Theodp writes 'Microsoft recently for Visual Basic 6 applications through the full lifetime of Windows 8, so (VB6 shipped in '98). So why has VB6, 'the un-killable cockroach' in the Windows ecosystem, managed to thrive?

'Cockroaches are successful because they're simple,' explains David S. 'They do what they need to do for their ecological niche and no more. Visual Basic 6 did what its creators intended for its market niche: enable very rapid development of limited programs by programmers of lesser experience.' But when Microsoft proudly trotted out VB.NET, the 'full-fledged language' designed to turn VB6 'bus drivers' into 'fighter pilots,' they got a surprise. 'Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content with what Visual Basic 6 did,' explains Platt. 'They were happy to be bus drivers: to leave the office at 5 p.m.

(or 4:30 p.m. On a really nice day) instead of working until midnight; to play with their families on weekends instead of trudging back to the office; to sleep with their spouses instead of pulling another coding all-nighter and eating cold pizza for breakfast. They didn't lament the lack of operator overloading or polymorphism in Visual Basic 6, so they didn't say much.' Exactly, though I'm quite 'meh' on VB6, it is still simple enough to slap something out in it in next to no time, and it works. Sure I'd like the IDE to improve and a couple of niggles to disappear, but hey - all languages have them, including.NET. There was a thread on /. Recently about teaching salespeople to code - in my experience you don't bother trying, you just give them a copy of VB6 and tell them to knock themselves out.

Each time IBM thinks that it has seen the aging Apple II safely into its grave, the computer comes roaring back like an electronic Lazarus. It is beginning to look as though the premier, popular. Edge machine boasts an operating speed of 7.16 MHz. The system features an integrated RS-232 serial port and seven IBM PC.

Next thing you know, they've knocked up something that does what they want. Give them a copy of VS2012 and tell them to do the same thing using WPF front end with a C# WCF webservices remote service and they wouldn't be able to do it. And that pretty much sums up why VB6 is still with us and was so popular. Better than the hobbled up shit they use today with Access databases linked to Excel dumps. One of my BA's at work literally turns on his laptop in his van once he pulls close to the building. He then lets it 'calculate' his formulas and worksheets for this massively complex model he's created.

It takes about 35 minutes so he's opted to turn the machine on early and walk into the building with it while it churns at 100% cpu and thrashes the hard drive. He even had it get corrupted once when it crashed and he nearly lost all his work. The guy is an idiot. But his model gets shit done and surprisingly management could care less how he does it.

Half the time IT is the unwitting force behind this sort of thing. If somebody spent an hour with him and gave him the odd assistance, then chances are his application, while not pretty, would be far more effective and maintainable. However, that would be an act of ceding control, so typically IT will say 'no backend databases or help for you' and proceed to try to tell the business that they should invest in a $500k development investment to basically do what they can already do with the hobbled-together s. Absolutely true, but if you look at [thedailywtf.com] you'll see that so-called 'professional' programmers can come up stuff that's just as bad. Only they think they're coding gods, at least the salesman with his VB app knows its just a quick n dirty piece of crap tooling that he uses to get his work done. In my place, I know several VB programmers who happily say this, and they know that one day we'll rewrite their apps 'properly' so they are less expensive to maintain and work better, when we have the time. Which will probably be never.

Yes, well, a lot of so-called 'professional' programmers believe PHP is a well designed language, and a good number of them exist on Slashdot. The problem is that the bar isn't exactly high to be able to call yourself a professional programmer. A decade or so ago you had to understand things like pointers and so forth, nowadays you can knock together any crock of shit and call yourself a professional programmer.

I suppose that's good and bad - good in that humanity gets more software ideas turned into reality. I thought there were major compatibility problems with the VS98/VB6 IDE on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (caveat: I heard this from a large desktop consultancy that were brought in to provide new systems for a large organisation - I haven't validated it myself).

If so, won't this stop you developing once XP is unsupported, unless you want to be developing using an un-patched OS? I'm genuinely interested in your strategy going forward, as a friend maintains a VB6 application that is going to be a nightmare to port.

