Am I on Candid Camera?... About to Flip Out

Seemed pretty clear to me... You doubt that I'd find the MSDN useful... (wink )

Considering the complaining I've done about it here in this forum, I suppose that is above the waist.

I really am a reasonable person ( I think ). It just p****s me off when products don't work as I think they should. Especially when it seems to me that it should be obvious to the manufacturer.
 
WOW

I don't think I could stomach reading an ENTIRE programming manual from cover to cover! I am more of a reference type of guy.

I have found however that reding up on the concepts behind the language can be helpful.

There are several articles on the net both for and against the OO aproach and after reading those i came to the conclusion that the old saying about pleasuring all the people all the time is true.

What is right for one is most definately not right for another.

Me? I love .net

I am still early on in the learning phase and it doesnt help that i have to use VB6 every day in my work (it clouds the .net mind!) and although I find tasks harder to accomplish in .net, I find this is purely because I don't know how!

Sure, there are things that microsoft have made more complicated, and sure their support is at best unhelpful but with the wonderful world of www. I have found i can get the answer to almost any problem.

My advice would be to give it time.

And of course, should you find a question to which you need an answer, post it and the Pentium Guy can give us more of his wisdom (You're welcome.)

Dill
 
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You use VB6 in your work every day ( which also implies that you have used it for some time ) and in one version change, they have made things "harder to to accomplish" for someone of your expertise.

Sure, there are things that microsoft have made more complicated, and sure their support is at best unhelpful
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Here's a newsflash... that is not an improvement.

I have purchased ( That makes 6 books now ... the publishing indusry is certainly benefitting from the change to .Net ) "Object Oriented Programming with Visual Basic.Net" and have read 40+ pages. I will finish it, and hopefully will have what the author calls an "epiphany", but so far, I am becoming more convinced than ever.

This stuff is ridiculous.
 
Ah, good ol' VB6 scripters, you sound just like the Cobal/Fortran guys of old.
I disagree with the statement that MS has made things more complicated. I feel .NET is beautifully simple in a way that all preceding languages lacked. What C++ has evolved into is the picture of complexity.
 
And you, IngisKahn will sound just like that also when it happens to you.

For you or anyone else to put on the "It's so beautifully simple" act is disingenuous baloney.

I challenge you to demonstrate the "beautiful simplicity" of VB.net right here in this forum.
Should be easy.
Why does this forum even exist... since it's so simple.

This ''ol VB6 scripter" will be very grateful to you to learn how easy it is.
Thanks in advance.
 
I learned VB mostly in VB.Net. VB6 doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me and vb6 doesn't always do what I'd expect it to do. I'm still confused by the fact that it has classes, but is only a little bit object oriented and lacks inheritence which prevents versioning bugs. I have to spend a lot of time looking things up and learning the specifics of that language.

For some reason there isn't a ".Text" property for each visual control, so I never know which control uses ".Text" or ".Caption".

I understand that VB6 is a very productive language, just as .Net is. But since I'm not used to VB6 I wouldn't be very productive in it until I learned all of the in's and out's, exceptions and patches.

I won't even touch on making my own components or ActiveX/Com because thats like a whole 'nother languge seperate from VB6.

:p
 
As a user of VB6 I am in concurrance with realolman. What used to be so simple to do in vb6 now takes 15 extra lines of code in .net. I also find the namespaces a PITA. I do however like the OOP and inheritence. Some things are just easier to do in vb6 (not to mention that the programs ran faster). I also found, however, that some things are easier to do in .net. All in all, I don't necessarily like the changes in .net (I loved my activex controls :)) but it will help professional coders. Being a hobbyist, I really don't benefit from it since I have to basically re-learn the language. Learning API was hard enough for me, now I have to ditch it and learn all the namespaces and classes. I found myself bookmarking the msdn page (yikes!). I have to consistantly look for help from these forums to get anywhere. Some things I have been able to do by myself, for instance accessing the registry, writing and reading to files, but there are other things that just have me stumped. I have finally decided to drop vb.net and C# and just go with C++. I figure if i'm going to be confused and be a newbie, I might as well use a language that I can at least (minus the .NET part of it) use on windows and linux/unix machines. I also use C++ and x86 assembler as well as learning the assembler for the motorola 68000 series for school, so it helps in that aspect as well. But all in all, I might not like the change that was made for .NET but it's a necessary evil in order to move ahead.

As for the msdn documentation... it is sketchy at best and rarely provides newbies like me simple clear examples to learn from (if there is an example at all!). I have bought books for .NET but haven't been able to find a good one that is a beginner -> advanced one. I don't care if it's 3,000 pages, but I'm tired of reading books and getting the next one in the series only to think to myself "ugh, this isn't intermediate, it a beginner's with 2 chapters of new information.". Then I had a book that I sold because I opened it up and the first remedial chapter that was suppost to "refresh" my memory, I had no clue what was going on. I think for such a big change they should have really done something better with msdn.
 
Appearently you guys are discussing MSDN right now but I just wanna say this about the VB6 to VB.Net transition.

