Microsoft said this week that it will support Visual Basic on .NET 5.0 but will no longer add new features or evolve the language.
“Starting with .NET 5, Visual Basic will support Class Library, Console, Windows Forms, WPF, Worker Service, [and] ASP.NET Core Web API … to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want to migrate their applications to .NET Core,” the .NET team wrote in a post to the Microsoft DevBlogs. “Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language … The future of Visual Basic … will focus on stability, the application types listed above, and compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic.”
Alright then.
I’d care more if they had a policy of releasing old stuff from end-of-lifed product lines.
Visual Basic 1.0 for DOS is a nostalgic “something I pirated as a kid” but it’s rare and expensive to buy legitimately for use on a retro-nostalgia PC.
Heh, I have a (legit) copy of Visual Basic for DOS, although it hasn’t really aged well. The visual designer is super cool, but generating DOS executables isn’t much use in this day and age. I’d love a version of that product that targets Win32/Linux binaries.
Although note it was quite different to its Windows counterpart, being a real compiler and all…
I have a retro-computing hobby.
(In fact, one of the projects I’m working on (slowly and in fits and spurts) is an installer creator for DOS, because it’s the only platform currently covered by my retro-hobby that can’t be covered satisfactorily by something on my list.)
I hadn’t thought about the whole “mouse-driven GUI builder for terminal apps” idea. Generally, I either use Qt Designer or do hand-coded TUIs in something like urwid.
It actually doesn’t feel like it’d be that difficult to do a mouse-driven GUI-builder like that of VBDOS if I weren’t already backlogged on existing GUIs six ways from sunday.
Yeah. It’s of the QuickBASIC 4.5 -> PDS 7.1 -> VBDOS 1.x lineage.
Ugh. I didn’t catch all the GUI→TUI corrections before the edit timeout expired.
Hopefully, someone to pick up to continue like what QB64 is doing for Quick Basic (see https://www.qb64.org/portal/) which has an accompanied GUI called Inform (http://www.qb64.org/inform/)
Wow. QB64 has really cleaned itself up since I last looked at it. I was still under the impression that it had nothing on FreeBASIC as a protected-mode compiler with QBasic dialect support.
That said, this line makes me question whether they’re staying on the right side of the law:
It definitely feels like a throwback to when QB64’s site wasn’t much more than a landing page and a pointer to a forum, despite it being at least a decade since the warez days of my high school years.
You have to remember where VB is used…. mostly in small bussiness, office and industrial use cases.
VB is basically the COBOL of the 90’s… except it doesn’t really suck to pick it up and write relatively simple software in. Nobody using VB even expects it to evolve, if anything when changes occur it is an annoyance.
VB should have probably died with Visual Fox Pro, but too many were afraid of c# because of the C in it. The increasing move away from desktop line of buisness apps didn’t help either. Doing ASP.Net with Visual basic was just really odd, imho. Sure it worked, and if you already had VB syntax in your head it was some what reasonable, but it was kind of like using a hammer to open a glass jar.
I agree, and I’ve seen it first hand… people practically going “eew semicolons and braces”….. *sigh*
It reminded me of the old Cobol vs FORTRAN arguments. FORTRAN with its mathematical symbols +-/*= was too “scientific” for non scientists to understand so COBOL used ADD SUBTRACT MULTIPLY and DIVIDE . Like apparently most people didn’t grasp elementary school arithmetic symbols.
Whoah, what sort of antique systems do you guys run, update to Google, you just hold your phone up and say “Computer……………!”
Isn’t that what IT is all about?
COBOL was all bout words. Wordy. That was the point, surely? The COBOL I did was all THIS SECTION, THAT SECTION, Lots of words inbetween.
What was the point, exactly? It was always framed as
” basic math symbols=> TOO HARD!!!! Accountants can’t understand plus signs!!!”
“Words => easy enough for business domain experts to code and review.”
I mean don’t get me wrong there were some good aspects to COBOL and some reasons to choose it over FORTRAN, but the whole symbols bias was absurd.
> VB should have probably died with Visual Fox Pro
The issue is that VB.Net != VB6. They are very different beasts.Anyone who tells you differently is not very good at what they do.
As I allude to in a comment below – I’ve seen some really heinous things being done by VB6 programmers that were allowed to be set loose on VB.Net. One that sticks in my mind, was something like:
dim x as Boolean
dim y = GetResultant()
select case y
case x
….
end select
What does this do? Who knows…. Turn on Option Strict and Option Explicit and it breaks horribly.
The writing has been on the wall for a long time. VB.Net is a bit of a joke these days. My experience (I have had two jobs over ~10 years where I had to deal with it) is that it was a slow decline, but bread terrible programmers that thought because they’d done a little VB 6 or VBA, they were DotNet devs. I spent a lot of those 10 years undoing the cruddy decisions and refactoring code in to C#, where it was at lease “sane”.