I thought there were major compatibility problems with the VS98/VB6 IDE on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (caveat: I heard this from a large desktop consultancy that were brought in to provide new systems for a large organisation - I haven't validated it myself). There is your answer right there. I've heard this myself from large consultancies trying to sell you the latest alphabet acronym soup of Microsoft's latest development technologies so they can make a bundle. Those who have bought in then get to upgrade and rewrite all their code in the new latest and greatest.Net version 77.4 and whatever the latest name for Windows.Forms is in perpetuity. It never ends.

You end up firefighting and upgrading more than you do actually coding useful updates into the application History over the past decade should teach us to be very, very wary of buying into any of the latest development technology from Microsoft. Silverlight developers are soon to be dumped on from a great height and these pitiful Metro applications we're all supposed to write now make me laugh, all so little baby Ballmer can have yet another expensive failure at being Apple or Google on mobiles. I'm genuinely interested in your strategy going forward, as a friend maintains a VB6 application that is going to be a nightmare to port to VB.NET, so it might as well be rewritten in something else. The quiet secret is that a lot of companies if they've rewritten anything over the past decade have rewritten their applications to be run over HTTP and a web browser. Anything that can't has stayed as it is.

Not that web applications are perfect by any stretch of the imagination but at least there is a relatively stable target there now and you have other browsers besides Internet Explorer, and even other operating systems besides Windows, so the rug doesn't get pulled out from underneath you. Deployment is quite a bit easier as well. I'm one of them.

I still actively use it today. And everything that VB6 can't do or 'needs a 'lil help with', I'm adding with [powerbasic.com] (PB). My programs are typical inhouse programs: Retrieve data from A, convert/calculate/transform it, store it back to A or pass it over to B. If my time would permit (programming is only part of my job's duty), I'd replace every VB application with a complete PB counterpart.

Unfortunately that's still not the case, but I'm working on it. I just wish PB would hire someone to write a decent IDE. The compiler is a masterpiece (and doesn't need to fear the comparison with any other language), the IDE. A 'just works' version of Windows, that MS sold support for, marketed toward businesses, that just stayed the same forever. As it is, MS makes its money on new versions. That's fine for MS, but bad for businesses that don't want to upgrade every four - six years. If MS made money selling a business copy of windows and then got a fair amount for support and updates on it perpetually, it would be win/win for businesses, developers, and MS.

Where I work at, we installed new systems in police stations in the last two years that were brand new and had Windows XP on them, because the software at the time didn't have Windows 7 drivers. A 'just works' version of Windows, The existing ones arent sufficient? My experience has been that any degree of 'doesnt work' is almost ALWAYS down to one of the following: * Driver malfunction (all of my bluescreens on this computer were caused by faulty logitech webcam driver) * Hardware malfunction (all sudden reboots ive seen on my home computer were caused by video card that went belly up) * badly written 3rd party programs, plugins, etc (99% of viruses ive seen come from Java, Flash, and PDF vulnerabilities, or else browser exploits) It is also my experience that people complaining about how broken windows is are doing something wrong.

There *wasn't* a good reason to switch from XP, until M$ stopped or threatened to stop releasing security patches for it, which is a big no-no for many companies. Let's not confuse 'a good reason' with 'corporate blackmail'. We all know where the lionshare of M$ profits come from, yet most business desktops have little real need to upgrade hardware or software beyond what Windows XP can offer. Then again, with more and more applications being fed through a web interface, perhaps businesses should be asking themselves a question that becomes more and more relevant with each passing day.

Why are we even paying for Windows OS? I'd hold off on the name calling. XP has a much better support history than ANY other commercial (non-commercial too?) OS available. Besides, I'm convinced that MS will continue releasing security updates for XP indefinitely. They'll see from usage statistics in a few more years that a LOT of people are still using XP, and I think they'll support it.

