Originally Posted by
Sutra
I've been using visual basic 6.0 for some time now i've gotten pretty good at it, but with the advent of 64bit versions of windows and the fairly new vb.NET craze i find myself wondering if its really necessary to upgrade to .NET. Can vb 6.0 be like other lasting languages such as C and Python? Your thoughts please...
Upgrading to .net is strongly advised.
The upgraded developement environment (IDE) provides a quicker and eassier means of doing coomon stuff in applications.
The upgraded library (Framework 2.0) has more classes then ever
The upgraded language ... what seanbee20 said.
There may be a few things than can be better done in VB than VB.Net but for the most part, all common stuff and more, VB.Net rulez. VB.Net is also capable of using VB libraries (dlls). It may not write a vb dll, but it writes .net dlls which have a bunch of features including code acess security and internal versioning. Btw, .net framework must be installed on the computer that you want to run the .net application. Thus VB.net can write a .net dll wrapper for a vb dll. The Framework 1.0 release has been around from about 2001 so it has a wide implementation of the older vb dlls and there is not much worry about finding code to run a .net application. Basically, VB.Net is were Microsoft programming is heading.
I am not even going to mention web page design and web sevices because that overlaps with ASP.Net, another upgrade to ASP.
Summary: the libraries are clean and consistent. You may need a little trainning/practice to fully utilize .Net platform technologies, just like how you did with VB, e.g. how to connect with a database is a bit different but don't worry about it. The language has a few differences so that will take some time to get use to. Again, its nothing to worry about. Its all for the better, especially feeling like a rapid applications developer.
Let's act on what we agree on now, and argue later on what we don't.
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