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!

That reminds me of a couple projects I did way back in the day (3+ years ago, now), one had a graph that had to be generated and updated in real-time without losing data quality, but keeping a nice looking graph... it actually worked in VB, but it was very slow... It ended up that I had to re-write it in C++ to make it faster due to the rate of data collection...

We had a similar problem with a VB program at my next employer after that -- a program in VB was supposed to handle not only real-time display, but also input the data from the industrial scanner... Needless to say, the overhead of VB made it far too slow to handle problem, so I re-wrote it in C++ (nobody else had any programming skill except VB, so I was the only one that could do it).

That is semi-humorous; Historically, I have ended up being the only link between a project that would fail with just the skillset of the remainder of the team and success... Often due to my long list of languages and deeper-than-average understanding of the HTTP protocol (which is easy, and the fact that so many web developers don't know it angers me to no end).

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Originally posted by e_dawg
That reminds me of a couple projects I did way back in the day (3+ years ago, now), one had a graph that had to be generated and updated in real-time without losing data quality, but keeping a nice looking graph... it actually worked in VB, but it was very slow... It ended up that I had to re-write it in C++ to make it faster due to the rate of data collection...

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Actually, I was referring to a structural graph (you know, nodes & edges).

I have only used VB6 and it certainly has is ups and downs.

You aren't going to find a quicker way to write front ends to database/spreadsheet manipulation in the windows environment....

Not really fast enough for much that I would want as computational codes, but useful none-the-less.

It is possible to create complex applications in VB6 that perform very well. I was with one company that wrote structural engineering software with Visual Basic. These were very complicated applications that ran fast.

A lot of it comes down to the quality of the code. One of the main reasons most visual basic programs are slow is because they aren't designed well. It is very easy to rely on Visual Basic to do everything for you instead of concentrating on good design and architecture.

It will rarely be as fast as well designed C++ code, but it's speed often shouldn't be too much slower. It's usefulness certainly isn't limited to trivial applications.

Now that I supported it, I would like to say that it does have many shortcomings. Number one on this list has to be lack of class inheritance. It also lacks the flexibility that C++ has, specifically when trying to interact directly with Windows.

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Originally posted by DeadKen
Actually, I was referring to a structural graph (you know, nodes & edges).

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That would be impossibly slow in VB...

They were just insane at that place -- the specs I had to code to for their QA were insane!

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Originally posted by Boldy
A lot of it comes down to the quality of the code. One of the main reasons most visual basic programs are slow is because they aren't designed well. It is very easy to rely on Visual Basic to do everything for you instead of concentrating on good design and architecture.

It will rarely be as fast as well designed C++ code, but it's speed often shouldn't be too much slower. It's usefulness certainly isn't limited to trivial applications.

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As of late, I must agree with this -- VB was optimized heavily between then and now. VB6 is actually far faster and cleaner than VB4 was (which is the version of VB that I wrote most of the VB code I have written in)... It almost rivals poorly-designed GUI programs written in C++, anymore.

The downside is that it makes it too easy for bad programmers -- poor-quality programmers never design their code, and they have no clue how to write an optimized hack, which degrades the poorer than average performance even more.

I've programmed in various languages, and find that VB is great for creating fast projects that need to interact with databases--ADO is the best!

C++ is faster computation-wise--great for games, graphics, etc. VB is easier, which decreases production time for general office applications.

Especially when you get into developing in COM/COM+, VB programmers will see that the gap between C++ and VB is closing. Arguing about which is better is pointless. You can open a paint can with the end of a hammer, and pound a nail into a stud with a screwdriver--as long as you meet the time constraints, the boss ain't going to care!