The Visual Basic Niche

A lot of people say that Visual Basic is a useless, bad (the word go on) programming suite. Some people say it is intended for rapid GUI devlopment. Both arguments have strong and weak points, but one thing is for sure, Visual Basic is so entrenched in its niche it may never be dethroned.

The best use for visual basic is for the small business, and/or one man operation to make a custom program that does exactly what the person needs it to do. It is quickly learned, and with only a little knowlege of the language, you can do some pretty useful things.

The best example of this is a local machine shop owner that bought and learned VB in about a day, and then set out writing programs that organize spreadsheets, and perform other basic tasks. This man doesn't care about a more productive, more powerful language, simply because he already knows this one.

.NET utilizes VB in full. There is no VBScript anymore. SO VB has a place.

My opinion and stance on VB is this. I view it the same way I view COBOL. It was made for business folk who need to easily create a program that acts and looks professional. I think it is a matter of preference. Right now I am learning to program Win32 in C. The time it takes me to create a dialog box and switch() out all the commands and messages is about the time that a person using VC++ (or VB for that matter) could be halfway done with what they are doing. Some people (like me) take pride in learning how to do stuff manually. But if you don't want to, I don't blame you. :)

All indications I have seen, MS is trying very hard to convert users from VB to C#.

I can see why. I think the average VB programmer can at least get started with C# in a day. They don't need to learn the more advanced stuff, but its there, not like the dead-end VB hits.

i totally agree vb is a gd programming language. With the launch of .net, vb is going to be a very impt and easy to use language. I tried my hands on c# and found it very very similar to java. I suppose it would be gd for OO kind of programming. The only drawback of vb is that it is platform dependent.

However, considering the number of machines worldwide running microsoft OS, vb should still be one of the chosen language for a long long time to come :D

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Originally posted by simple_thinker
i totally agree vb is a gd programming language. With the launch of .net, vb is going to be a very impt and easy to use language. I tried my hands on c# and found it very very similar to java. I suppose it would be gd for OO kind of programming. The only drawback of vb is that it is platform dependent.

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VB has it's place; for easy database development or simple/quick GUI work, VB is great.

It does have it's place in .NET.

VB may be platform dependent, but so is MFC. Heck, even Java can become accidently platform dependent if you use Windows API calls or such. :)

I'm a Senior IT developer in a small development group (about 4 of us) in a large corporation (around 9,000 employees) and our main programming language is VB. We have very short project timelines and if we used C/C++ we'd never meet any of them. VB is simple, quick, and very powerful....and not just for DB applications or applications that want to "look professional".

With it we have been able to create a process that builds out and configures servers and workstations (about 1500 servers and 3000 workstations world wide) from a central console (kind of like a Ghost console) automatically with no user interaction. You can rebuild workstations with several different Ghost images, and put down any combination of software you want on both workstations and servers all from this console. Our processes are so advanced that when companies that sell "console" type software (Ghost, Altiris, On Technologies, etc) look at what we have they are blown away.

Anybody ever notice that when your watching a football game the bottom of the screen gets replaced with the scores from games around the league? What do you think that's written in? That's right...VB.

:-)

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Originally posted by a stoner
Anybody ever notice that when your watching a football game the bottom of the screen gets replaced with the scores from games around the league? What do you think that's written in? That's right...VB.

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Bull... Every broadcaster I know of uses SGI -- most use this strange scripting language (I am unfamiliar with) that does visual manipulations and generates data like that...

The only company that might use such a thing is MSNBC, but nobody else in their right mind would...

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Originally posted by biosx
My opinion and stance on VB is this. I view it the same way I view COBOL. It was made for business folk who need to easily create a program that acts and looks professional. I think it is a matter of preference. Right now I am learning to program Win32 in C. The time it takes me to create a dialog box and switch() out all the commands and messages is about the time that a person using VC++ (or VB for that matter) could be halfway done with what they are doing. Some people (like me) take pride in learning how to do stuff manually. But if you don't want to, I don't blame you. :)

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That's the main reason why I use VB. I would love to have time to learn how to do everything manually, but there isn't a company out there that will give you the time to do this. Unless we need to distibute a program on a large scale, we only have time to do it in VB.

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Originally posted by e_dawg

Bull... Every broadcaster I know of uses SGI --

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I used to subcribe to a VB magazine and there was an article about how a guy at Fox used VB to get all the data needed to show the scores of the games in the graphics when they show all those scoreboards at the bottom.

They may use SGI to display the graphics and shrink the window, but the backend is VB. He also stated that the reason they went with VB was because they were on a short time frame and they would never have finished it on time if they went with another language (he specifically mentioned C/C++).

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The only company that might use such a thing is MSNBC, but nobody else in their right mind would...

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Why not? What would be the problem in going with VB?

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Originally posted by a stoner
I used to subcribe to a VB magazine and there was an article about how a guy at Fox used VB to get all the data needed to show the scores of the games in the graphics when they show all those scoreboards at the bottom.

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I see keywords!

"to get all the data needed"

I guess I can see this -- a little program that acts as client to a high-end backend system that has the data, and downloads it to a file on the desktop that is running the VB program.. Then the other machine accesses the goofy desktop via SMB to get the file for the ticker generation.

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They may use SGI to display the graphics and shrink the window, but the backend is VB. He also stated that the reason they went with VB was because they were on a short time frame and they would never have finished it on time if they went with another language (he specifically mentioned C/C++).



Why not? What would be the problem in going with VB?

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Read above.

Because it cannot handle stuff like that -- you are not looking at the desktop of a windows machine on your TV screen, my friend.

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Originally posted by e_dawg


I see keywords!

"to get all the data needed"

I guess I can see this -- a little program that acts as client to a high-end backend system that has the data, and downloads it to a file on the desktop that is running the VB program.. Then the other machine accesses the goofy desktop via SMB to get the file for the ticker generation.

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Kinda. If I remember correctly, the high-end backend system in your example above is all done via VB. The screen graphics just get the data from the high-end backend system.

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Read above.

Because it cannot handle stuff like that -- you are not looking at the desktop of a windows machine on your TV screen, my friend.

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I'm not talking about the graphics, I'm talking about the data processing. The gathering of the data. The moving of the data from the stadium where the game is being played to the master server. The data being put into a readable DB for the on screen graphics. All done with VB.

Why would this be bad idea in your mind?

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Originally posted by a stoner


Kinda. If I remember correctly, the high-end backend system in your example above is all done via VB. The screen graphics just get the data from the high-end backend system.



I'm not talking about the graphics, I'm talking about the data processing. The gathering of the data. The moving of the data from the stadium where the game is being played to the master server. The data being put into a readable DB for the on screen graphics. All done with VB.

Why would this be bad idea in your mind?

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No, you just implied in your first post that some station did real-time graphics generation in VB...

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Originally posted by e_dawg


No, you just implied in your first post that some station did real-time graphics generation in VB...

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Oops. I just reread it and you're right. Sorry, that wasn't my intent. :eek:

At my last job we were recursing through 100MB+ graphs and creating new graphs. Very complicated stuff. I doubt that could be done well with VB, or very fast.

VB is good at tying GUIs to DBs (ordering systems etc) and general dB stuff. I don't doubt that.

But you won't see high end cad work done in it! I'm still waiting for consequential Dr Dobbs articles featuring work done in VB!