@notsle
I once saw 50 nested IIF calls.
And all on one line too. 🤦

#VB6

I know I'm very much reinventing the wheel here, especially because the wheel has been abandoned and whatever they're calling wheels these days require a supercar and a subscription at minimum to use and no one can build a wheel any more without a hundred people and a plan to burn money until a vulture swoops in to buy the burning husk for how bright it doth shine.

I *wish* this wasn't necessary, like I could just write some UI code and it'll run on any platform and it'll continue to do so forever no matter what new thing they add further down the line. Oh, wait, that already exists! It's called Visual Basic 6! I could write a GUI [to track the IP] in VB6 right now and it would run on Windows 95 through Windows 11 and via WINE on *nix.

Microsoft went on a bit of a bender in the 90s with COM, their object model, but they had the right idea if only lacking in execution (ActiveX...). If you want to embed a web-browser in your app you hook into the COM object and you're away. Different programming language? Doesn't matter. Different OS? Doesn't matter. Different *Endiness*!? Doesn't matter. Different physical location than the object? Doesn't matter, it works over the network!

Software is less modular than ever before; now "modular" just means the programmers used folders this time! Want to render a LibreOffice document inside your app? A PDF? A media player? How many years you got left?

#programming #windows #vb6 #retrocomputing

I first wrote my own text editor around 2001 using Visual Basic 6 and I used that editor, on Windows, *until VSCode was released in 2016* because #VSCode was the first non-crap Windows editor, and that might seem like a weird thing to say nowadays but in the Before Times, the best text editors in the world were on #Mac because that was the only market where developers cared about software quality and people would actually pay money for it, at all.

Windows was known for piracy and open-source software was basically unusable on the platform. We really, really have come a long way. Remember Atom? They asked the question "what if we wrote a text-editor in JavaScript?" (even worse, coffescript) and the answer was, unsurprisingly, a text-editor slower and less responsive than a teletype. VSCode was literally the first text editor on Windows to successfully copy TextMate.

But even now, one reason I stuck to my editor for so long was because it's the only editor, before or since, where the list of folders and list of files are separate which prevents things jumping around like crazy all the time and it's a feature I still lament the loss of.

#vb6 #retrocomputing

Programadores quejándose porque los asistentes con IA les aturden con sugerencias al escribir el código y yo, aquí, añadiendo funcionalidades a una aplicación en #VB6 😅

#Paleoprogramacion

https://www.windows98.website
visual basic 6, faithfully recreated for the web
#vb #win98 #nostalgia #visualbasic #vb6 #windows #windows98 #vb6 #netart #demo #nerdlife

BTW Here’s a modern open-source, regularly updated, portable image editor written in Visual Basic 6 that runs on XP and up and outperforms GIMP: https://photodemon.org/

#retrocomputing #VB6

I’m building a #VB6-style interpreter in #FreePascal! 🎉
It parses & runs `.BAS`-like code with support for classic keywords like `Dim`, `If`, `For`, `Sub`, `Goto`, `Print`, and more.

✅ Done:
`If/Then/Else`, `Goto`, `Sub`, `Call`, `Input`, `Print`, `For/Next`, `Do While`, etc.

🔧 In progress: `ElseIf`, `Select Case`, `Exit Sub`, `Const`, loops
🚧 Next: `Function`, `Return`, `Gosub`, `File I/O`, `Type`, `Error Handling`

@babble_endanger #FreePascal runs on #MSDOS, 9x, XP and up, #PowerPC MacOS and lots more. Heck, VisualBasic 6 #VB6 runs on 9x thru Win11 and is more stable an ABI on #Linux via Wine than Linux apps have. #Rust ’s problem is a matter of will; a turning up of the nose of anything that isn’t “current” — a moniker they haven’t realised they don’t control; that’s in the hands of Microsoft, Apple, Google etc.

I hate to tell you, but there were probably more "non-programmers" writing #VB6 programs in the early 2000s than there ever were #C / #Cpp programmers at the time.

