Visual Basic 6: Alive and Kicking
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About five years ago, the programming world, according to Microsoft, was a simple place. There were several different languages to choose from, but each of these was its own animal. Even today, with .NET firmly embedded into our brains, a few of the tools from years ago are still alive and kicking. Read on to find out why Visual Basic 6.0 is still hanging on, and why it may still be worth using.
Flash back to five years ago. The Windows programming world was divided by many factions. You had the Visual C++ group, who believed in the purity of C/C++ to deliver solid stand-alone applications. You had the Visual Foxpro group, most of which grew up using dBase and Foxpro to develop database-centric applications. And among the many more groups, you had the Visual Basic, or VB, developers. The VB developers were about quick application prototyping, and even quicker program completion.
Now fast forward to the current day and age. Microsoft is heavily pushing its .NET platform at every turn, stating that it is the wave of the future. It consists of a common language runtime (the CLR), and every .NET compatible language that you compile creates code that runs against the CLR. The solid lines that used to exist between C++ and VB and J++ and countless others have now blurred, and it's kind of hard to determine where one stops and another begins.
But is it the Nirvana that Microsoft has promised?
Next: Why did people hate Visual Basic? >>
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