They're not dumb. They know that many people will use XP come hell or high water, and I don't think they would want to let such a widely visible product. I can think of one major reason to switch from Windows XP. Good 64 bit support.

That alone is a major reason for upgrading. I skipped the whole Vista thing, and have nothing good to say about that OS, but Windows 7 is actually quite nice, and I'd easily pick that over XP for any new machine. Windows 7 has been very stable ever since I got it. I only ever reboot when there are updates. Windows XP is still fine, and I'll run it on my older computers until the hardware dies.

But when it comes time to buy. False analogy. There are very real advantages to cars over horses (mainly that cars don't poop everywhere), other than not having DX11 there are very little advantage to switching to Win7 over XP. I can name them if you like.

Anaconda 1 Full Movie In Hindi Free Download 3gp. * Greatly improved GUI with all the hotkeys and multimonitor support anyone could wish for. If you had VB5 and you got VB6 you could upgrade your app to a vb6 application very quickly and your program looked and worked just like it did before. Upgrading you VB6 app into.NET breaks all but the most basic application, and there is a lot of rework to be done.

Often these VB6 apps are not the best design and, and you need to find a.NET compatible version of your third party tools, then they are probably quite different and you need to rework them again. Next you have the.NET framework. I write a program in visual studios 2010, Now I need to make decisions. Do I compile it for.net 2.0 and not have as many features but know that my system will work on most modern windows systems, or work on 4.5 and require all the users to upgrade their system? Why can't I just compile it into a static.EXE Finally you have older developers. These guys are not Computer Scientists, They studied other fields and happened to learn computers, and started to program before a lot of the formalization in good form came into place..NET seems unnecessarily restrictive to them. Why do you need to type all this extra crap.

I need it to do this, why do I need System.Windows.Forms.PotatoGun.PopSound() instead of PlayPop Often these older developers are just maintaining the existing system that they have coded decades ago. So there is no real push to upgrade and give them a new project just because it needs to support.NET. Web apps are more fun than VB6? At least in VB6 you could make the screen do almost anything you imagine with a few clicks. With web apps you are stuck with the page flow of HTML-related 'standards', or else use JavaScript that probably breaks on some browser version or vendor you haven't tested, and looks jittery and forced. The ability to make dialog boxes or help/wizard/lookup screens pop up anywhere for any reason is what made VB pleasurable: one's design GUI imagination can be satisfied without fuss and. There are many projects, usually internal or niche market applications, which have decades of legacy code to keep the product running.

This is not a choice of the developers or done out of laziness, this is what their employers have given them to work with. If you have to rewrite vast amounts of code because the programming language is out dated, you will find that depending on the size of the project, the company who owns the project will be on the hook for millions of dollars to rewrite it so that it will work with modern environment. If you are a company in placed in this position of having to rewrite everything, what is there to say that you are going to stay on the Microsoft ecosystem. VB6 is simple, but there is a surprisingly large amount of power to be tapped from it, if you understand the underlying infrastructure. Having done some hard core [wikipedia.org] programming 10 years ago, for a Computer Based Testing 'test driver', our team learned we could spend 2 days to get up a 'ActiveDoc' in C++ using ATL, and WTL, or we could do the same thing in VB6 within an hour. Considering how fast it was to implement ActiveDocument and custom COM interfaces, I changed my mind on how weak I perceived VB6 was.

(Unfortunately many of the VB trained, customer-based implementors of our interface were not as astute, and even in a VB6 environment didn't understand what they needed to do to create a component that would properly talk to the rest of our system.) Still, knowing how quickly VB6 would let one get up an interface, I was able to help a room mate of mine create a [tronster.com] for our own rolled version of Zelda. It was a little cumbersome to learn how to read individual bytes of the palette based sprite files, but VB6 had all the power there. All that said, VB6 should die IMHO. After (C# / VB).NET came out, it became a lot easier to make object dynamically talk to each other and perform byte level manipulation.