#programming

Не, я знаю, что For Each, не смотря на использование варианта, работает быстрее, чем просто For с индексом, но чтобы настолько... Коллекция, 240 тысяч элементов типа Long, с которым в цикле производятся действия (коллекция перегоняется в массив). For с индексом пережёвывает коллекцию за тридцать-сорок секунд. For Each проносится по коллекции за 0.12 секунд. #программизм #vb6

amazing day at work today!!!

setup vb6 enterprise in a virtual machine (💀) so myself and my coworkers can actually make bug fixes for one of our apps we maintain

because im so cool, i got it working in 6hr and fixed the CI/CD scripts because someone deleted them by accident

(for context, that piece of software is extremely important at my work and is at least a few years older than me. and it's so god damn fucking cursed)

#devops #programming #vb6

Я тут пишу кое-что, и снова столкнулась с такими мерзкими, но неизбежными вещами, как байтовые буферы, в том числе запихнутые в строки. Всвязи с чем два наблюдения.
1. У VB нет встроенных механизмов, чтобы скопировать часть одного байтового буфера в другой. CopyMemory().
2. Строки в VB – юникодные, но могут быть ANSI, если хорошо попросить. Понять, в каком формате строка, очень трудно, но сам VB знает, что там внутри. #программизм #vb6

Say my name: The Evolution of Shared Libraries

https://www.jocheojeda.com/2025/01/21/say-my-name-the-evolution-of-shared-libraries/

#SoftwareDevelopment #DLL #SharedLibraries #DotNetFramework #VB6 #COMComponents #GAC #GlobalAssemblyCache #AssemblyIdentity #DLLHell #CrystalReports #LegacySystems #SoftwareEvolution #DependenciesManagement #Microsoft #Windows #SystemArchitecture #VersionControl #TechnicalDebt #SoftwareDeployment #DotNetCore #ModernDevelopment #SoftwareHistory #EnterpriseDevelopment #SystemDependencies #BackwardCompatibility

At this point, I could write a program in Visual Basic 6 and it'd be more portable than anything I could hope to do with #C.

Compiling suites have become these constantly moving, hulking behemoths that gain more bloat whilst dropping older platforms, making it practically impossible to compile modern code on retro platforms.

I just want to include a small binary in my repo that can compile a small #C89 program so that the user can get going on anything from a Penitum onwards without downloading gigabytes of dependencies that won't even run.

#VB6 #retroprogramming

Ist das Eskapismus oder Altavismus?

https://devclass.com/2024/11/12/visual-basic-6-recreated-as-a-cross-platform-ide-in-modern-net-just-for-fun/

#VB6 #Visualbasic #NET #Dotnet

Avalonia Visual Basic 6 - A recreation of the classic Visual Basic 6 IDE and language in C# with Avalonia UI.

https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6
#avalonia #xaml #csharp #vb6 #dotnet #mobiledev #windowsdev #webdev

The Legacy Coder's Guide to .NET Conf 2024.

https://www.mobilize.net/blog/the-legacy-coders-guide-to-.net-conf-2024
#dotnetconf #dotnet #vb #vb6 #blazor #dotnet9

I don't claim to have ADHD or autism but I certainly have days where I think to myself, "geez I definitely must be on the spectrum somewhere..."

Today, an issue in a 20 year old, piece of #VB6 (#visualbasic6) (native-complied) drove me crazy so I spent the day going down a rabbit hole of 20 year old knowledge (thank god for the @internetarchive) to perform some #RE work on this ridiculous 90MB app.

It's so hard working on this huge (for the time) app that nothing decompiles it well (or without crashing) so I've resorted to hand tweaking opcodes with a hex editor.

I've poked at #ida free but it was always out of reach so I'm unfamiliar. #ghidra has the same problems but at least it's free (thanks #nsa). All the vb decompilers are atrocious.

I don't like interpreted code but P-Code (or .net, or Java) would have saved me a boatload of headache. It makes me long for the days of Ring0 debuggers like #smartcheck. Alas.

Also of personal fascination; while I code (poorly) today, I was always stronger at working in reverse.

I would love to see Microsoft release a modern version (not re-imagining) of Visual Basic 6. The sheer productivity I got from VB6 has never been replicated. By being able to just CREATE things, I learned so much. #vb6