Re:The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
by jeffFrom18F on Monday June 24, 2019 @02:31AM
(#20260997)
I was going to make a reference to "Hardcore Visual Basic" but you beat me to it. Fantastic book, it's hard to find a tech book that is that useful and fun at the same time.
My first job started out with mostly Visual Basic 6. One of the modules written in VC++ by a bunch of guys who were looking to get that on their resume (they had since departed). It probably should have just been in VB as well and was always a nightmare to debug and enhance.
Once .net was prominent we mostly moved to C#. There didn't seem to be much of a reason to go with VB.Net, C# seemed more "legitimate" and without the hassles of Visual C++/MFC.
Decades later and I still find myself writing an Excel macro in VBA now and then but I've largely moved on.
Matt Curland's "Advanced Visual Basic 6: Power Techniques for Everyday Programs: Hardcore Programming Techniques" was a cracker of a book as well back in the day:
VB was great like you said until you needed to do something difficult. I remember Bruce McKinny’s Hardcore Visual Basic book being my best friend for a little while. It thought me I could do the hard stuff in C, make a DLL and drop that into my VB project.
Bruce had a saying, VB makes 95% of the job easy and the other 5% impossible.