Programmers that have went from VB5/6 to VB.net?

Question

I have used VB5/6 doing machine control applications since VB5 came out. I know this language is dated and the whole world seems to be moving to the .net model. How steep is the learning curve? One person has told me that learning .net would be easier if you had never used VB at all. I have resisted so far bucause of a $10k or so investment in activex goodies which I believe will be useless under .net. My customers want a version of BASIC, won't let me use C. Any comment appreciated.

Answer 1

Yea I was a shock when I first tried VB.net 2003 after learning VB6. I would agree that it is better for a newbie to learn VB.net and skip VB6 altogether. No sense in learning VB6 to have to unlearn VB6 habits to work with VB.net

VB.net also requires machine running the resultant program to be running the Common Language Runtime (I think it is now @ V3.0) VB.net Studio needs to run on XP or Vista (NT I think) but won't run on 98 , ME or earlier OS.... Compiled program will work on 98, ME if CLR is installed

A big difference I noticed straight away is that control arrays are gone. Forget about the way you used option buttons in VB6 with an index value. indexes don;t exist in vb.net....

I do like the VB.net will let you assign controls to an event handler. (Any event handler....) So in VB.net Option Buttons (Now called radio Buttons) are given different names.. (no index) and a particular radio Button can be assigned to a new or existing event by the handles property on the event.

There are features in the IDE that make it easier to view your code. REGIONS are added

#REGION " My description"

vb code

#END REGION

the regions let you collapse the code and hide it from view in your listing. So now you don't have to scroll as much to work with your code.

You do want to use the latest version of VB.net as Microsoft got ride of the MSComm Control and did not provide serial port access in VB.net 2003... MS has brought back easy access to the serial ports in their latest version of VB.net via a class

Connections to databases are a little different in that the idea is to breifly connect to a DB and work with a copy. Then reconnect and pass updates to teh DB. This minimizes connection duration and ultimately enhances DB performance.

The best thing I did to really get a hold on VB.net was to take a night course but you can do on your own with a good book. MS is now providing Express versions of VB for free and has lots of video tutorials.