VB Forum / Enterprise Development / November 2005

Dick,

Thanks. We took a smaller project (a simulator) and converted it to VB
2005. The MAJOR problem with 2005 is that they removed EVERYTHING that
supported NON-object oriented programming. While OO is great for lots of
things, it is most decidedly UNusable for some applications and is most
decidedly UNusable in some places in MOST complex applications,
ESPECIALLY in simulators and state machine logic.

The "choker statement" in the smaller project was a gigantic On GoSub
statement that apparently must be converted to a gigantic Select Case
statement. This mixes main simulator logic with specific component logic
in a most UN-OO way.

The present program (not the smaller project) contains a gigantic ON
GoTo statement as part of a state machine module within an NNTP client,
as the NNTP protocol is horribly designed without any concept of
layering - e.g. you can be interrupted at any point for authentication,
with all outstanding requests being summarily discarded even where the
authentication is successful. This sort of mess demands a state machine
approach. Again, VB 2005 will force us to mix the state machine
switching with the action logic - UGLY by any standard and hard to
maintain because it spreads what should be a single long statement
across dozens of pages of nearly unrelated logic.

To further illustrate, The state machine is now easy to read in VB5,
with what looks like single-thread logic and an occasional GoTo followed
by a label, where control is returned to the state machine controller to
be returned to the following statement at some time in the long distant
future as the result of one of many potential future events. Either I
must scrap this easy-to-maintain structure, or change the On GoTo to a
much larger Select Case statement where every case consists of just a
GoTo Statement (which I will probably do to preserve readability of the
remainder of the program).

All in all, they obviously had some BAD MANAGEMENT at Microsoft in the
program to develop .NET/2005, which concentrated WAY too much on
preserving the weaknesses of the arcane C/C++/C#. Didn't Microsoft learn
ANYTHING from those countless C bugs in Windows that they keep patching
- that you couldn't create in VB if you tried? Now with fast processors
and large memories, there is NOTHING (that I can see) to recommend
C/C++/C# over more protected environments like VB. Of course, with VB
you can always turn the protections off and have pretty much the same
mess that you now have in C/C++/C#.

Don't get me wrong, I have written more C/C++ than I have written VB.
That is enough to know that C/C++ is NOT suitable for complex
applications or simulators where comprehensive testing may be
impractical or downright impossible. Not unusual, some of my projects
started off with fully coded systems that even their authors couldn't
make work right - a pretty much unknown situation in VB. The idiots that
haven't learned this (yet) are now poisoning VB with their continuing
ignorance.

Anyway, I have my answer - yes, VB 2005 DOES appear to be marginally
usable, though the downsides probably equal the upsides. My applications
are somewhat complex/slow client-side applications that are NOT suitable
for making web sites from, so there is little need for .NET/2005 aside
from a few neat subroutines like IsPunctuation, which is where this
entire discussion started.

Thanks Dick and everyone for your continuing help and guidance.

Steve Richfie1d