Crossing the chasm for millions of VB developers
By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News NetworkMonday, March 14, 2005
Hundreds of influential Visual Basic developers (recognized by Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional program) have signed a petition demanding Microsoft should continue supporting Visual Basic (classic) as it is doing for C++.
Microsoft’s plan is to end support for Visual Basic and force a transition of millions of VB developers to VB.NET or other .NET languages. However their most valued customers do not agree. They contend that despite the similarity in name VB and VB.NET are significantly different languages and would require extensive training and investment for IT department. The decision to migrate should be left to the customers and not forced upon them. Unless Microsoft decides to back down, which seems unlikely, there is a big transition ahead of these developers and very soon (end of this month).
This is a time for the millions of VB developers worldwide to take a close and hard look at the several options available to them.
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March 18, 2005: 12:36 am
True. VB.NET should have been included in the list. My oversight. But the two points still stand namely: |
 Walt |
March 14, 2005: 5:23 pm
If you have read any material about VB.NET you would know that it IS object oriented and modern and well supported in the Windows environment. That’s the point… VB.NET is all these things. VB 6.0 is not. Therefore changing to VB.NET will give the same benefits as C# or Java and the syntax is more familiar to former VB6 programmers. You are raising the same point that hundreds of VB.NET programmers are raising, the programmers that didn’t sign the petition, the ones that have already switched to .NET. The real choice is whether to continue with COM development (therefore staying with VB6) or move to either Java or .NET |
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Walt |
March 14, 2005: 5:22 pm
If you have read any material about VB.NET you would know that it IS object oriented and modern and well supported in the Windows environment. That’s the point… VB.NET is all these things. VB 6.0 is not. Therefore changing to VB.NET will give the same benefits as C# or Java and the syntax is more familiar to former VB6 programmers. You are raising the same point that hundreds of VB.NET programmers are raising, the programmers that didn’t sign the petition, the ones that have already switched to .NET. The real choice is whether to continue with COM development (therefore staying with VB6) or move to either Java or .NET |
angsuman