RIP VB6

[Tom Dacon]

Yesterday, April 8th, Microsoft officially dropped support for Visual Basic
6.0.

COM-based VB1 through VB6 had a long and successful life from 1991 to 2008 -
seventeen years. I heard elsewhere that VB6 was ten years old, but I don't
know that myself for sure. What I do know for sure is that I programmed with
COM-based VB starting with VB1 and proceeding through the versions even past
the introduction of .Net. Loved it, hated it, but made my living at it, and
switched to .Net framework programming as soon as I could get a gig doing
it.

VB.Net and the .Net framework are eight years old this year. The framework
came out from under non-disclosure in June, 2000 at the PDC conference, and
some of us were programming C# with Notepad and compiling it from the
command line no more than a couple of days later. What do you suppose the
future will hold for the .Net framework when it's seventeen years old?

Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting

 

[Tom Shelton]

Yesterday, April 8th, Microsoft officially dropped support for Visual Basic
6.0.

COM-based VB1 through VB6 had a long and successful life from 1991 to 2008 -
seventeen years. I heard elsewhere that VB6 was ten years old, but I don't

Wasn't VB only based on COM starting with v5?

 

[Tom Dacon]

You know, Tom, as soon as I reread what I posted I remembered that, although
I couldn't remember just which version was rewritten on top of COM. VB5, you
say? Thank you.

One thing I DO remember was writing VBX controls in the C language for VB3,
and that was far from COM.

Tom

 

[Tom Dacon]

And lest we forget, we should all hoist a glass to Alan Cooper, who started
the whole thing.

Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting

 

[Tom Shelton]

You know, Tom, as soon as I reread what I posted I remembered that, although
I couldn't remember just which version was rewritten on top of COM. VB5, you
say? Thank you.

One thing I DO remember was writing VBX controls in the C language for VB3,
and that was far from COM.

I'm pretty sure that VB4 still used VBX controls...

 

[Lloyd Sheen]

I'm pretty sure that VB4 still used VBX controls...

VB4 was the first com based VB. I remember this because I was on a team
that converted a VB3 app which used VBX's (an I did a few with C - no ++ no
#).

And 1991 was first year of VB. I got my first copy at the launch in Long
Beach. Had to wait 3 weeks to use it since this was a holiday. Being from
Ottawa Canada there was no great distribution system then. VB1 was great if
you had Petzold'ed an app.

VB5 as the first version to provide OCX's.

Lloyd Sheen

 

[Tom Shelton]

VB4 was the first com based VB. I remember this because I was on a team
that converted a VB3 app which used VBX's (an I did a few with C - no ++ no
#).

VB4 came in 2 versions, one 32-bit and 16-bit. Are you sure it was COM
based?

 

[Lloyd Sheen]

VB4 came in 2 versions, one 32-bit and 16-bit. Are you sure it was COM
based?

Sure, we followed the doc which contained various methods of doing same
thing. It was the first time you could make things quick by implementing
early binding or make it easier to code with late binding. I think the
early binding was called the house of bricks. There was a third method in
between but can't remember what it was or what it was called.

We used VB3 first, then VB4, never used VB5 but VB6 was best version of the
classic VB.

LS

 

[Lloyd Sheen]

VB4 came in 2 versions, one 32-bit and 16-bit. Are you sure it was COM
based?

Found the three methods:

House of Straw, House of Bricks and House of Sticks


LS

 

[Tom Dacon]

Man, you're taking me back...

Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting

 

[Tom Shelton]

Sure, we followed the doc which contained various methods of doing same
thing. It was the first time you could make things quick by implementing
early binding or make it easier to code with late binding. I think the
early binding was called the house of bricks. There was a third method in
between but can't remember what it was or what it was called.

We used VB3 first, then VB4, never used VB5 but VB6 was best version of the
classic VB.

Cool. I couldn't remember for sure - I actually never used VB4 very
heavily (though, I still have my 32-bit copy somewhere, I sold the
16-bit version). I used it for a class - but VB5 came out shortly after, so I
upgraded. So, VB5 and 6 saw my heaviest usage

 

[Lloyd Sheen]

Man, you're taking me back...

Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting

Me too. The app I was talking about was being released in its new 32bit
form on that new OS Windows 95. It was being featured in a book (with a
diskette) so they wanted screen shots of it running in Win95. Well we had
the beta and I spent the better part of a day installing from ...... the 57
diskettes.

Oh the good old days.

Yeah sure.
LS

 

[Tom Dacon]

Oh the good old days.

Yeah sure.
LS

Here's one probably only a few people remember -

In VB1, I was putting my comments above the sub or function line, like a
good C programmer, as in:

'
' Comments here
'
Sub Main()
End Sub

When I loaded a project into VB2 for the first time, all the comments that
lay outside the methods were swept up and collected into the declarations
area at the top of the module! So I had to find the comments for each of the
methods and put them INSIDE the method, through god knows how much code. I
kept doing it that way ever since, through all the later versions of VB. I
think that was fixed in VB3, but by that time I was in the habit of putting
them inside so I just kept doing it that way. With VB.Net I started putting
them outside again.

Tom

 

[Lloyd Sheen]

Here's one probably only a few people remember -

In VB1, I was putting my comments above the sub or function line, like a
good C programmer, as in:

'
' Comments here
'
Sub Main()
End Sub

When I loaded a project into VB2 for the first time, all the comments that
lay outside the methods were swept up and collected into the declarations
area at the top of the module! So I had to find the comments for each of
the methods and put them INSIDE the method, through god knows how much
code. I kept doing it that way ever since, through all the later versions
of VB. I think that was fixed in VB3, but by that time I was in the habit
of putting them inside so I just kept doing it that way. With VB.Net I
started putting them outside again.

Tom

Don't think I ever used VB2.

LS

 

[Alex Clark]

'Tis a sad day indeed.

I have fond memories of pushing VB to its limits, writing code late at night
on a RedBull fuelled coding kick. Cursing the archaic printing methods, the
lack of inheritance for classes, the way MS deliberately broke
multithreading with each successive service pack. The excitement when VB5
came out and offered compilation to native code for the first time. The
disappointment at the lack of progress when VB6 was finally released.

I remember reading up with excitement about what would have been VB7 also -
a non-.NET successor to VB6 which MS canned in favour of VB.NET. There were
even a couple of screenshots showing nifty features like using the WFC
instead of the giant (for those days) VB runtime DLL, and allowing only
certain parts to be statically linked into your app. It promised proper
multi-threading along with true OO and parameterised constructors for
classes. All in all, it looked like it would've been quite a powerful tool.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they went the .NET route (even though I have
great misgivings about the WPF route they're now taking) but I can't help
but wonder what VB7 might've been like...

Ahh well.


-Alex