No more Visual Basic after tomorrow
By Damien B on Friday 13 December 2002, 07:54 - Cyberpunk - Permalink
For one month my job is to maintain a client-server application in VB5. I has not been the most fun thing in my life, but at least it provides some occupation. Quick pros and cons of VB5 :
- Pros
- Easy interface designing
- Keyword
With
enhances readability for multiples operations on an object - Very well integrated debugging
- Cons
- Fixed layout, resizing must be handled manually
- No always well-suited events
- Poor string handling capabilities
- Poor readability due to default properties
- No inheritance
- Random crashes of the IDE
- Deployment hell (why a simple demo app, with no dependencies doesn't run on others 'puters?)
- No 'Inc' function (this function is one of the first I used proudly in Basic)
Overall it has not been a bad experience, and it leads to a little wishlist for Java.
- Syntactic Sugar
- A 'With' keyword
- Behavioural change
- A true static resource oriented user interface definition. Two years and a half ago I designed my own based on XML. The performances were quite acceptable, there is so much resource used with Swing that you can add many IO and parsing before you feel the overhead. I don't know how it would perform today (proprietary source code, and I don't work there anymore). Of course it depends very much on the graphic toolkit you use (AWT, Swing, SWT, QtJava, Java/GTK, dog.gui...), that's probably why there are multiple ways to do it (serialization, LUXOR, code generation...) and no one really as clean as a good ol' resource file compiled.