Testers, Try This Program

Abstract

Colasuonno comments on Visual Basic.Net, the latest version of Microsoft's Visual Basic and recommends that engineers try it. Despite marketing missteps, this program works.

Despite marketing misteps, the program works

As an expert in software for testing, you have seen a lot of products. Name one of your favorites. That's easy, Visual Basic 6. But test engineers should try Visual Basic.Net. It's the latest version of Microsoft's Visual Basic.

But it's been out for almost two years. That's right, but test engineers who haven't started using it are missing out on some great enhancements to the language and environment. VB.Net is now on equal footing with all of the other computer languages in Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET).

Really? I thought .NET was something to do with XML or Web Services? Yes, the messaging for the test and measurement industry was way off the mark. After all, how many engineers care about creating "Distributed XML-based Web Services?" I know I don't and I bet that for the vast majority of test engineers/programmers that is of no use whatsoever.

So, what does it give engineers? VB.NET is really Visual Basic 7.1 with the 2003 release. It's as easy to use as Visual Basic 6 and it provides access to a wealth of new capabilities provided by the .NET Framework. It now is a fully objected-oriented language including inheritance, support of multithreading, new console capabilities (you couldn't write VB console apps in the past), structured error handling, better cross language debugging (this was really hard to do if you had an application that combined VB6 and VC6), and better DLL version management.

What is the .NET Framework and what makes it better? Well, the new run-time library is far more comprehensive than the old Visual Basic 6 runtime library. The .NET Framework is composed of the common language runtime (CLR) and a unified set of class libraries. The CLR is responsible for runtime services such as language integration, security enforcement, and memory, process, and thread management. In addition, the CLR has a role at development time with features such as life-cycle management, strong type naming, cross-language exception handling, and dynamic binding, that reduce the amount of code that a developer must write to turn logic into a reusable component.

What about legacy programs? Programs can largely be brought forward into the new environment with a modest amount of work. When a Visual Basic 6.0 application is upgraded (via an upgrade wizard) to Visual Basic .NET, the conversion of some code cannot be done because of syntactical or architectural differences between the old and new versions. For this reason, functions in the Visual Basic 6.0 Compatibility library are used to allow the code to run in Visual Basic .NET, without the need for extensive modification. These functions mimic Visual Basic 6.0 behavior.

What about connecting to instruments with add-ins? There are a couple of ways to do this. You can continue to write code directly using VISA as before. Agilent and National Instruments provide a .NET interface to the VISA libraries.

You aren't a sales person for Microsoft are you? No, but I really like this product.