Hardcore .. Visual Basic ;-)

This post is part-introspection and part-retrospection on my journey as a software developer. 

A post on Visual Basic (VB) celebrating its 25th anniversary -https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/05/20/happy-25th-birthday-vb/ triggered an avalanche of memories!!

In the late 1990’s,  in my first real gig as a software engineer, the first project that I got involved was to write a Microsoft Windows PC based Terminal Emulator to talk to a large gargantuan sized test equipment via the serial port. Yes, there was a serial port in PC’s back then !! Having learnt only C and a few other exotic languages like Fortran, Pascal, Cobol and other stuff in college, I was totally zapped on how to proceed further. The only requirement given was to create something similar to what a commercial offering (Reflection terminal software, anyone??) was available in the market... The only option those days, to create a Windows based desktop client was to use either Visual C++, Windows SDK in C (Yikes) or Visual Basic (Please don’t tell me that there was also Borland ;-) ).

Since the two senior guys in the team, knew some amount of VB, we decided to go with VB. It was a simple decision making process ;-) Anyway, I was a fresher and enthusiastic, was very eager to prove my chops. I spent countless hours on the very slow internet searching the web using Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo for anything to get me started. The beauty of VB was, for someone like me who had never used VB in my life, I could go from “Hello World” to a full-fledged client server app in a few days !! Productivity was incredibly fast, everything was very intuitive and MSDN was our Bible/Bhagavat Gita. VB also had a nice ecosystem of vendors who made money by building third party controls that could be used within VB. You needed a fancy grid, you had an ActiveX control for it. You needed a better serial port control, you had another ActiveX control. I struck gold in my research, when I spotted a beautiful article by Al Stevens in Dr Dobb’s Journal (www.drdobbs.com). It had code and material on how to use a COMM (serial port) control and interpret the control characters in VB. That was all I needed !! An initial version of the app was ready in less than a few days … Over the next few weeks, the application took shape and we soon had a nice, working application. Being based in Bangalore, India, I was always looking to devour any material from MSDN or books from Microsoft Press, which had the best books, in my opinion.  I will say this, I learnt all the stuff you needed to build a modern desktop application in this project such as creating a help file, a setup program for installing in other computers, calling windows native code etc. and much more …

Blast from the past - (From left - Me, N.Das, Narayana and Thantry - in front of the STS 1000 - the test machine that needed the Windows terminal emulator)

Around this time, I came across a book called “Hardcore Visual Basic” by Bruce McKinney - https://www.amazon.com/Hardcore-Visual-Basic-Bruce-McKinney/dp/1572314222 It had a lot of inside stuff, the dark art of going to the next level in VB. I read this book cover to cover and very soon, could call myself a VB ninja ;-)

As times passed, Java came into the picture. I, who had struggled with C++ and VC++ jumped onto the Java bandwagon, first with the applets and then with Servlets/JSP and then there was no looking back. But, I will credit VB for the fast  and agile way of creating applications, where you could whip a complete app in a few hours. That was also probably its failing .. Being new, I did not care too much about performance and stability, and the apps were very bloated as with any rapid application development tools. I guess, after VB 6 and with the advent of the Internet, Microsoft did try many things, but it always remained a poor cousin of VC++ and then .NET and finally died a slow death. Guys and gals with VB were not paid as well as folks with Java, VC++, Unix skills and always seemed to have a defensive attitude when it came to VB ;-( I am not sure, the calls for open sourcing VB will serve any purpose, as there are so many languages now and VB has not been actively developed over some many years and Windows is no longer the dominant platform, it once was.

Well, I can say this with pride, I loved Visual Basic and it helped me create my first production grade application and made me very productive. It has had its heyday and like any other computer language past its prime, probably needs to be enshrined in the Computer History Museum and enter the history books!!