Code|Beta

So, I was sitting at my desk doing something but I was feeling bored and felt like coding, but I don’t have Visual Studio 6 installed on my work computer, mostly because I don’t have a license for it, so what to do? Well I knew that Microsoft has a version of the Visual Studio which is called Express, it basically means that it’s somewhat smaller than the rest and that it also has some limitations. But I wasn’t going to start building the next big program, so I’ll give it a try. And to be honest with you it blew my mind away.

I’ve been working most of my coding life in Visual Studio 6, mostly in Visual Basic, doing small projects and it was my tool of preference when it came to developing VB applications, because to be honest Visual C++ just sucks and I rather open VIM and GCC to code in C++. I’m working on this small tool to aid me in my note taking at work, so I thought I’d give this Visual Basic 2005 Express a try, so I downloaded the installer and installed the damn thing, then I pulled the VB6 project from my home network over to my computer at work, I loaded the project in the new version of VB and it told me that it had to upgrade the project for the new version, well that went smooth, mostly because the coding is just starting and therefore there’s not that many changes that need to be done.

This .NET framework, which apparently isn’t called like that anymore, has some very neat effects. Something that I really like is to create flat windows, where all of the controls are just laid flat on the window and there isn’t any or much 3D effects, I know this is a world where everything needs to flash or have some expensive 3D effect, but I just don’t like that. This framework thing lets me do that, so my application is completely flat, well with the exception of the form which keeps it’s 3D border, anyone know how to take that off and make the form flat?

What I have to relearn is the coding, there are some noticeable changes to the way the code works, but given the fact that it’s VB it makes it easy for you, so I basically have to learn a couple of new things. Most of this is Object Oriented, which I don’t have much of a problem since I learned C++ that way. I actually like this version of VB and I will try to get the full version in the upcoming weeks. For now I will work with the Express version.

VB was one of the first languages that I learned, the very first being Logo, and I have since then loved coding in this language. Most people that I talk to say that VB is not an actual programming language, when I ask why the reason they give me is because it doesn’t have classes, to this day that still leaves me with an unanswered question, I guess that these people think that there are like, what, 5 languages out there. There are a lot of coding languages that don’t use classes and do you see anyone arguing that they are not really programming languages.

I tried opening my other project on the new VB and it did upgrade it but with so many warnings and code issues that it’s just not worth it to upgrade it, so I’ll maintain it for a little while more in VB6, until I can get this new project off the ground and working like it should. Once I get the new version out there, I will simply retire the old version.

-LM