The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

VB.Net Success Stories

We have a new project and I'm trying to convince the management that we should be doing it using vb.net rather that the old vb6. I'm interested in hearing from members of this forum who have implemented projects using .net. What features did you find most useful? How did the framework help you? I have read the marketting stuff and you can be sure I would rather hear 'from the trenches'.

Ammo

Ammo
Thursday, March 4, 2004

Other than "It would look good on my resume", what are your reasons for wanting to use VB.NET?

Pepe Le'Pew
Thursday, March 4, 2004

> Pepe Le'Pew

The very same reason a person would use C#.

Reasons to use C# / Reasons to use VB.NET?

1. We are a windows shop / Ditto
2. We are used to doing Java/C/Objective C / we need a similar language on our upgrade path / We are used to doing VB/Delphi, we need a similar language on our upgrade path.

VB.Net the language has some quirks, but nothing to be ashamed of. I would say it is probably 20 to 100 percent more productive to use VB.NET than C# than switching to C# if you are already a VB person.

Li-fan Chen
Thursday, March 4, 2004

vb.net does proper OO.

That's more or less the end of the discussion as far as I'm concerned (-: But FWIW my last VB6 project was an OO design implemented in VB6 and there were more than a few times I suffered for the lack of genuine inheritance.

The second reason is that good though VB6 is (I live in the real world, for all its faults the fact is that it does let you deliver) its also a dead product. .NET is the way of the future...

Murph
Thursday, March 4, 2004

Pepe Le'Pew,
Thanks, my CV does not need any more sprucing up with spurious languages.

Li-fan Chen,
The question is not about the language choice, it's got to do with the 'why bother'.

I have tried a few things and found that:

It's relatively easier to do a UI in .net
Better IDE
More efficiency and flexibility in ADO.Net.
Reflection coupled with the ability to generate code at runtime.
...

I'm sure that some of the forum members have done at least one project. They should be in a position to say whether their move to .net benefited them in any way. I would rather we do not start a religious debate about languages

Ammo

Ammo
Thursday, March 4, 2004

* It's OO
* The IDE is great
* COM interop is easy

I just took a C console program, wrapped it in a managed code library, exposed it to a web service, web app, and winforms app in about 2 days.

Doesn't get much better than that.

Sassy
Thursday, March 4, 2004

Ammo,

In your original post you stated,

"I'm trying to convince the management that we should be doing it using vb.net rather that the old vb6"

and in your last post you stated,

"It's relatively easier to do a UI in .net
Better IDE
More efficiency and flexibility in ADO.Net.
Reflection coupled with the ability to generate code at runtime."

Ok, let's pretend I'm management.

Reason #1:"It's relatively easier to do a UI in .net"
So you mean faster, right?

Reason #2: "Better IDE"
What's an "IDE"? Sounds like whatever it is, you already have one, so why can't you just that IDE-doohickey and save the company some money?

Reason #3: "More efficiency and flexibility in ADO.Net"
More efficiency and flexibility sounds nice, but what's "ADO.NET"? Anyhoo, can you give me some numbers on the increased efficiency and flexibility?

Reason #4: "Reflection coupled with the ability to generate code at runtime"
What's "reflection"?

I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you'll have to continue using what you've been using for application development.

And...end of simulation of management.

Looks like you've got some homework to do, Ammo. :-)

Pepe Le'Pew
Thursday, March 4, 2004

My other half does projects in various .NET environments all the time. They seem to ship. And they seem to ship well.

I think this is a Them/Us thing. Me, I can't get on with something buried deep in the windows development model. I just don't get on with it at all. Even using Borland tools on MS platforms gave me slight claustrophobia. [Hence I'm doing Linux development...]

For people who do "get" windows development, they really do seem to get better results with the .net devtools than with the previous versions of VS.

They seem to work mostly in VB.NET and then the minute they need to do anything complicated, drop into either C# or C++.NET and just "throw it all together".

So yeah, it seems to work.

