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

[Richard Crist]

Excellent

 

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/t6b8wa5e.aspx

 

Now you're making sense. :cool:

[realolman]

"You nearly had me roped and tied, altar bound, hypnotized. Sweet freedom whispered in my ear..."

 

No.

 

This is not about me, or the time I spend posting or not posting... I have done my part. I have bought their products and have spent inordiinate amounts of time trying to decipher things that should not take inordinate amounts of time to decipher.

 

This is about the pretzel logic messes that Microsoft just plops out there in huge volume.

 

I returned to the one book that I had been reading, and since most of it was stuff that I did already somewhat know, I thought, well I'll try some of the Web application stuff.

 

Here we go again:

 

At this point, I don't remember exactly what it's beef was was, but the IDE wouldn't allow me to open a web app.

 

Ended up that I should have "installed the FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions and World Wide Web Server" BEFORE I installed Visual Studio and the .NET framework. Nothing in the Visual Studio installation process told me that. Since one of the big deals of this .net is supposed to be to write web apps, you'd think they might have mentioned it. It's got a prerequesite CD that seems to me could have picked up on that.. they could have put a check box on the installation process that asked if I wanted to use the web apps stuff and taken care of it themselves or shown me what to do... but no, they just let me go right ahead and install the Vis studio, and then a couple months later when I try to use one of it's features, it squawks with error messages, that don't even point directly to the problem.

 

It's not even like you had to do anything special, just a couple checkmarks.. didn't even need a disk... the stuff was already on the drive! It's just that now things were installed out of order, and now I had to fix them.

 

I had to type stuff at the command prompt. Why in the world do you need to mess around with the command prompt in this day and age? No, I've done that before, I'm not going to ask a rhetorical question, I'm going to make a statement:

You should not have to mess around with the command prompt.

 

 

I had to reinstall Visual studio twice more, and sift through noninformative error messages and "help pages" for 2 hours before it seemed happy, and would allow me to open a new web app.

 

Now, what was it I bought this stuff for? Oh yeah that's right... to relearn in a new version what I could already do in the last.

 

Back to the simple web app. Well that was easy enough. Let's run it.

 

Oh my another error. It can't find the file. Maybe I need to manuallly attach? Change the config. file? Am I a member of the Debugger's group? If the IIS was installed after the .NET framework, I may need to repair the Net framework? If I knew all this, I wouldn't be in the Help system.

 

Honestly, I don't know how why anyone would defend such baloney. I gotta go through all this crap to make a piddlin little web app, but it's pre installed so I can sign up for EarthLink or NetZero with one keystroke? Come on now!

 

Who among you has not wanted to take a baseball bat to the monitor at some point? Submit yourself for sainthood, and/or psychiatric evaluation, but don't make excuses for Microsoft's sloppiness and arrogance.

Edited February 13, 2005 by realolman

[ThePentiumGuy]

My turn to rant. I mostly skimmed over these posts, so feel free to skim this one over too, becuase it would only be fair.

 

OOP is the new wave of the future. Trust me, once you learn how OOP operates, you can basically program in any OOP lanaguage you want. For example, the fact that I know VB.NET makes my Java course so much easier, whereas other people in my class are sitting there typing String HelloWorld = New HelloWorld(String "Hello world") - semicolon left out intentionally.

 

It's a large shift from a procedural language like VB6, whose behind the scenes methods cover things up and make the language easier. Trust me - I came from vb6, and I knew the pain of switching to .NET.

 

I used to be in the exact same position as you, ranting about .NET. Now I realize I said that "I loved .NET when I first got it" (or something along those lines) - but it took me some time to really appreciate the language. I felt a little quirky using it. What bothered me almost instantly was the fact that a lot of code was generated for you. I immediately got confused upon opening "Windows Form Designer Generated Code." And also the other thing that bothered me was that each event had 'strange' arguments (lol, things like "ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e as System.KeyEventArgs). And it took a long time to figure out how to show a new form.

 

Now, once I got into actually coding and making applications with this - I found it great. I recently opened up VB6 (after about 2 years!) and found that it was kind of weird I guess.

 

Learning an OOP language really reforms you (and could spoil you if you switch back to a procedural language). In VB.NET you could say something like form1.FormBorderStyle = FormBorderStyles.None. I don't exactly remember how to do this in vb6... but I think (don't quote me on this), it was something like form1.FormBorderSTyle = BorderStyles_None (again, I haven't done vb6 in a few years). Dim c as Color = Color.Blue... .NET keeps it simple.

 

Now, about the whole Microsoft sucks when it comes to documentation rant. I think it's safe to say that there's a general consensus that agrees with this. They do document some things well, true, but other things they tend to leave blank or keep it (very) vague.

