy and some of the developers really wanted to switch to browser-based. Fortunately, that shipped had sailed. Can you imagine writing business critical apps for the browser in 2002?!
Because for the most part, you don’t need desktop applications in 2024. They are harder to maintain when used across multiple computers and you can’t access them from anywhere like web apps.
And most companies that need to build the things you mentioned can use a SaaS.
Also, those “simple apps” end up being an unmaintainable mess after a couple of years. In 2024, to a first approximation, no company should be writing software that is not core to their business.
Most problems are not special snowflakes. Someone has already solved their problem and created a customizable SaaS around it.
Yes I’m old enough to have used VB6 professionally from 2001-2008 (when it was way past its prime). But my first programming was on an Apple //e in BASIC and assembly and programming professionally in C and C++ from 1996-2008
In some context, I think desktop apps are far better than the web, and it's now super simple to roll out desktop apps using tools like Intune.
However, I'm talking about general business apps here.
The likes of Zoho, Salesforce, and, to some extent, Dynamics are covering some of this space—but again, they're expensive.
The main point of my post was that if I were 18 today and starting my first job, it'd be much harder to acquire the skills needed to grow. With VB or Delphi and a book, you could become pretty productive within a year or so, and the cost of entry was very low. The skills you learned opened the door to a whole new world for little cost. Especially, as others have mentioned, finding "DVDs lying around" :) which, of course, doesn't work for web tools in 2024! I was lucky my company provided, but i know friends who learned from the other approach.
These web based NoCode companies should provide people starting out with free, fully functional accounts—but then restrict live users to about 5. Atlassian/JIRA was always good at this with their $10 entry point. While it's not a programming tool, this approach is why it's found everywhere. It allowed someone wanting to experiment and learn to pay just $10 for access to the complete platform.
You might say there is plenty of open source out there, and this is correct, but again, in companies, this is not always used. They want the known companies.
What the generation do have today which we never did is access to high quality training beyond books - and now AI! Wish I was 18 again!
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>I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off. Building business apps beyond Access or Excel was so straightforward.
Because every business app needs to be written in a Javascript framework to be considered serious. Nevermind speed, resources, speed of development.
> providing technical support to many developers when I wasn't one myself yet!
This reminds me of my days as a Lab Tutor at the programming lab at my college. I was only one or two semesters in helping people with Advanced Java homework while taking basic Java.
>I guess the web came soon after, and trying to do WYSIWYG for HTML and CSS has never gone well—even today.
>FrontPage came out but died soon after, and mixing desktop apps with web apps was never great.
I remember using Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft WebMatrix for WYSIWYG.
I think we would still be using all macromedia products if adobe didn't buy them. I miss flash :(
I think one aspect is that business requirements for many of these apps became more complex, which is why we now often use process management or case management tools instead of smaller local programs.
Agreed, a fair point - companies are a lot more aware of what is possible beyond a spreadsheet! :)
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Visual basic was the best way to build business apps ever. We just got these features in visual studio. Some we may never get (drag and drop dbs, form builders, etc etc). The closest I have seen was Flash. But if you say Flash or visual basic you are downvoted. I will let people get back to their js frameworks.
You're completely right, however the market for business desktop apps is over; not just because of the web, which is still inferior to VB in many respects, but because companies restrictions of what can be installed in a corporate desktop. It is much easier to use a web service than having permission to install a desktop app in a corporate computer. The huge Windows vulnerabilities destroyed the desktop as a viable business software platform.
Small businesses don't want to pay for simple apps. They want to pay a percentage of their sales to a large middle man who takes care of sales. It's too much for them to pay a few thousand (or hundred) dollars for a bespoke solution, but they have no problem paying tens of thousands per year to a middle man.
There's a reason small businesses remain small.
Almost none of those reasons are managing what are generally trivial costs for a growing business.
Small businesses remain small because they: cant scale, have a small tam, require direct labor from the founder to get the job done, the market is fairly well established but the founder has some special skills which are difficult to impart, especially in the context of the business.
Market conditions, the ability to get capital, and a lot of luck have way more to do than is your SaaS bill a little too high, you can always just use some google sheets and google docs and get 80% of what you'd need in most SMB situations.
