Archive for the ‘VB .Net’ Category
VB .NET 2008
On Dec 12th I went to the Visual Studio 2008 Install fest in Waltham, Ma. By going there I got a free copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional. Some of the new features may have me revisiting Visual Basic .Net. I always wish they had called VB .Net something different. It is so different from VB 6.0 and it is so much work to port a VB 6.0 application to VB .Net, that I have always considered it a different language and haven’t had any reason to actually use it.
I have been impressed with the overall improvements of Visual Studio 2008 and the additions to VB .Net. It’s too soon to tell, but VS 2008 may become my primary development environment going forward. It still takes way too long to install, but it went off without a hitch. The first time you run it the startup time is slow as it does some configuration. After that it fires up really fast, even on my AMD Athlon 3200 XP (32 bit). It only takes about 3 seconds to start.
I did try converting a few VB 6.0 apps that I have always thought should have been easy to convert and it still isn’t able to convert them. The changes required after converting make it too much of a hack for me to consider actually converting an existing project. It looks like I will still have to keep a working copy of VB 6.0 around for quite a while. At least until they get rewritten in some other language. I currently have been rewriting them in PowerBasic or RealBasic as the need comes up to make significant changes.