> whats sad about Visual Basic? im 16 and took a VB.net course last year and
loved it, now im taking a C++ Class, teaching myself Java, soon to start
C3, and next year take J#...all this spawing from VB...so im asking u people
who kno more about it then i do...am i wasting my time with VB?
Historically, you could create programs much faster in VB than in any other
language.
But VB was slower, so they had to rely on components made in the other
languages.
Nowedays, VB.NET is almost the same as C# and the C++.NET managed language.
Creating a program in VB.NET or C# takes the same time to create, so there
is no more additional advance over C#.
The good news about .NET is that I can take a VB.NET assembly and use that
without problemn in C# and managed C++.
And I believe that VS 2005 even allows to have a mixture of C++,C# and VB
within the same assembly?
So creating a project where you need a lot of programmers work together
might be done each in his own prefered language.
Now in my opinion, C# comes the closest to real .NET way of programming. So
learning C# will automatically forces you to think in the new .NET
filosophy. C++ and VB programmers somehow keep stuck with the old way of
thinking, which is getting out of date very fast.
Knowing VB 6 is interesting from a carreer point of view, because one day
you will be out there and have to port VB 6 code to VB.NET or C#. But then
again, more than 50% of the (older) programers out there already know VB 6,
and not all of them are very adaptive to new technology, so you might have
to compete with a few hunderthousands of programmers that know VB better
than you will ever.
It is hard to predict what to concentrate on, just remember that evry 2-3
years you will get into a complete new software revolution and you have to
relearn the new ways and forget the old ways.
WINAPI->MFC->Winforms->XAML->??? Or DLL->COM->ActiveX->.NET
Look at ASP->ASP.NET. As a programmer if you don't evolve then you get
outdated in a 5 years or so. So be prepared to keep on learning things when
you come home from work. I still have to do this every day. But I love it.
:-)