I have developed a few apps in VB 6.0. They work just fine, but it has become difficult to support and install them under Windows 7. They are not commercial products, just used to support development and test of embedded systems via the serial port. They actually started life as QuickBasic 4.5 apps, then were upgraded to VB for DOS, then to VB 6.0. The 'basic' functionality of these apps has not changed much, just the fancy UI stuff has been updated, and TCP/IP support was added. Facing the fact that VB 6.0. I think VB5 also supported COM.

(Unsure of this.) MFC was around long before VB6. We were looking to leverage it at the project's inception but found ATL (with WTL) to provide a lite-weight alternative without the bloated class inheritance. Looking back, as good as ATL was, I don't think we would have survived using it without the WROX books and great samples from CodeProject and similar websites.

The problem is both MFC and ATL are essentially just wrappers to a high procedural, highly struct-passing Win3. I've been talking about this for years, and I've even been laughed at here on Slashdot for suggesting classical VB will never be going away. How could it? There is that lovely fully object oriented thingy called VB.Net?

Why wouldn't you want to rewrite all your applications in it for no appreciable benefit whatsoever? The fact is that Visual Basic was and is used for what it was good. Departmental and business applications where the overhead of that object oriented nonsense didn't make any sense at all. .fully object oriented thingy called VB.Net.

The overhead of that object oriented nonsense didn't make any sense at all. The fatal mistake that Microsoft made with VB.Net is that it was completely backwards incompatible. No one cares about.Net applications You don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about. (1) VB6 is an object-oriented language. Its support is poor--eg. No inheritance, clunky syntax--but programmer-defined classes exist. If you meant just the new OO features you should have said so--your wording is imprecise throughout.

(2) VB6 has no class library to speak of--you had to write your own routine or hack together a ListBox to sort a string array. That should be a couple lines of code.

Forget hash tables, queues, etc.--you have to implement it all yourself or find somebody else's random crap, which is wildly inefficient. The.NET class library is very good and is a huge potential 'appreciable benefit' to upgrading. (3).NET and VB6 are comparable in speed (except loading times,.NET is worse there). Which wins depends on precisely what you're doing. For math-heavy problems,.NET is often much faster. But honestly, why the hell do you care about the speed (/memory use/whatever you meant by 'overhead') of VB6 apps? It's almost always irrelevant in light of user input delays.

(5).NET is not even remotely dead, so no 'fatal mistake' was made. (6) Lots of people care about.NET apps. Glance at the Tiobe index, for instance. (7) You'll be able to create.NET Metro style apps. Converting an existing desktop app may or may not require [microsoft.com].

Your backend will be mostly to entirely reusable, so you won't have to 'rewrite everything'. (8) You greatly exaggerate the backwards compatibility problems and you know it. Some large projects are suited to automated/assisted migration; just read these zillion [artinsoft.com]. It's far from perfect, but it's also far from nothing. You do have at least a few good points--lots of businesses absolutely rely on very old technology and wouldn't upgrade without support; Microsoft's chances of getting a significant mobile presence are slim. You came close to the truth behind the continued success of VB6: people don't want to learn new systems and some people are stuck maintaining old ones that are too difficult to convert.

Most of your points are garbage though. What I wondered was, what happens if you take top-notch C++ programmers who dream in pointers, and let them code in VB. What I discovered at Fog Creek was that they become super-efficient coding machines. The code looks pretty good, it's object-oriented and robust, but you don't waste time using tools that are at a level lower than you need. I've spent years writing code for C++/MFC and years writing code in Visual Basic, and let me tell you, VB is just much, much more productive. Michael and I had a good laugh today when we discovered somebody selling a beta crash-reporting product at $5000 for three months that Michael implemented in CityDesk in two days.