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Say what you like about Visual Basic (and a lot has been said that is less than complimentary), but for a huge number of people and workplaces this was the tool that moved people from trying to fudge Excel or Access into a workflow and actually trying to write some software.
My first language was BASIC on 8-bit machines (actually, it may have technically been Logo on a BBC, but I remember BASIC on a BBC as an 11 year old more clearly), and by the time VB came along I'd moved onto compiled languages like C and interpreted languages like Perl and PHP, and was a bit sniffy about the point and click nature of it all. I had one friend at college who refused to move on from QBASIC - I once saw him write a 3D game engine in that could about 30 frames _an hour_ on a Pentium - and the general atmosphere of being pro-FLOSS/anti-MS, plus a ton of really badly written apps encountered out in the wild when I did some small business IT consultancy made me very averse to VB in general.
But you know, it wasn't the fault of the environment or the language. It was powerful, useful and better than the alternatives for a lot of people. Its main contemporary competitor - Delphi - seemed all the rage before it didn't. And I now wish we'd been able to get a little more down the simpler visual programming domain for a while, because the modern equivalents like XCode feel massively confusing to the novice, so the learning curve feels very steep by comparison.
> a ton of really badly written apps encountered out in the wild when I did some small business IT consultancy made me very averse to VB in general.
A lot of VB has been historically written by people who had no background in writing software. They were jack of all trades, needed some quick and dirty and they learned just enough to have some working code
This might be classic "that's not a bug, it's a feature", territory.
I love the idea that somebody could just get something working - it is fantastic that was possible, and a shame that we've lost it a bit.
The fact that a professional might look at the code produced and die a little inside is where a lot of bad rep comes from, but hey, working software is better than no software, particularly in the days when that software probably is running on a single machine that is not connected to the internet, and when it is, it's only connected a couple of hours a day via dial-up modem.
I see lots of comments about how good VB6 was. I agree it made programming super-easy and practical.
However, it is evident to me how the whole thing fell appart by the late 2000's, and now we have much more powerful, yet complex programming environments:
- Rust, C, C++: Extremely complex but powerful.
- HTML, JS, CSS: You have to learn 3 different technologies and won't be able to leverage the easy, powerful native APIs the OS provides. It's cross-platform though.
- .net: Not as easy as VB6 (and C# becomes actually more and more complex, more powerful as well, though). You have to learn XAML as WinForms is still a thing but considered legacy.
- Python: Easy (maybe more than VB, but not by much?), but no native, easy GUI toolkit for Windows. There are native bindings for GTK, but Linux is not a big desktop platform, and more so in business, and still GTK is much, much more complex than VB6 + Winforms + COM.
So basically, it seems we have traded easy of use and practicality for power/performance and cross-platform compatibility? What do you guys think?
I often muse over there not being a VB-alike approach for Python.
It would surely be reasonably straightforward to automate the creation of the GUI boilerplate code from a form designer, and then within an accompanying IDE hide most of that code from the user, only making the specific parts visible that correlate with different UI interactions?
> creation of the GUI boilerplate code from a form designer
why? i think the approach of of the form designer generating code instead of generating serialized objects that your code interacts with at runtime is a serious flaw. java got it wrong, cocoa got it right there.
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PyQt/PySide with QT Creator is the closest equivalent.
TCL/Tk and AndroWish. For an example working under PC and Android:
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG
There's a ton of visual programming tools out there, they just don't call it visual programming but low code.
VB6 made writing Windows GUI applications very easy (on screen form designer), particularly when interfacing with COM libraries written in languages such as C++. No-one would use it if performance was an issue. Better was Borland's Delphi, with much the same features, but that ship sailed long ago.
VB6 is a terrible, quirky programming language, and it’s a pain to debug, especially if you’re used to modern development tools.
Microsoft killed it to push .NET (although originally, VB.NET was promoted as the main GUI language). People went to .NET, but also chose the "adult" language of C# along the way. Also, WinForms isn’t deprecated (it was in maintenance mode for some time, but now it gets some new features).
Language history aside, browser-based UIs are easier to develop and deliver, so they won over desktop applications.
