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APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
Microsoft's Visual Basic .Net leaves its Basic legacy behind,
and not necessarily for the better
InfoWorld,
TEST CENTER
THROUGH THE YEARS, Microsoft has constantly upgraded the features of VB (Visual Basic) to keep them in sync with Windows' capabilities. Yet even as VB took on new features, Windows business software got easier to write with each new release of the IDE (integrated development environment). With VB Net, Microsoft took the risky leap of tightening up the language to make it compatible with the .Net Common Language Runtime. Ironically, by making VB Net a more respectable language in terms of its structure and its object-oriented features, Microsoft has alienated some of its most loyal developers.
Microsoft has pushed hard to get developers to move to Net in time for its grand debut in the .Net Server OSes later this year. For example, the latest quarterly refreshing of MSDN (Microsoft Developers Network) Library - the collection of online documentation for Windows programmers - can no longer be viewed or searched using Visual Studio 6. Purveyors of VBoriented Web forums, training classes, books, and conferences got the message and are uniformly obsessed with Net. Anyone learning VB now is under enormous pressure to learn VB Net.
Historically, the core programming skills that are prerequisite for languages such as C and Java have been unnecessary for VB beginners. VB's nofrills syntax allows you to express business processes and logic without having the language get in the way. Vast, murky facilities such as COM+ and the 32-bit Windows API are encapsulated by the language and in...