Enter The Critics

To read the criticism, see the links at the end of the article. I plan to talk about some of their criticisms, not just quote them. Critics feel that the changes made to Visual Basic have made it too complex for the common VB developer. In a recent conference a speaker said they thought it should be called something else because it has so many changes. They have also claimed that the changes for this version exceed the changes to all prior versions.

I think the changes in VB.NET do exceed those of any other version, but that the benefits outweigh the cost. It has finally become a fully featured development language. Is it too complex? Being a developer requires a moderate to high amount of intelligence. We have to solve difficult business problems in short time frames. Every VB developer still had to learn the intricacies of the language when they first started working with it. Now they, along with everyone else, will have to update their skills to work with VB.NET.The requirement of continuous learning is part of the reason why we are paid well. In my opinion, most of the changes to VB.NET are not complex. They do allow for writing of complex code, but this doesn't make the language complex. Many of the things that are now possible with VB.NET did not come at the expense of an easy to use development language.

Critics have also complained that they will not be able to easily convert their applications to VB.NET. I understand that doing conversion work seems like wasted time. In this case, I would doubt that converting to VB.NET would be worth the time. With all of the new features available to you in VB.NET, just converting it to work could be like shooting yourself in the foot. What exactly do we expect to gain from just making it work with the minimum amount of changes possible? Instead, the application can be reengineered to a better design than was previously possible with VB6. If you find that reengineering the application would take time you can't give up right now, don't. No one is forcing you to upgrade your application. If its not broke don't fix it. I know people who are still only developing with VB5, and their applications are not suffering for it. There are some pretty cool applications out there developed in VB6 and prior that run, and will continue to run, without difficulties. If the development teams of these applications were to ask their users if they would pay for a new version that only made the application work in VB.NET, I suspect they would get a lot of negative responses. Another option is to decide to do your new development with VB.NET.