> browser-based UIs are easier to develop and deliver
Compared to the ease of a VB6 winforms app, they are way harder to develop. It's just the delivery that's a little easier - as well as the portability to non-Windows platforms like phones.
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One of the "quirks" that really caught me out once was the fact that VB6 doesn't do short-circuit evaluation of logical operators....
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VB6 is how I got really started off with programming and building games. There were project files you could find online of games made in VB6 of such immense complexity (one was an 'MMORPG' with networking, file save/load and data serialisation via RTF blocks, etc.) that it made my head spin. I don't know if I would have gotten into programming at such a young age otherwise.
Are you by any chance talking about Mirage online (and it’s many other servers)?
I remember loving that game (or the Jerrath Online server anyways) and being amazed by it. I knew enough about computers to know it was programmed in VB 6, but not enough to actually code.
But the desire to eventually make something like it definitely had to do with my interest in coding later on.
Page is not loading in Firefox 132.0.1 on MacOS Intel 15.1?
Edit: no, it just takes a loooooong time to load
True
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Is this supposed to work? It does not for me. Probabbly my privacy settings are prohibitive for it?
And why is this mania putting everything into the browser that does not belong there? Is the reason putting there is just to have it there? Why not desktop app? Any sensible reason? Is it for pepole not owning a computer and have to fly from borrowed one to borrowed one where only the browser access is stable for them? So many things are particular with browsers for the purpose navigating the web or other source of information that it negatively interferes with usability for generic purpose app if not running the extra miles to get a workaround for it (and most do not care to run the extra miles). Pushing the wrong button in the browser f.s up something and others are cumbersome too, back utton, refresh, context menus, working with files, mixed with anything else in the tabs, even the address bar is in the way, etc. The few sensible web apps were either narrow use trivial ones doing a simple task thing mostly accessing a client service (human client) or put into a thin client (now its a computer) for clarity. Not user friendly at all. But hey, today's computer "engineers" give no fuck for the user but all for the technology, we all must enjoy that! (No)
This is an application built on Avalonia. You can compile it into a desktop application if you want (https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6), but because of the framework you get the web version for free. Seems rather ridiculous to complain about a web version of a hobby project just... existing.
You completely missed the fact that this is built using Avalonia, which means that you can run this on desktop (win, linux, osx), mobile (android or ios) AND browser (using wasm) with almost the same codebase. check https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6, and feel free to try the desktop ones.
The second part was an adjacent complain about the generic trend of putting things to the web too much. As it is obvious. It wasn't about this very project (the "putting everything" =/= 'putting Avalonia based Visual Basic 6', obviously, even the 'everything' is a rhetoric expression here used widespread in generic discussions and not a literal 100%, obviously). Please review it carefully this time, thanks.
It's written in Avalonia so you could easily compile a desktop version if you wanted, although the author doesn't package one explicitly
https://avaloniaui.net/
https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6
> mania putting everything into the browser that does not belong there?
This ship has sailed a long, long time ago.
Yes. : (
"And why is this maniac putting everything into the browser that does not belong there? Is the reason putting there is just to have it there?"
Haha, relax a bit. If it wasn't a browser application i wouldn't have tried it at all (most people here would not have either). I see it more of a toy than a development environment - but the fact that it seems fully functional and in the browser is impressive to me.
Anyways, 99.99% anyone using VB6 today is doing it for nostalgic purposes, not to develop real useful code - and that's probably what the project had in mind. Just a fun project.
If you did want an accurate no-changes recreation of vb6 on the desktop, just download the original vb6.
more people use it for production than you think. I have 20+ ActiveX controls being used in production using IEMode in Edge =D
> Why not desktop app? Any sensible reason?
It is a desktop app as well. It's written in C# and Avalonia. You can compile it to Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. You can also compile it to WebAssembly, which is what has been done here for this demo:
https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6
WebAssembly brings all languages to the web and this is a nice example of the power of wasm.
> Probabbly my privacy settings are prohibitive for it?
Yes. It does not load for me on Firefox unless you disable fingerprinting protection.
I guess that disables ALL wasm access to the canvas.
for the same reason some people have made run doom on evrything with a bit of processing power and a display, for the funsies