I have a soft spot for VB6 - I learnt to code using VB6 back in school. I had loads of fun building these simple apps that I then distributed to my friends. The highlight was when a magazine (PCQuest? Digit?) distributed one of my apps on their CDs. Ah, those were the days.
I wanted to build GUI apps and wasn't fond of all the C/C++ books I could get my hands on just having console mode apps. People always find it funny that I started writing VB6 code and with every step, always seemed to move down the stack, to writing kernel mode code at one point - people usually move in the other direction.
The non-MSFT world underestimates the power of VB6 (as they do Delphi) - you could build some really complex apps and by calling Win32 APIs you could do a lot of what pure Win32/MFC got you.
MSFT completely messed up the move to .NET and fundamentally misunderstood what the VB6 devs wanted. I saw them try and correct this for many years internally but it never really worked. VB6 could have become PHP if Microsoft had played their cards correctly.
Same here, Visual Basic 6 was my entry point into programming. I had lots of fun coding and was able to learn a lot. Then they brought out VB.NET. It just seemed distant and bloated from VB6. After so many years of not touching VB6, it is interesting to know that windows still supports it.
Ms never misunderstood anything. Their goal just was another one. "people love it? Great, take all away and include a bit of that in the ultimate pro product tier. The rest will be available in an add on"
I wanted to build GUI apps and wasn't fond of all the C/C++ books I could get my hands on just having console mode apps. People always find it funny that I started writing VB6 code and with every step, always seemed to move down the stack, to writing kernel mode code at one point - people usually move in the other direction.
The non-MSFT world underestimates the power of VB6 (as they do Delphi) - you could build some really complex apps and by calling Win32 APIs you could do a lot of what pure Win32/MFC got you.
MSFT completely messed up the move to .NET and fundamentally misunderstood what the VB6 devs wanted. I saw them try and correct this for many years internally but it never really worked. VB6 could have become PHP if Microsoft had played their cards correctly.