 

Moving to a more OO style give much more long term benefits in terms of reuse, maintainability and architectural design choices

Very true. Gone are the days where you program large modules, nowadays everything is divided into several classes.

 

Edit: Your comment about the pricing, heh, sorry - that's what monopolies do (ex: Google bumped my pagerank down becuase I didn't have google ads on my site (they did this to a lot of people - now it's no longer first when you search, it's backed up by a ProgrammersHeaven link which links to my site)).

 

Who among you has not wanted to take a baseball bat to the monitor at some point? Submit yourself for sainthood, and/or psychiatric evaluation, but don't make excuses for Microsoft's sloppiness and arrogance.

Been there, done that (well...almost). I wholeheartedly agree with the 'slopiness and arrogance' part. And you are right though - there's no excuse for that. And it's quite annoying when they change some source code for the next version, and then they switch it back for the version after that (see DirectX). They can really let you down.

 

It sucks in the beginning (trust me, I know where you're coming from). Microsoft can drive you nuts sometimes. Keep an open mind.

 

My advice:

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. (Clint Eastwood, Heartbreak Ridge)

 

-The Pentium Guy

Edited February 13, 2005 by ThePentiumGuy

[PlausiblyDamp]

Every time I've personally installed VS.Net on a PC without IIS installed it has given a warning that unless I install IIS (and offered instructions on what to do) I would be unable to create web applications; along with the option to skip the install of IIS and continue if I did not want IIS installed at this point - not sure why your install never prompted.

 

Now, what was it I bought this stuff for? Oh yeah that's right... to relearn in a new version what I could already do in the last.

If that was your only reason for the upgrade then, to be blunt, why did you bother? Surely the reason for an upgrade is to take advantage of newer features / functionality offered by the new platform, and realise that there will be a learning curve associated with the fact. To upgrade to a system that is vastly different to the existing one and expect everything to stay the same is shortsighted to say the least. If the upgrade was made without doing even a cursory check of the differences then expect to be shocked.

[Denaes]

I got forced into .Net. I'd taken vb6 in college, started working at a bank and my boss saw me making apps in vb6 and bringing them into the bank to help with my work.

 

So he says "I'll get you vb6 as well." and in the mail 3 days later comes VB.net. Because it was cheaper.

 

I got a basic VB.net book and learned it. It was different, but not really worse or better.

 

Almost immediately I was struck by the simplicity. :eek:

 

If you EVER wanted to change the text on something, it was .Text!

 

Not .Caption or .Label. Just .Text

 

There was a Visual Basic namespace so you could "Rig" your app into working until you found the correct way.

 

I'd just finished doing a 6 month application that I have no clue as to how I could have done in VB6. Just using the ADO.Net wizards and database explorer... f'ing amazing.

 

In like 2 minutes you can have a fully typed ram representation of your database in a typed dataset. :eek:

 

Now ASP.Net is another cow. This has confused me, but I havn't put 100% effort in yet.

 

First you have to have IIS installed on your machine to really use it and test things. It might even be a requirement to even open an ASP.Net application.

 

After that it's just like VB.net, only with web centric commands and having to learn how to deal with a server side language.

 

Right now I'm in the process of getting my .Net MCSD certifications after a hiatus from .net working with PHP.

[realolman]

Geez, PlausiblyDamp I was being facetious. It was meant as a jab at MS for their changing around of the language in a manner that I consider to be capricious, arbitrary, and arrogant.

 

I can tell you that after installing it three times, there was no indication of any necessity of any absence or presence of any level of IIS. The IIS was indeed installed, just not in its entirety. Then, after I installed the Visual Studio, I find out from the Visual Studio, that I did it in the wrong order. I gotta mess around for 2 hours with the computer, the installation and the configuration so it suits the programming environment, so I can spend 15 minutes trying to learn the language.

 

I think they could and should have made it a heck of a lot easier.

I think that is a failure on the part of MS and I have every right, as their customer, to be p****d.

 

You are an expert on .NET.

 

Go look at the Visual Basic.Net sites and try to make a "cursory" or any other kind of check on the new features from the perspective of a buyer who is not aquainted with the product. It's all a bunch of "rich and robust" booshwah. They tell you nothing useful.

 

Thanks PentiumGuy... maybe that's what I'm looking for... some validation... "no, you're not crazy... a lot of this stuff DOES suck."

 

Maybe there are relatively normal people out there who just want to use the computer to figure out the things that come up without spending a lifetime programming. A couple hours or days here and there to write an app that will solve a problem or perform a task of some kind. I think that is a very useful thing and a wonderful niche for a programming language product.