(And we actually implemented a good part of ours in C++/ATL). And I also guarantee you that our Visual Basic code in CityDesk looks a lot better than most of the code you find written in macho languages like C++, because we're good programmers, and we write comments, and our variable names are well-chosen, and we do things the simple way, not the clever way, and so forth. The company I work for has a well-staffed IT shop, but the one thing we are lacking is anyone with real developer experience. We have one woman there who is known as the 'database developer', but all her experience comes from Access. Access front-ends to SQL databases, that sort of thing. It works for the most part, but it's frustrating from our perspective when we have to deal with all these Access databases/front ends, and we know things could be so much better. A few times they've tried to send her to VB.

Most of the Access developers I know don't even know standard off the shelf simple SQL statements. The environment is so washed down that they never make the leap past the query builder.

I already know without even asking that you are in a shop that has a access app for everything and duplicated data everywhere. The best shop I worked in would not allow access on any desktop for this very reason.

Access at the end of the day is just a hack, ok for a 5 person company but should not be used for enterprise devel. I taught myself VB6 (fool for a teacher?) about ten years ago mainly so I could write small apps and utilites for myself. Combined with Win32 api calls, it's been powerful enough for almost everything I've needed to do. True, my code isn't elegant but it gets the job done. For a more modern object oriented language I think Lazarus (an open source Delphi clone) is in the same category as VB6. I found it easy to move from VB6 to Lazarus since the IDEs are similar.

Lazarus is based on Pascal so some might consi. I loved VB6 and beat it death. For knocking out a quick application it was hard to beat. I long left it behind (at least a decade ago) but when I started developing iOS apps a while back I was so disappointed with the interface builder that it made me angry; they obviously never understood the joys of the VB6. I hate to say it but the whole interface builder was more of a rip off of the later c#.net interface in Visual Studio that drove me away from all things Microsoft.

Thus in my present apps I don't use. Delphi did win out - it's called.NET. Remember that Microsoft snatched Borland Pascal/Delphi lead designer and developer, Anders Hejlsberg, and had him work on C# (he still does). C# 1.0 was pretty close Delphi with syntax replaced with something vaguely Java-like. WinForms, and.NET component model in general, is pretty similar to VCL in its design philosophy, and in some cases even down to class hierarchies and names, like [T]Object. .NET thrive is because the Visual Studio IDE demands it, unless you are doing C++.

The basic rule of thumb, if you are going to be writing programs for windows you use Visual Studio. Now.NET as a language isn't that bad, I actually like it. What I hate is the Virtual Machine nonsense, that only works on Windows Systems, yet it is still virtualized so it runs slow.

It combines the worst attributes of the VB6 world and the Java World. If Visual Studio gave people a non.NET option for VB (a VB 7 per say) then I would expect VB 6 dyeing out and.NET wouldn't have caught on. It would have been an other J++ Java success is in the fact you can write code and run it nearly every modern system out there. And you code isn't scripted but in a way that can be closed source (Not all developers want their code Open Source) Also Java has a good set of quality IDEs Netbeans, Eclipse are a few of them, and they are really good at Java Coding.

Why do we want VB6 to die more then the others? It is a platform for unstable applications.

VB6 Apps have a tendencies of getting corrupted and random deaths where you need to reinstall them. Visual Studio 6 needs to run on Newer OS's Windows 7 64 bit. You cannot buy the media/licenses directly anymore. If you are going to grow you company you cannot stick on a tool where you cannot get legal licenses as your company grows. Young Whipper Snappers don't want to use it. (We are at a point where we have a lot of software developers retiring) And we need to replace them with younger blood. The problem is the young guys do not want to use it.

The VB6 compiler produced native code. Most of the sloth came from the runtime libraries, and most of that from string handling: rolling your own StringBuilder class fixes most of that. Java has the same issues, also using an immutable string class, but they fixed it by hacking the compiler to recognise where you are doing string concatenation in a loop and make a StringBuilder out of it instead..NET also produces native code, eventually. Performance problems in any of them are usually down to bad algorithms, or using a mass of bloaty libraries to compensate for a lack of time.