{Much as it pains me to say it...}

Katie Lucas
Thursday, March 4, 2004

Things not mentioned so far that I am very grateful for:

* Multithreading
* Can develop Windows Services
* Can create 'singleton' distributed objects as well as 'single call' which was already supported in VB6/DCOM. (.NET Remoting is coooool.)
* Performance
* Proper exception handling

Biggest downside my VB6 buddy finds is no 'edit and continue' in debug mode... but it is coming back!

Gwyn
Thursday, March 4, 2004

You may be interested in this post from last week:

http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=118983&ixReplies=5

--Josh

JWA
Thursday, March 4, 2004

No matter what reasons people give you, there are going to be those that pipe up and say "Big deal, I could have done that in VB 1.0 in the same amount of time.".

Also, I wouldn't narrow it to VB.NET, but rather .NET in general since the reasons for moving to VB.NET are virtually the same for C#.

Here are some tidbits from my work with my clients:

1. The OOP features allowed us to develop a generic database access layer fairly quickly. We then used this in our applications so that we could still use the managed providers for SQL Server and Oracle, but be able to switch between the databases without recompiling. (This was necessary for a migration between the two databases.)

2. ASP.NET gives us a huge productivity boost because gone are the days of huge, scripted pages that are a pain to debug.

3. Easier unit testing. While there may be unit testing software for VB 6.0, Nunit simply rocks with .NET. We can easily run our unit tests on our business objects and entity classes.

4. This is harder to quantify, but having a true OOP language instead of a quasi-OOP and mainly procedural language such as VB 6.0 gives us a productivity boost simply because we are comfortable with OOP and know how to leverage it properly.

Mark Hoffman
Thursday, March 4, 2004

for us asp.net brought productivity to the ground, maybe we just don't get it,

Thursday, March 4, 2004

ASP.Net slowed me down a lot too because I fought it at the beginning. When I learned "the way" of ASP.Net, I could slam out pages faster than I ever could in ASP, they're easier to maintain, and they run faster.

Philo

Philo
Thursday, March 4, 2004

Funny isn't it, how whenever .NET is mentioned, the discussion soon turns into how much better ASP.NET is than old ASP. Even when the question was 'why go *VB*.NET'.

Perhaps VB.NET just *isn't* a great leap forward from VB6???

Les C
Thursday, March 4, 2004

Strong-typing. 'nuff said.

foo = getDateValFromDb()
If IsDate(foo) Then 'passes
bar = CDate(foo) ' fails
End If

I ended up just explicitly converting thigns to strings and back to their appropriate types half the time.

Richard P
Thursday, March 4, 2004

I think both VB.Net and C# are massive improvements over VB6. I couldn't imagine going back.

-- Amazing framework library. For example, a wide range of collection objects (hashtables, arraylists, etc.) instead of the VB6 "one size fits all" collection; strong support for XML; built-in sorting routines (with good interfaces to override the default sorting behavior if necessary); stupid-simple methods to serialize objects to binary data or XML. These all can be great time savers.

-- Great IDE, plus a very comprehensive MSDN help system.

-- A better library of WinForms objects. Also, the objects are more flexible -- if you don't like the way a listbox or button appears, e.g., you can override it.

-- Fully OO.

-- Structured error handling.

-- Blazingly fast.

Robert Jacobson
Thursday, March 4, 2004

"Even when the question was 'why go *VB*.NET'."

It's even funnier when people post without bothering to read the entire thread.

It's been stated at least twice that it's pointless to argue why someone should go to VB.NET, but rather you have to look at the entire .NET Framework. Considering that ASP.NET is part of .NET, it makes perfect good sense to consider this in your evaluation. There could easily be a web side part of his application.

Sasquatch
Thursday, March 4, 2004

I, for one, wasn't trying to stir up a language war per se. It just seems to me that if you need to convince management to switch to VB.NET, then you have to address any and all objections they're likely to have, since switching will cost money. Tossing out technical buzzwords and phrases left and right that most managers don't understand is an ineffective approach, IMHO.

Pepe Le'Pew
Friday, March 5, 2004

Hi
Pleeese, if anyone have code sample for accessing Microsoft English Query from VB.net could you pleeeeese send it to me (or link to it)
Thanks in advance

Basil Smith
Thursday, April 1, 2004