 

( there's a project for you PentiumGuy... I'd use it ... )

 

I think it is where Visual Basic used to be. If you want to spend the rest of your life programming, go use a "real" language. What do you need with three or four languages that all do the same thing? You don't have to wreck a good thing. If I want to print on a form instead of the "console" as part of my debugging style, who's problem is that? There's more room in the IDE that way...You gotta get rid of it???

 

Here's a good one Danaes:

I wanted VB6 on the notebook they got us at work last year, just for stuff that may have been somewhat on the level of what you said you were doing at the bank ... little apps to help you out wherever.

 

The Corporate IT people decided that it had to be the full blown Visual Studio Enterprise version with all the languages ( what are they? C++ ,VBasic, J ... I don't even know )

To top off all their wisdom, they will not install help... No MSDN.

Go figure.

Edited February 13, 2005 by realolman

[ThePentiumGuy]

To top off all their wisdom, they will not install help... No MSDN.

I doubt you'd find that useful ;).

[coldfusion244]

I doubt you'd find that useful ;).

 

Actually I find MSDN quite useful sometimes :). Mostly because i'm a .NET newbie and don't know all the built in classes yet... It really does help though, when I am looking and I type in collection (like we had in vb6) and I find that there is a collection class, but to get any use out of it you have to derive a class from it. there has been countless times i've just typed in for example "Sockets" and looked at the sockets class, or compile errors... So it does have it's uses even though half of the documentation looks like it's missing a huge chunk of text and arbitrarily stops at some points...

[realolman]

I guess Coldfusion244 told you, PentiumGuy.

[Denaes]

I use the MSDN all the time.

 

The only thing I've found it to be no help with was the System.XML namespace. It's got no examples and everything is vaguely worded... at least from my perspective.

 

But the online MSDN is just as good (if not better) than the version on your computer normally. I mean if you're using VB4, I'd rather have the old MSDN than the internet version. Otherwise it's more up to date.

[realolman]

Danaes, what was the name of the book you mentioned in your earlier post? thanks

[Jay1b]

VB.NET is easier the VB6* in my opinion, the only thing thats harder is the help system doesnt seem as good to me.

 

*I programmed in VB5 throughout uni, so i have got experience of it!

[Denaes]

Danaes' date=' what was the name of the book you mentioned in your earlier post? thanks[/quote']

 

I just had Complete VB.Net and the forums here. Complete VB.Net broke everything up to explain the framework in general and to touch upon topics, usually not in terribly great detail.

 

It's aimed for people who already know how to program and just want a large reference book for said languge.

 

There are also books specifically out there for VB6 programmers who are upgrading their skillset.

 

Honestly, one book you NEED is Object Oriented Programming using Visual Basic.Net by O'reilly books. You need this because you need to know OOP in order to take full advantage of .Net, Java and I believe C++ (fully or partially OOP?) and it sounds like you've got experience up to your next, but not Object Oriented experience.

 

Complete VB.Net touches upon it, but the O'Reilly book is great.

 

After reading through and practicing with these topics, the way the framework is setup will start to make more sense.

 

After reading and applying Object Oriented principles, you'll understand why Listbox.items.add is so great when you see any control with an items works identically.

 

My favorite move in .Net is to create collections, then create an object type thats in the collection and for a For Each... loop. Works like magic. This is how you use the listboxes and any other control with collections within them.

 

I'm not saying you'll like .Net any more, but you'll have a better understanding of "why" things are done this way.

[realolman]

Denaes, this OOP for VB book is by J.P. Hamilton and has some sort of water fowl on the cover, like maybe an egret ?

 

ISBN 0-596-00146-0

 

Is that the one?

[Denaes]

That is the book.

 

OOP isn't language specific, but I started to learn it in college with Java and was confused and bored to death by the dry reading.

 

This book... well it isn't a Tom Clancy novel, but it's readable :D I just sat down and read the majority of it on a long bus ride.

 

It's a nice book that doesn't assume you know anything more than basic programming principles and teaches a bit of the framework as well as using notepad to create classes and compile things command line the first chapter or two, before moving onto the .Net IDE.

 

You can buy this book or get an electronic version readable online through safari (there is a link on Oreilly.com)

[realolman]

Thanks, 23 bucks at amazon . I saw the safari thing too.

[ThePentiumGuy]

Oh - I should have been a little more clear on my previoius post. I meant you can just go to www.msdn.com and get the help instead of having it installed on the system (or am I missing something here?).

 

-TPG

[realolman]

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.

[Dill]

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

Edited February 18, 2005 by Dill

[realolman]

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

 

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.

[IngisKahn]

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.

[realolman]

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.

[Denaes]

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

[coldfusion244]

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.

[snarfblam]

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.