Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Done, Not Dead

{

Yesterday I found a link to a petition of VB developers, many of whom are MVPs, demanding that Microsoft not abandon the language/tools that served them well for so many years. I thought it was interesting because it went along much of the thread of "why not a better COM?" which I'd started on earlier.

Today I found Appleman's comments on it; it appears that his take is that of Don Box - VB and COM are done not dead.

Which is sort of interesting; there was a lot that could have been done to make classic VB even better and it's as useful now as it ever was (except for fear that it may become unsupported).

What were some of the things that could have been better?
  • An enhanced IDE
  • More advanced controls (better menus, better toolbar, lists, better browser/net controls)
  • New language constructs and datatypes (compound assignment, collection classes, etc)
  • COM cleanup (less reliance on the registry OR better tools for managing it, builtin version management).
There are many other things I could think of but it suffices to say that with a better classic VB we'd no doubt experience less "energy" about WinForms with the .NET framework.

Anyhow, this seems almost passe for the likes of me. On to XAML and whatever else bleeds "new."

The petition has inspired quite a few retorts here, here, and here.

}

No comments: