About Powerbasic

[Frederick J. Harris]

Good points Theo.  I agree with you.

Safty is a really hard thing to come by.  I work for a large goverment organization that several years ago contracted out for a really major Enterprise scale application to be built.  I'm not 'in' with the folks who are paying the bills, but I imagine millions have been spent on it so far, and my understanding of the situation is that things are going very, very, very poorly.  Like many large software development companies this outfit subcontracts out the actual coding work and just more or less manages things.  Last winter their subcontractor walked out on them, and that brought things to a complete halt for a very long time.  I'm not even sure they've gotten started again.

I recall when the specifications for the 'Request For Proposals' was put out that .NET was a requirement for the project.  I can just imagine the fun it is building an application the complexity of which is such that it takes a team of coders several years to build, when .NET itself changes every year or two.

[Theo Gottwald]

Exactly,Fred.
This way to go is not a way to solve problems.

Its just a modern way to spent huge amounts of money in a friends big company.

IT Projects are the best way to move money to somebody. Because of the complexity, most people can never understand what was really paid for, and if there had been other alternatives.

Actually I would not say that DOTNET is far from a state that makes it usable for Longterm Projects.
This may change at a later time, when it becomes a bit more stable.

A PB-64 would be an intersting Alternative to me. While for Long Term Projects, something with -64 will be important.
Just looking at the Prices of RAM, the time will come in some Years that -64 will be definitely Standard.

[Edwin Knoppert]

>when .NET itself changes every year or two.

>Actually I would not say that DOTNET is far from a state that makes it usable for Longterm Projects.
This may change at a later time, when it becomes a bit more stable.

Waah!
Did you actually used it or just tested it a little.
I see remarks like these on several boards and most of it is simply not true.

There was a change from v1.x to v2 but all the others are extensions and underneat still use v2.
The change between 1 and 2 may not even notacible, this depends on the parts used.

'a bit more stable' what on earth are you talking about.
I do (ASP).NET for several years now, it's rather steep to learn and maybe it's therefore easier to say it's not your taste.
Ok, the IDE may produce some idiotic behaviour but that may be once a day or not at all.
Code compiled never behaves odd, frankly i have never seen such a stable behaviour, no crashes etc..

Admit it, the 'run-time' size, being Microsoft, the steeper learning curve as expected are the cause of these remarks ain't it?

The market for custom controls... i suspect it is never been larger (vs VBX and OCX)

I am not saying you all should use .NET but .NET is a serious thing for some programmers, it's paying me each month.
Hey, i prefer coding in PowerBASIC but that doesn't mean .NET is a loser.

[Patrice Terrier]

Edwin,

I didn't make the effort to upgrade my VS2005 to VS2008, do you think it is worth to do it?

Perhaps better integration with VISTA?

...

[Edwin Knoppert]

I had trouble with this IDE.
Note that compiled output is stable but the 2005 IDE was better.
(I may have had a beta of 2008?? and i went back to 2005)

The .NET frameworks 3.0 and up are v2 but extended, the basic v2 part is stable but i don't have any experiance with the extended features, like wpf, for 3.0 and 3.5 and so.
These distro's are getting incr. large, i stick with coding for v2 anyway.
Vista has v3.0
Soon v4.0 will be released.

Did you experiance trouble with the 2005 IDE's under Vista?
I use XP all the time.

[Patrice Terrier]

Did you experiance trouble with the 2005 IDE's under Vista?

I had to download a patch to use VS2005 on VISTA.

This application present known compatibilty isues...  ask your vendor for a new version that is VISTA compatible

Microsoft speaking of the Microsoft flag ship development platform.  

[Theo Gottwald]

This may change at a later time, when it becomes a bit more stable.

I am doing projects in a very large german company, which actually moves bussiness software from VB6 to DOTNET.

The result is:
- Lots of bugs and problems,
- for example with the system resources.

So i can say that I am watching it from a supporters standpoint, buti believe that this company is big enough to have good programmers, to not blame them.

What i am talking from are not those small applications, one person makes, Edwin - you may have different experiences.
I am talking from enterprise Applications, managed by a lot of people.

[Edwin Knoppert]

>for example with the system resources
Which are?
I hope you'll ever come back and eleborate the situation, even if it was a programmers error (Dispose() comes to my mind )?

[Theo Gottwald]

Which are?

This Application has a lot of Menü Points and many of them open Forms.
If you open and close them often, System Resources go down and never come back until you completely restart the whole program.
If you miss doing so, you may end up in an Error-Message that dosn't say much to the User (Can't tell you compamny secrets here, its a control that can't be initialized).

Besides that Users report us that the overall speed of the application is significantly lower, then it was before in VB 6.

Therefore this i not my personal opinion, its what i hear from al ot of users usiong the program since 10 Years.
Knowing this i can not recommend to make a migration to DOTNET in Enterprise Applications at this time.

[Edwin Knoppert]

Ok, but i was not discussing the overall speed at first.
Speed issues may be there yes, but also.. there is no trivial conversion from VB6 to VB.NET imo.
VB.NET has a few easy wrappers (like shell afaik) but that's about it.
Like i said, i found the learning curve steep but that is related to the enormous amount of objects in the runtime.
One has to learn quiet a few before you can do something with .NET

We experiance serious speed draw-backs with ASP.NET, it's rather slow imo.
At the other hand it is now a rapid development tool for us.
If it ain't such a large collection of functionalities we better thought about a different programming language.
Still, the (working) speed isn't undoable but it ain't great.
Slow startup mostly.

We avoided VB.NET and program in C# only, this is of course not speed related but it may force you to learn more and to gain more at the end.
This will take time.

>I am talking from enterprise Applications, managed by a lot of people.
Your resources issues, i can not verify this, it may equally be poor programming.
A large bunch of programmers does not say much, i have encountered a few scenarios where the whole team where depending on one (clever) programmer..

[Theo Gottwald]

I am not the programmer of this application, and i am also not the one who decided for the conversion.
But the experiences I tell you are first hand.

I assume, that they use the normal DOTNET Tools, so i can't tell you where the resource problems come from, but it should be from the DOTNET runtime.

Maybe you take your application an just open and close the Masks 1000 times using a Testing software.
Do you get resource problems on the way?

Many people do not test their applications really extensively - like in batch usage.
If you do this, you'll often expereinece other sides of your program. I'd say its a DOTNET problem.

[Edwin Knoppert]

We have only a few windows .net apps for internal use, there is no testing done.
We host ~ 8 a 10 ASP.NET websites on one server.
Only SQL server produces an issue in a rare occasion and eats all the mem.
This seems to depend on a specific query, i am not informed what the cause was.

The windows apps appear rather slow but then, i didn't write them and i suspect a query to our remote server is executed while the form is partially visible.
I hate that and i never would like to do it this way.
But then, this is for internal use (and i don't write them).

Our ASP.NET apps appear slow when some time not used, after that it's ok but not all pages are instant.
This may depend on the database queries i guess.

[Theo Gottwald]

Just to explain, what it means "Resource problems".

If you open a lot of graphical windows resources, at the end your IE will start without Toolbar, programms that have always worked fine will not come up anymore or bring silly error-messages.

At the end your screens turns into a white color and is not more redrawn, this is the final state of "resource problems"  the moment you can most often not escape until you reboot.

Important to know that this is not primarily a Memory (RAM) problem, but a problem of an overflow in internal windows tables, holding pointers to windows data like Regions, etc..

Good tested pProgramms return their resources at runtime. Means you open a form, then you fill it, and the resources are returned when you close the form.

Those DOTNET Enterprise stuff i have seen there, seems to return all resources when you close the programm totally.

Means you can not use it for a longtime without restarting it.

A behavior that makes some of the power-users quite angry.

[Patrice Terrier]

The main issue i had myself with Dot.NET, was with the "Garbage Collector" when mixing managed code and unmanaged Win32 DLL (pointer were getting lost) forcing me to do extra acrobatic to preserve my pointers.

...
 

[Edwin Knoppert]

>Just to explain, what it means "Resource problems".
Ok, your story seems to have the old fashion GDI and USR stuff problems.

With sysinternals - process explorer you can add these two columns and detect if what you are saying applies to all forms.
Supose i write me a simple app having a single form and add some code to open and close this form countless times, this would introduce the problem?

It's just.., a good programmer is sceptic, i made so much diagnostic errors in my life...
So far i really think MS does not introduce such an error imo.