Java has the same issues, also using an immutable string class, but they fixed it by hacking the compiler to recognise where you are doing string concatenation in a loop and make a StringBuilder out of it instead. That was always how Java did string concatenation (except in the cases where the compiler detecting it was concatenating literals, where it did the obvious optimization) and it's the only sane way to do it if you're not using a mutable string model and yet still have string identity other than by value.

(Languages that don't expose object identity can pull some clever tricks to hide the details.) If you're ever stuck trying to optimize some Java code, the first thing to look for is whether they are doing st. I am not sure the stereotypes Platt is describing really make sense. I know plenty of non-vb6 coders who work 40 hour weeks and actively avoid jobs where they must work evenings and weekends (myself included). I would imagine that plenty of vb6 programmers started working these kinds of hours after the.com bubble popped, for fear of losing their jobs otherwise (until they burned out, of course).

A career in tech is bad enough as it is.no opportunity for upward mobility without shifting to a completely. 3, and 4 are fair points. 1 and 2 are just wrong. VB6 apps are no worse than any other, and you can run VB6 on windows 7 64bit with a patch that you can download from MS. I do think that VB7 would have killed.NET dead, which is exactly why they didn't make one. I understand MS wanted the original.NET to be much more VB compatible, but the.NET guys didn't (or rather couldn't) want to do this, they wanted to make their own version of Java and nothing was going to stop them. Well, until today when MS has realised.NET performance and efficiency is crap and they need to go back to native code.

Maybe now they'll make a VB7 that is geared toward quick-n-easy Metro apps, then Windows8 might actually become popular. I just don't get why so many find it hard to believe VB 6 has such long legs. It did ONE job and it did that job fucking brilliantly, which was to make an easy to use GUI front end to a DB, that's it, that's all. This is what MSFT fucked up with with. Wizoo Latigo Crack Macaroni there. NET because frankly ALL of the VB 6 I've seen being used and being built really was only variants on that one function.

What MSFT refused to accept was was how important one small function can be to an SMB or SOHO. There is a HELL of a lot of times a small business can use a custom GUI to a DB, everything from contacts to records can be kept in a simple DB that just needs an easy to use front end so the user doesn't have to know anything about DBs, just fill out the forms.

Finally all those 'real' programmers that gnash their teeth at even the mention of the word VB? GET OVER IT, you wouldn't expect them to call a 'real'engineer when all they need is something that can be banged together out of an Erector set would you? Of course not and it just so happens there is a hell of a lot of business jobs that don't need some full blown SQL DB just to get the job done. Its just like how we've all seen 'applications' built out of VBA and Access, it has its little niche and as long as one doesn't try to build something outside of its little niche? Then its a perfectly valid tool. MSFT failed with.NET because they assumed if you were doing job A that you would want to learn to have the power to do jobs B-K, when in reality frankly there were tons of guys that frankly only needed to do job A so B-K were simply overkill and pointless. That is why VB 6 has such long legs, frankly there hasn't been any other language that filled the SMB small DB niche quite as well as VB 6.

Finally all those 'real' programmers that gnash their teeth at even the mention of the word VB? GET OVER IT, you wouldn't expect them to call a 'real'engineer when all they need is something that can be banged together out of an Erector set would you? Of course not and it just so happens there is a hell of a lot of business jobs that don't need some full blown SQL DB just to get the job done. I'd be fine with that. Except that those little projects that just need to be banged together out of an erector set have a habit of growing, and becoming 'business critical'. They soon exceed the skills of those who banged them together, and they need to call a 'real engineer' in to make it work again. Frequently, the existing software doesn't do exactly what it's meant to, or what the documentation (if there is any) says it does, and nobody wants to give any design criteria are 'do what the old one does, but better'.

In short, the reason 'real programmers' hate it, is because sooner or later, it ends up being their problem. Because if I'm not mistaken you are talking about OO languages and Basic is a procedural language?

At its core basic is frankly so simple and VB6 in particular is so simple for doing this one task that the thing practically builds itself. I've never bothered with.NET but i can tell you just from looking at the code that its language is a LOT more complex.

