Is Visual Basic 6 Dead?

Is Visual Basic 6 Dead?
By Michel Latreille

No way!

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the famous American writer: "Reports of the death of VB 6 have been greatly exaggerated!"

These days, VB.NET is said to be all the rage in application development circles. But is it really? Don't get me wrong. Visual Studio 2005, which contains VB.NET, is a great product. It is now really object-oriented and that makes it a powerful development tool for all kinds of major projects.

But, some of the strengths of VB.NET are also major drawbacks. The fact that it is object-oriented will greatly improve programmers' productivity. However, the world is full of programmers who use VB 6 - it is still the most popular language in the world. Those programmers are comfortable with VB 6 and its not-so-object-oriented environment and are proving very reluctant to switch to new object technologies that they will have to master before becoming productive.

Also, to implement completely the new .NET Framework, Microsoft has had to sacrifice backward compatibility. That means that you can't automatically convert an application from VB 6 to VB.NET. When you moved from VB 5 to VB 6, the conversion was painless. Everything that worked in VB 5 still worked in VB 6 plus some new, improved features that you could then decide to implement or not.

That's not the case anymore. To move an application from VB 6 to VB.NET you have to go through a conversion utility. The process will convert most of the VB 6 code but not all. In most cases you will have to manually convert 20% of the code. On a large project that can be a major undertaking!

"The Marketing Department at Microsoft probably calculated that if they were going to actually get people to move to VB.NET, they had to provide a conversion tool - if only to create the illusion that it was an easy, straightforward upgrade."

--- Dan Mabbutt ---

So, VB 6 remains, and will remain for a long time, the most popular programming environment. Millions of programmers have grown up with Visual Basic 6 and they've developed a fierce loyalty to the language. If you want confirmation of that, just tune-in to one of the many forums discussing Microsoft software and products.

There's no reason why you can't continue to use VB 6 for as long as you want to. Even on the new Windows (Vista, scheduled for 2007) Microsoft will offer some support for VB 6. You won't be able to get Tech Support and there won't be new Service Packs but the language will continue to work as well as it has for many years.

One of the only problems with using VB 6 is that you can't buy an official copy anymore. Microsoft doesn't sell new copies of the software. But there are other sources, such as Amazon and eBay where you can always find new or used copies of the software.

If you are new to VB 6 or you just want to improve our skills, get yourself some good tutorials, and a good textbook. You can now find the textbooks for VB 6 at Amazon for just a few dollars.

About The Author

Professor Mike Latreille has over 30 years of experience in the computer industry as a consultant and educator. He has worked for a number of companies, including IBM, as well as for the Canadian government.


He is currently conducting research in eCommerce and eMarketing.


He can be reached through one of his websites at: Visual Basic Class.

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.NET :Solving the Multiple Inheritance Issue Under .NET Platform

.NET platform does not support multiple inheritance. Do not confuse multilevel inheritance with multiple inheritance. With multiple inheritance we can have a subclass that inherits from two classes at the same time.

Let’s suppose we have an application that has a class Customers and another class Vendors. If you wanted to combine these two classes into one CustomerVendor class it would be a combination of Customers and Vendors just like the diagram below.

Please copy the following URL into your browser to view the diagram: http://www.vbprofs.com/images/Article Images/ThomasArt1.gif

In the above diagram we see how the CustomerVendor class inherits from both of those classes.

Multiple inheritance is complex and can be dangerous. The advantages of code re-usage prevail over complexity is up to your choice.

Multiple inheritance is not supported by VB.NET or .Net platform. Instead of multiple inheritance we can use multiple interfaces to achieve similar effect to multiple inheritance.

In VB.NET all objects have a primary or native interface, which is composed of properties, events, methods or member variables declared using Public keyword.
Objects can implement also secondary interfaces by using Implement keyword.

Sometimes it is helpful for an object to have more than one interface, allowing us to interact with the object in different ways. Inheritance allow us to create subclasses that are a specialized case of the base class.

Example

Sometimes we have a group of objects that are not the similar, but we want to handle them the same manner. We want all the objects to act as if they are the same, even though they are different.

We can have some different objects in an application, such as customer, product, invoice etc. Each object would have a default interface appropriate to each individual object, and each of them is a different class. No natural inheritance is implied between these classes.
Let’s suppose we want to print a document for each type of object. In this case we’d like to make them all act as printable object.
To accomplish this we can define a generic interface that would enable generating a printed document.
By implementing a common interface we are able to write a routine that accepts any object that implements a printed document.

To conclude, by implementing multiple interfaces in VB.NET , we can achieve a similar effect to that of multiple inheritance.

Thomas is an experienced Visual Basic developer, with expertise of 7+ years developing especially financial applications. His main IT skills are VB, SQL, Crystal Reports - should you need a Visual Basic developer for your projects feel free to contact Thomas through his personal website Kaloyani.com or through VBprofs.com - the newest Visual Basic and VB.NET resources portal.

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My Choice Visual Basic

A number of years ago now I wanted to learn to program, I thought about it and managed to get a copy of Visual Basic 4, That was as you can imagine many years ago. Over the years i have followed through listened to other programmers talk of visual basic being the entry level language and not really professional.

This is as false as it comes, sure a few years ago visual basic had its place in business logic and i steered away from some technical programming, the obvious problems were that it was a bulky program when compiled. I have dabbled with C#, Cobol, and Delphi; However I believe strongly in being an expert in one language is better than being a jack of all trades in terms of learning other languages. Now days with Dot Net the line between Visual Basic and C# being radically different is a bit blurred.

Xtenda Communications now provides various applications written in Visual Basic, including VBA, VB6, VB.NET.

I am hoping to find the time to publish some of my works over the years, when i first started my applications used to seem to take forever to complete, its amazing how you as a programmer change over the years, you find easier ways to do things you get very frustrated when you spend weeks or months writing code to work around limitations then a new version is just released sorting out that limitation, and you sit back and thing i just did all that for nothing.

I hope to bring some new bits and pieces to my blog and i hope to see some people come back and even leave some comments.

Thanks