Funky VB Crutches

April 29, 2005 · 1 min read

Don Demsak recently posted an article “”. Being the culprit VB developer in Don's post I have to say there is no excuse.  I didn't know there was another way to create event handlers.  The same old (VB) way I've been handling events seemed to work just fine for me.  Then Don discovered the serialization problem.

I say there is no excuse, but I am not referring to my chosen code implementation.  I am referring to VB.Net continuing to allow me to do things the old way.  This problem is a known issue and yet it continues to exist in VS 2005.  Again, no excuse.

I stand up to Don regularly in defense of doing things the VB way, but more than once VB.Net has done things behind the scenes that make me question my position.  I am starting to think it is time for the VB.Net team to remove the crutches.  By enabling VB developers to continue using flawed coding methods and less than optimal libraries in order to provide “backward compatibility“ for VB 6ers is harmful to the developer and the products they produce.  I don't want to have to move to C# (I hate semi colons).  But I don't want funky things to happen behind the scenes either.  And to be frank, I would never have found this particular issue without Don's help!

VB developers don't always get the respect and credit that C# developers do.  Maybe if the language stopped codling the VB developer with “backward compatible“ features, they would.  Take away the crutches we can handle it.

--chaz

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Chip Lemmon

New on Geeks with Blogs

  • We Won The One Award I Actually Care About

    Full Scale made the Inc. 5000 for the fifth year straight, the 12th listing across my three companies. Here is why the one award you cannot buy is worth stopping for.

  • Your Customers Build the Features Now

    I let a tool I liked sit dead for a year rather than build the features I wanted. An MCP server meant I never had to, and your customers can do the same to your product.

  • Get the Size of a Directory in Linux the Easy Way

    du -sh for the quick answer, ncdu for the cleanup, df for the disk itself: every command for checking directory size in Linux, plus why du and df never agree.

  • Vim Search and Replace: The Ultimate Guide

    One :%s command replaces every match in a file before a find dialog would even open. The Vim substitute patterns worth the muscle memory: flags, ranges, capture groups, and multi-file edits.