Believe it or not, the legacy point of sale product I work on still uses a VB6 app for the cash office and reporting functions. A number of large grocery stores still use it in the US and abroad. I don’t work on that part of the application, but it still works just fine on Windows 11.

Sadly development is no longer possible on Win11 and requires a Win7 VM

I have not tried it myself, but apparently it can be done.

Not true, I maintain the VB6 and VC++6 parts of our system on a Win 11 machine. Search a bit and you will find instructions for installing them successfully.

I think the installer wont work and needs some workarounds to convince it to install but the program should work.

Somehow VB6 was really handy, I used it for a few projects in high school and I remember searching how to do things it was usually 2x or 3x the amount of code to do the same things in the newer version so I kept using it

One of my previous jobs was working on a vb6 POS system, we had to use windows XP VMs just so that we could run an old visual studio to keep developing it.

I left that company when it was clear their dreams of replacing it with a SaaS product wasn't headed in the right direction for me, but I sometimes wonder if that product is still going or whether they finally achieved their SaaS migration dream.

Very well could be the same company :)

It also allowed a lot of young people (ie me) to learn to make legitimate looking GUI programs without a difficult barrier to entry, on whatever windows machines our schools/houses had lying around.

That and Delphi, how I miss you.

How would you compare VB in the early 90s to XCode in 2023?

Not even close. VB was pure productivity.

I honestly miss VB, there was just something about it.

Yup. Even for non-UI applications.

Our site at the time was Active Server Pages, with a DCOM backend. We started out writing the DCOM components in C++, but way more than half of the C++ code was in just type conversions with the variant types that COM demanded.

We got tired of that really fast, and started building the COM components with VB5/6. That was SO MUCH faster.

Same here. When VB4 came out I wrote a COM based plugin system with it which worked perfectly.

VB6 was the absolute high water mark for RAD tools. Nothing has come close since and yeah, productivity and software in general has suffered for it.

Nothing comes close to VB even today. I can't recall anything like that.

The language was almost English like. The interface was so advanced for it's time. The drag and drop form designer.

XCode is nothing even Microsoft's own product line has nothing like that.

Edit: typo

The true successors to VB today are low code tools like Retool. Visually create an internal app for your business, then use a (relatively) simple language (this time JavaScript) to make it do basic CRUD stuff.

For various reasons, we kind of lost that pragmatic approach when apps moved from the desktop to the web browser, and we've only just recently started to revisit it.

Tcl/Tk has entered the chat.

Some of us don't want to spend an hour rat wrestling to get a form up -- a form that won't even tolerate resizing very well. Tcl/Tk is pretty much the fastest way to go from zero to functional GUI I've ever seen -- especially if you already have some functionality that works from the command line and just need to wrap it. It's also available from Python as Tkinterm and is amenable to repl driven development.

I've written both Tcl/Tk code and Lazarus and i think the latter is much faster to make things: not only you have a visual WYSIAWYG[0] editor but also a very rich framework.

[0] A for Almost as technically the program can compile with different GUI backends (Win32, Gtk, Qt, etc) :-P

Still not as accessible to non-techies as VB was, but I've been really enjoying using the Godot game engine for making simple GUI apps.

I'd like to know more about that. If you've a blog or something.

What are the reasons for using this vs a simple UI library like tkinter?

Free Pascal/Lazarus is pretty close, but the documentation needs work. It's my go to for Windows GUI development.

Yea, VB was quite something. I look back at it with fond reminiscence.

I'd actually counter this with Lotus Notes 6.5; On top of what VB offered it had a built-in locally replicated, fully encryptable and access manageable DBMS for every application you developed. Plus, it had a formula expression language that could take many tasks without needing to drop into the basic derived scripting language. To create simple CRUD apps that you could still work on in airplanes & trains it was really powerful. One of my favourite moments was when I sat in a corporate meeting with 12 or so different stakeholders for a project management software, and while they were discussing things to change, I just took the projector and implemented it live.

I'd say Delphi/C++ Builder back then (not sure for now) and nowadays Lazarus are better than VB6 in pretty much all aspects when it comes to RAD tooling. There are many more controls (and with way more features in them) than VB6 ever had, it has much better functionality for layouts (in VB6 controls do not even have automatic resizing and alignment is limited to "picture" controls - but even that is more limited than even Delphi 1), in VB6 non-visual controls/components (e.g. timer) felt more of an afterthrought and at least in Delphi and Lazarus/Free Pascal the language itself is designed so that any object can in theory be inspected by the object inspector.

VB6 was easier to get started with and learn though, but IMO that was because it didn't provide as many features and on that front the earlier VBs (up to VB4, before the new IDE was made) were even easier.

> Visual Basic allowed people with minimal knowledge of computers to write useful applications that powered the economy. This is something we often forget nowadays in the flood of frameworks, programming paradigms, microservices etc.

We haven’t forgotten anything. MS Power Apps is the spiritual successor for Access.

Also, it’s the likely reason that startups like AirTable went unicorn, and if you look at Salesforce and ServiceNow they look a lot like enterprise versions of MS Access. Everything mentioned is a low code platform. I’m sure if you give me time I can name more major low code companies

What you’ve forgotten in your nostalgia is the instability and insecurity related to VB and everything that relies on it. It’s probably why MS is trying to kill it for Windows 12.

Yeah for databases that's great, but still there is nothing to compare to VB, looking at it's accessibility and power.

There’s also nothing else that compares to vb as a large security threat to the windows ecosystem. There also have been plenty of replacements that have already eclipsed vb. It’s no one else’s fault that you just weren’t paying attention.

> We haven’t forgotten anything. MS Power Apps is the spiritual successor for Access.

I am pretty sure that having access to all of the events in VB6, I would be able to implement a bug-free Autocomplete Textbox. [0]

In Power Apps, it is not possible to implement this exact UI, without major bugs - in 2023.

Something was definitely forgotten along the way.

[0] https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_js_autocomplete.asp

> [H]aving access to all of the events in VB6, I would be able to implement a bug-free Autocomplete Textbox.

.. That’d completely fall apart at the first hint of anything vaguely nontrivial going on with input, whether due to the user’s language, accessibility tech, or autocorrect on a touch keyboard.

I remember being a non-Latin-script user in the age of localization patches and country-specific builds, and very much appreciate today’s “(try not to ruin) i18n first” approach (among other things implied by the above), but a simple input API absolutely was a casualty of that, even if you LoB app is completely fine being ASCII-only (however dubious a statement that is).

(No experience with Power Apps, but I don’t think there is a single modern platform where that’ll be easy.)

> No, it was never "good" nor "elegant".

It was great for the time. I still don't see time travel debug in any of most modern IDEs.

Amen, all the structures in the world are useless if it's not producing something useful.

Not just useful, but also user friendly. Not all computer users were savvy enough for command line apps or bare bones script source.

You can use the Godot engine to build apps. It has a very similar drag/drop UI. Double click for events, and gdscript is very easy to pickup. Reminds me of VB everytime I use it

Interesting, I've only ever heard it used as a game engine.

You totally can! I have a couple of apps that were made using it. There might even be a showcase on their site

> VB used to be one of the most important technologies in our field. No, it was never "good" nor "elegant".

Node.js for a modern take?

VB was the Macromedia Flash of our (pre-internet) generation.

Too bad theres nothing as good an ubiquitous nowadays.