How bad were those days?
Until recently, looking back on those days, I'd say that they were pretty good.
But over the last couple of nights, it seems that a) I didn't know any better back then, and b) those days were CRAP!
What am I talking about? VB6. Back in the dim distant past, I used to do a lot of programming in VB6. I used to think it was pretty powerful. Really I did. I could make pretty much anything happen that I ever wanted to happen in it - and I thought I could develop pretty fast too.
But those dim dark days are gone, and I now code in VB.net. Those dim dark days are long forgotten (hell, those dim dark days are only a year and a half ago - I never got a chance to pick up .net until roughly the start of last year), and I now code in sweet vb.net bliss.
Go have a look at Jason Salas's blog. I'm writing an IE toolbar for him. I started off with this project thinking it was no big deal - hell, I've written millions of them before. You want proof? Go look here. And here. Oh, and here. Yup, i wrote a lot of all that. All in VB6. But this was a chance to write a toolbar in .net, which was great.
But we can't. We can't rely on everyone having the .net framework yet (still!!!), so i have to fallback to the old favorite.
Hah! Favorite my ass! Yes, I can still write toolbars for IE in VB6. Yes, you can do a hell of a lot of things in VB6. No, I freaking hate having to do it the long way!!!
To do what needs to be done, I need to subclass about 5 different things. I need to call Win32 API functions. Hell, i even need to call CreateWindow(). What's up with that?
Why the hell did I ever think that coding in VB6 was easy? Was enjoyable? Was quick?
It's ok, I still enjoy working on this project (technically speaking) - the theory is good for me, and i can still apply any new knowledge I gain (or stuff that I knew once and had forgotten and have now had thrown in my face again) to the .net version of it all. Once i get this toolbar done for Jason (which, besides the tricky RSS reader, should only take me the rest of this week after hours) then my vb.net version of an IE toolbar will be ready to be written, and probably in about 25% of the code, and only a very minimal foray into 'unmanaged land', and that only because MS is still insisting on keeping COM interfaces around :)
Sorry for the rant, but man, this crap is annoying. The last time I felt this frustrated and held back was when i tried to force myself to sit and code in C# for a week, absolutely no VB.net allowed. I still have nightmares about that experience (ok, so it was only about a week and a half ago, but that's not the point).
Perhaps a quick note on that. Don't get me wrong, C# is a very powerful language. Of course it is, it's .net based. Sure, everything that you can do in VB you can do in C#, and vice-versa (well...mostly). But does the IDE have to be so freakin unhelpful? I want popups god damn it! I want decent intellisense! I want to know if somethings wrong before i compile! I want my code to make sense. Hell, these reasons I just listed is probably one of the major reasons i'm not enjoying VB6 coding anymore. But at least VB6 has E&C, and a nice readable language.
The guys who wrote the VB editor in VS.net...man, i'd sleep with every last one of them just to say thankyou for doing it so well. Perhaps a better thankyou would be to not sleep with them. I'm sure you get what I mean.
But I digress...Jase, your toolbars making progress!
Listening to: perfect day - paul mcdermott - (3:55)