A while back after programming with VB6 for some time I started learning c++. It didn't last long because I missed my RAD and good ol' InStr() (string manipulations got the best of me in C++). But I found myself missing so many aspects C++ even after only a month of programming in it. To me C++ (and even C#) make alot more sense then VB6 ever did, but it was easier for me to stick with VB where I could whip up quick apps in minutes. Even so I still find myself declaring structs and int X instead of Types/Structures and Dim X As Integer. (As a matter of fact, more than once I spent several minutes trying to figure out what was wrong with my syntax when I declared a struct.)

Anyways, when I got VB.Net I spent days just marveling at such nifty features as full OOP and Logical form control (no more unload me and showing forms without declaring and instantiating them) and incredible new operators like bitshift and shortcircuited logical operators and oh! Strict typing! I didn't notice any of the missing VB6 features. It seemed like they removed so many things wrong with VB and added so many things that should have been there all along. I was personally very confused by commands such as form1.Print when print was not even a member of the form class and crazy irregular syntax of a few functions like Line.

Sure it took some time to adjust. I had to learn how to use the graphics class, I had to relearn how to manage forms and at first all the explicit casts and conversions seemed to get in the way, but now the code makes so much more sense and the classes involved are so much more useful.

Of course VB.Net is not perfect. I'm not happy about the fact that sometimes people need to download the rather large .Net framework to run my programs and in my personal programming experience JIT compilation is really unnecessary 99 out of 100 times but in my (amateur) experience VB.Net is simply so much more productive and logical.

My only regret is that I bought VB instead of C#. Any of you other VB users can call me crazy but I like C syntax better. Even if I always forget to close my brackets. And the second equal sign.
 
marble_eater said:
My only regret is that I bought VB instead of C#. Any of you other VB users can call me crazy but I like C syntax better. Even if I always forget to close my brackets. And the second equal sign.
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lol, I am a member of a php board and you wouldn't believe how many times the answer was "you forgot the second equals sign bud."
 
realolman said:
And you, IngisKahn will sound just like that also when it happens to you.
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Not sure what you mean. I've been with BASIC from BASICA to Quick Basic to VB to .NET; I've transitioned from C to C++ to ATL to COM to C# all the while keeping my ASM skills sharp (btw, MSIL is cool and worth learning). By far the easiest, the most logical, and the most pleasurable transition has been to .NET

I understand that when you only know one programming language then Anything Else seems backwards. Take consolation in the fact that VB is now a full-fledged OOP language and that the skills you gain learing .NET can be applied elsewhere.
 
What I meant IngisKahn, was that I feel your post re: good ol' VB scripters, fortran and cobal guys of old, was condescending, and the "beautifully simple" stuff was disingenuous baloney.

A multi-languaged, sharp skilled guy like you should have picked up on that, I think. But then I'm just a one programming language guy... and an obsolete language at that.

I retract my statement about you're ever getting left behind. You'll probably always be cutting edge.

I'm still waiting for your demonstration and your explanation of why this forum even exists, considering the "beautiful simplicity" of VB. net
 
Man, this thread is turning into a flame war.

Realolman - All I can say is everyone has their own opinions. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it (unless you're forced to... like your job). Hell I know some people who prefer Delphi over VB6, or even fortran over any language. Use what you want.

We all agree, to some extent at least, that Microsoft has made some careless choices regarding MSDN. Some of us here just live with that. Some of us don't like it and have moved on to other languages.

Once in a while there's a flame war deciding between languages (I remember a few months ago there was one between C# and VB.NET - I won't go there). Sure, sometimes we have arguments, Hell after that flame war I decided to try out C# and eventually liked it, some of us did the same too.

Basically my point is, maybe .NET isn't so simple ("Beautifully simple" as some of you put it) to you - but that's what this forum is for.

We're here to help.

-The Pentium Guy
 
At the end of the day MSDN is just one of the options provided by Microsoft as a source of help, ultimately your mileage will vary depending on how you approach it as a source of documentation and how you phrase your search criteria. Personally I tend to find it useful when needing to lookup method syntax, information regarding exceptions that may be thrown, acceptable ranges for parameters etc. Pretty much the stuff I would expect from library documentation. Yes the sample code included can be of variable quality - however other resources such as the 101 samples, www.gotdotnet.com, channel9 etc also provide another source of information and examples. If you have an issue with MSDN etc. why not take it up with Microsoft and let them know your issues?

As to why this forum exists - people will need help regardless of the language being used and a forum can be more than a simple source of code samples. If VB6 was so simple what was the need for the plethora of VB6 related forums? They are (or were depending on your current language choice) a valuable resource - just the same as this forum (hopefully) and others are a valuable resource to .Net programmers.
A programming language, just like a spoken language, can be simple and elegant - this does not preclude it from being able to express complex concepts; concepts which people may need external input to be able to express correctly or with maximum effect. This isn't always the fault of the underlying language or the person using it, but surely seeking help in a constructive way and then learning from this is how we progress in life.
 
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I felt IngisKahn's posts were condescending and I was offended by them.

I will do no more flaming or complaining about .net

My reasons for trying to learn .net are probably about the same as anyone else's, including not wanting to be left behind when older languages are no longer supported.

I do not believe .net is simple, nor was VB6, or any other language.
 
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