Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

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Inman

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Microsoft Plots the End of Visual Basic - Thurrott.com

Microsoft said this week that it will support Visual Basic on .NET 5.0 but will no longer add new features or evolve the language.
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Microsoft said this week that it will support Visual Basic on .NET 5.0 but will no longer add new features or evolve the language.

“Starting with .NET 5, Visual Basic will support Class Library, Console, Windows Forms, WPF, Worker Service, [and] ASP.NET Core Web API … to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want [sic] to migrate their applications to .NET Core,” the .NET team wrote in a post to the Microsoft DevBlogs. “Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language … The future of Visual Basic … will focus on stability, the application types listed above, and compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic.”

When Microsoft released the .NET version of Visual Basic, originally called Visual Basic .NET, alongside C# at the beginning of the .NET era, the two languages were evolved together and had roughly identical feature sets. But this changed over time, with professional developers adopting C# and many fans of classic VB simply giving up on the more complex but powerful .NET versions of the environment. Today, virtually all of Microsoft’s relevant developer documentation is in C# only, with VB source code examples ever harder to find.

Worse, Microsoft in 2017 announced that its original C#/VB co-development strategy was over. Only C# would get all of the new features, while VB would focus on the simpler and more approachable scenarios that it once dominated. But that never really happened, and Microsoft effectively abandoned VB. This week’s announcement just makes it official.

What this means to VB developers is that they might be able to bring their existing codebases forward to .NET Core or, soon, to .NET 5.0, which will replace both the traditional .NET and the open-source and cross-platform .NET Core when it’s released in late 2020. The issue is that not all legacy technologies will be supported going forward, so developers using WebForms, Workflow, or Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) will need to stick with classic .NET. Those applications will continue to work and be supported until the underlying Windows versions are retired; classic .NET support life cycles are tied to the Windows versions on which they were initially deployed.

Microsoft also notes that VB developers will occasionally benefit from improvements to Visual Studio.

“Visual Studio regularly adds new features to improve the experience for developers, including those using Visual Basic and either .NET Core or .NET Framework,” the .NET team adds. “An example is the recent addition of IntelliCode for Visual Basic.”

This is a sad day, and one that hits me personally. I started my writing career with Visual Basic 3, went on to write several books about VB and its various variants, and most recently wrote an entire Notepad clone called .NETpad in Visual Basic, Windows Forms, and the .NET Framework.
 
hatzisn

hatzisn

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These are really sad news. I started my event driven oop Programming in vb 6 in 1998. I programmed though with spaghetti code in QBasic before. I even wrote my Thesis Program in VB. I am sure gonna miss it. On the other hand C# code is mostly similar to VB (but rearranging the way it appears) and most of all if you are familiar with it you can easily understand a 90% of Java code and adopt to it and also C++ and by Googling several staff you can either adopt to it.
 
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Hanz

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That's alright. B4X is here and much better and I hope there will be more UI development specially grid views like tableview: for accounting application.
 
R

RWK

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Seems Microsoft is fading away from VB.
In some Online Releases of MS Office, where VBA never gets in, there is now an Option to activate something like TypeScript, JafaScript

Maybe we could do something like BANano for that to build something like B4Office..... ??? when time has come.
 
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LiK137

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Erel said:
An active discussion about this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22570684
I added a post about B4X. I think that B4X is one of the better options that VB developers have.
Click to expand...

Absolutely agree regarding better option. There is one at least also keeping Basic beloved as You.
Want to thank You for such almost perfect B4X.

Just don't go MS way regarding BASIC. Firstly make beloved then abandon.
Stay As Simple As Possible like Pure C but not ++ with many brain raping syntax.

Again, huge thanx.
 
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DawningTruth

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I must say. Of all the programming languages I have used and learnt, and there are many. I still find B4x to be one of the most intuitive and easy to use. I find I'm more focused on creating great algorithms, rather than getting mentally bogged down in syntax and language overhead.

B4x is also an incredibly enjoyable language to code in. So thx Erel for creating this amazing platform.
 
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js486dog

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Erel said:
An active discussion about this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22570684
I added a post about B4X. I think that B4X is one of the better options that VB developers have.
Click to expand...
I like VB6. I started with Visual Basic for DOS and proceed VB3,VB4,VB,5,VB6. I still make programs with VB6 also for Win 10. Pros - simle language and quick developing (lot of OCX).

I have tried B4J first time this month. I have make a simple program and compile it to exe file.
B4J is also simple language but the compilation to exe file is not as simple as in VB6.
What I need is work:
1) with dabase (read and write)
2) with txt files (read and write)
3) with mapping (map in coordinates WGS ..., GPS).
4) create exe file

I think
1) and 2) is fine in B4J
4) is a little complicated
3) i think it is impossible.

This is the reason why I still use VB6 for Win Desktop.

But I think: B4A is the best tool for Android.
 
Paolo Pini

Paolo Pini

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I have many working application wrote in VB6 yet, some very big, I normally develop in C# and other language but I consider VB6 the best language ever created.
 
techknight

techknight

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It is such a shame that microsoft is abandoning VB, but my personal opinion on the matter is they created it by drastically changing VB as it was from VB6 up to what it is now. That drastic change is probably the reason why alot of people ran away from it, or adapted to C#.

Whats really going to be a sad day is when Microsoft eventually does what apple did, and transitions over to 64-bit only. then VB6 apps will cease to function. They will do this in time just as they did from 16-bit to 32-bit. Windows hasnt been able to directly run 16-bit Win3.1 apps in a very long time.
 
Alysson Rowan

Alysson Rowan

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As someone who has always developed in (primarily) BASIC, this comes as sad news.

Mind you, I gave up trying to get my head around VB.NET almost from day one - whatever it was, it wasn't BASIC.

I will stick with my hoary old copy of VB6, and run it alongside VBA (still on Office 2003 here), B4*, QB64 (for some of those ancient glue programs that I still have), Script Basic and the Arduino development system (C+-). Shame THAT isn't freely available in BASIC, too.
 
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