Comment by mavamaarten
2 years ago
Whoa. VB6 was totally what got me into software development as a kid. A blast from the past I needed today, thanks.
2 years ago
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.
Layout has nothing to do with styling. The placement of a button has nothing to do whether it's a native one or it's green.
Even on the web, the set of controls we use are mostly the same we did in the 90s, except everyone styles them differently.
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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.
6 CDs because VS6 comes with 3 CDs and 3CDs for MSDN.
But later they switched to new format of MSDN and old IDEs can't use them. And there was some add-on that allow to old IDEs to use new MSDN format.
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.