switching over to .NET

[Guest sticksbs]

Hi all,

 

For the last year I've been using/learning VB 6. And certain things have led me to consider switching to VB .NET. The main one of all things is basically the difference in asthetical design. Having the mouseHover option which VB 6 doesn't have is a big bonus to me, mainly just cause it makes things look nice :) However i'm not sure how fast it will be with image swapping and stuff of that sort.

 

Also I'm not sure if VB .NET has more options such as transparent backgrounds for controls such as the listbox or the textbox, or do I still have to do all the subclassing and painting the backgrounds manually.

 

I can't remember where, but i read something saying how .NET does not create standard win32 files. Are there any restrictions I should know about, in terms of compatibility, reliability etc...

 

And the last thing is are there any advantages or disadvantages of using VC# instead of VB, they seem to essentially have convered in funtionality. The only reason I would prefer C# is becuase I've done a lot of C/C++ programming, and the code structure just seems more natural. Actually JScript seems like the best option as I really like Java's coding structure, however I'm not sure how similar JScript is to C# and VB .NET

 

I'm sorry if these seem like novice questions or whatever, I just wanna get a feel of what might be the best route for me before I purchase more design products.

 

Thanks for your help.

[Guest sticksbs]

Sorry just realized why I wasn't considering JScript, because it's a scripting language. I think I was actually thinking of J#, however although this might allow for cross-platform use, I don't think i'm willing to cut down on efficiency with an interpretor.

[divil]

If you know C syntax and VB syntax, you can pretty much interchange between VB.NET and C# as much as you like. You'll feel at home with both.

 

.NET executables require than the .NET framework runtimes are present on the computer, that's the only restriction. A very small price to pay for the benefits the framework provides. I don't know of anyone actually doing anything with JScript, so I can't say anything about that.

 

Subclassing is vastly easier and mostly unnecessary in .NET. The kind of subclassing you mean, anyway. It is possible to do real subclassing (inheriting and overriding) with .NET, and a lot of the controls are geared so that programmers can owner-draw them anyway. Transparent backgrounds are supported.

[Guest sticksbs]

Thanks for the response divil,

 

I think i'll be switching over to either VB or C#, I think the other benefit that is really attracting me is the exception handling, much more programmer friendly at least for me, since i never understood VB6's error handling that well, but i'm pretty confortable with try-catch-finally blocks.

 

Forgot to ask something though, how does .NET's use of form resizing work. I know I had to create many functions to resize and reposition my form's and all the controls within them in VB6. I heard that .NET has some anchoring properties and scaling properties that can be set so that when the form resizes all the controls within the form resize??? Is this correct or am I still dreaming, and will have to continue to use my own methods to do this?

 

Thanks again for your time...

[divil]

What you heard is correct, .NET Windows Forms have properties which, in the vast majority of situation, provide all you need to tell controls how to resize themselves automatically. It really is very good.