Oct 04
Great empires often fall from within.
The death knell for Visual Basic is premature, but it’s true that VB has deviated from its original vision as an “Application Construction Kit” for the masses and has lost significant market share as a result.
Tim Anderson summed it up best:
It sounds like perfection. Microsoft had perhaps the largest number of developers in the world hooked on a language which in turn was hooked to Windows. Yet Microsoft took this asset of incalculable value and apparently tossed it aside. Back in 2002, Microsoft announced that the language was to be replaced by something new, different and incompatible. That caused rumblings that continue today. Developers expressed emotions ranging from frustration to anger. They felt betrayed.
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Tags: .NET, Alan-Cooper, Bill-Gates, C#, Development, Languages, Microsoft-.NET, Popfly, Silverlight, Software, VB, VB.NET, VB6, Visual Basic, Visual-Basic-.NET, Visual-Basic-6
May 29
The promise of end-user programming has been a fleeting one.
First there was Hypercard for the Macintosh. Hypercard was powerful enough to produce commercial applications but simple enough for a child to use. Unfortunately, Hypercard proved too difficult for Apple to market properly, and besides, most developers don’t care about the Mac anyway.
Microsoft followed in 1991 with Visual Basic, which retained the simplicity of the BASIC programming language while upgrading it for use on the new graphical Windows platform. VB was such a smash success with both novice and professional programmers that at one time, over 60% of software developers reported using Visual Basic for some of their projects. But along the way, Visual Basic matured into a real (read: complex) object-oriented programming language, leaving behind its simple roots and unfortunately many of its fans. As a result, VB use has plummeted 35% in just the past year.
There are also new efforts by IBM and smaller companies such as DabbleDB and Zoho to turn novices into programmers. But none have the excitement or momentum of Microsoft’s new programming tool for the masses: Popfly.
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Tags: Development, Microsoft, Popfly, Silverlight, Software, Tools, Web
May 08
Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash.
Officially, “Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.”
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Tags: .NET, C#, Development, Flash, Silverlight, Tools, Web