Sigh, I wish I still had my old VB6 code sitting on the hard drive instead of backed up on a DVD in the closet somewhere because i'd show that because of. I prefer VB.Net versus C# actually. I use both but C# has more complications without adding more functionality for most standard software development usage.

About Java: it may be false, but most products I have to use that are built in Java are pretty slow, and/or have an awful GUI. Apparently it is very difficult then to use it in such a way that you don't suffer performance issues. But the main question I have is about the Visual Studio remark. While I know of one IDE that had realtime code compilation (pre. The objective is to spread FUD, taking advantage of a mass of lost, blind followers that had given up their theological believes to embrace a new, technological religion. Java is not bloated, neither slow or sluggish or whatever.

But your applications can be bloated, slow and sluggish if you hire bloated, slow and sluggish minded programmers to do the job..NET is not better than anything, but it's not worst neither. The Object Model shines sometimes (Microsoft hired the guy behing Borlands's Object Pascal Windows Library). I would even consider a.NET career if it was not backed up by Microsoft - I'm already burned by Microsoft technologies twice, I can pass the third.

Marvelous language. I loved every day I spent learning it. But I took Python to day to day business - I ended up more productive (and my services, less machine demanding) using Python.

Nice API, by the way - but the lack of threading sucks. I also made some good projects in VB6 and Perl also. I prefer not doing it again, however. VB6 is, really, very limited on modern programming technics (but something can be done, nevertheless - I just think I can do it easier on another language). Perl is too much different from anything else to make me fell comfortable on it.

On the long run, no matter how many languages I deal with - the unique one that is omnipresent is C. It saved my sorry ass countless times. VB6 has staying power for one major reason -- you can do about half of the programming by dragging-and-dropping. You have a visual IDE, where you can plop stuff onto a form, 'wire them up' with a few lines of code, and you are the rock-star of the day. For those of you who are visually oriented, it is a huge plus to write in the language. And if it didn't do that one thing you needed out of the box, you would go and buy some 3rd party's OCX, which would show up on the toolbar, and you plopped that onto the screen.

Additionally, working with Databases was pretty much as easy as Access -- again, drag-drop stuff, enter the database name, and away you went. Do date, there really isn't any IDE/Language that has targeted this audience of people who wanted to do RAD in this visual manner. So many of the web-targeted languages you need to visualize everything for the computer (which some people really have a hard time with). Many of the other modern application development languages require a lot more programming to do the same thing. Programmers usually don't get this, but there will always be a need for languages that allow non-programmers to create simple automated behavior without using a formal language with strict grammar. Hypercard was the first to allow this, VB6 and Mosaic were its natural successors for desktop and web applications respectively, and Excel fills-in the gaps for data modelling and storage. Actually the spreadsheet is a really good programming language for this purpose, even when its automation features.

Do date, there really isn't any IDE/Language that has targeted this audience of people who wanted to do RAD in this visual manner. There's Delphi. Say what you want about Pascal or OOP, but it is just as easy to program with as VB, it has an extensive third party component selection being actively developed (to do whatever you want, from serial communication to image processing and GUI components) and it is, somehow, still being sold and supported. When.NET came around, its users were praising the ease of GUI development, something that Borland users already became accustomed to during the previous 10 years or more (with both Delphi and C++ Builder). With no dynamic libraries or virtual machines to depend on, every executable runs natively with the visual component library -- VCL -- that can be statically compiled in it. Unfortunately tho, Borland changed its business focus and sold the whole thing ( except the VCL) to CodeGear.

The new VCL developed by CodeGear is meant to be compatible with the old Borland one, but it still has compatibility problems and, in general, is bigger. The last Borland-produced version of Delphi is the 2006 one and that's what I'm still using today for quick drag and drop GUI projects (when there's no need to spend more than 5 minutes drawing a GUI). And I know several people making tons of money selling and developing DB based programs with versions even older (Delphi was originally developed to provide an easy to use interface to DBs, that's why it is named after an 'oracle').