Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

I found a copy of "Write Your Own Adventure Programs" (1983 - Usborne: https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/Write%...) as a kid in my primary school's bookshelf. I remember the code was written in BASIC and my family didn't really own a computer back then.

Fast forward a few years later I saw this "Visual Basic" thing and thought it would be similar ... it was, but only sort of. I had no book to learn from at first so I remember clicking through every single menu and button available to see what it did. Then I remember using our dialup to download every possible 3rd party VB form control and throwing them in a Form to see what they did. I don't know why I found this entertaining enough to keep doing it.

Eventually by copy pasting and changing stuff I was able to write some basic "homework helper" programs: calculate the area of a circle and stuff like that. Soon after I tried to look up tutorials which taught me basic win32 programming to do things like have an icon in the status area next to the clock, and then hiding my window to run in the background and make annoying sounds so I could build a silly little prank program to install on my friend's computers which was fun but often would fail because they were missing some .dll file which wouldn't fit on the same floppy.

It could be frustrating at times but also I feel so blessed to have lucked myself into learning programming this way and my parents pretty much just letting me do whatever I wanted to this expensive device that probably was not a small thing for us to afford at the time.

Even tutorials felt more fun at the time, it'd be "hypnoMan37's windows registry tutorial!!! HEyyeyeyy Guuyzs :-)))) gzgzgz to my irc channel #blabla on EFNet! so first you call RegistryCreateNewKey32(...." because god knows I did not have an MSDN CD either.

Learning via a code camp feels way more efficient but also so much more dry in comparison. I wonder if there isn't a substantial cost to boring the newbies to death.

I want my kids to do the same but are really unclear as to how this is done today without BASIC. I am not psyched about tools that help you merely build platformers with WYSIWYG.

Any ideas?

https://microbit.org/

It's rough around the edges, but what it does well is offer a wide array of sensor inputs, and very simple text output. And wraps it in a simple API.

You can compute temperature, direction, orientation, do GPIO, network via Bluetooth or direct radio, and drive it with a simple two button and marquee text UI.

Wow, that takes me back. My local library also had a copy of "Visual Basic How-To: The Definitive Vb3 Problem Solver" and at some point I'd renewed my loan of it so many times they told me I couldn't anymore. I remember building a working interface based on the "Peanut Computer" interface from the beginning of _Out of this World_.

You can get everything you need without paying any money or even driving to Circuit City.

Damn Borland with their in-between library version incompatibilities. To this day I think it was the reason of their downfall.

> which taught me basic win32 programming to do things like have an icon in the status area next to the clock,

On one of programming Fido groups one guy literally had tagline “to put an icon in the area where the clock is you should use ShellNotifyIcon”

https://ia902300.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/4/...

But I'm not sure it was anything particular about the environment per se. Like, visual basic was written to do business software, truly the most boring thing imaginable. I think it's more about being left to your own devices with something that intrigues you for hours on end without an adult trying to control or direct what you're doing. Maybe. I'm not sure :-)

My first interaction with Visual Basic was through VBA in MS Word. The first time I opened it, I know that it was a place to code, but I don't know what kind of code I have to type. I don't know any programming language at that time.

And then sometimes later, I found a VB.NET book at a bookstore. I was overjoyed at that time, and immediately tried it on VBA to be dejected because the code didn't run at all. I still remember how I several times, until I swear that if the last trial I do also didn't run, I will give up. Fortunately, it does run!!!

Turns out, I didn't know that the VBA on MS Word in my computer is based on VB 6 while my book is about VB.NET. The code is a little different, and that's why my code didn't run.

After that, I bought every book I can find about VB 6. I also somehow stumble upon a VB 6 IDE installation on my relatives CD stash, and installed it on my computer.

And till today, I still think that VB 6 GUI Builder is the best I have ever tried.

it's this a niche for some industry? or all those products are aimed at people's nostalgia of running their old programs?

Ruby syntax is very nice (I personally prefer it 100x to Python's), and Crystal makes it fast AND adds some typing.

There are GUI libraries for it for things like GTK or LibUI https://github.com/Fusion/libui.cr

The V language also looked ideal for this as it has a built-in GUI but upon investigation I found its internals are... not really fleshed-out or thought-out well, and its main maintainer likes to delete and ban any criticisms regardless of validity on its official forums, so that was out, maybe revisit it in a few years

When I was bored I loved reading the MS-DOS 6 manual cover to cover.

Back when Internet access wasn't readily available the quality of documentation and sample codes were impressive.

I think there's probably some lesson in there about microsoft misunderstanding the strength of VB as a RAD tool for mom and pop shops and non-software firms who have a single tinkerer, rather than an Enterprise Language. It died a slow death in favor of C# at that point. Embrace, extend, extinguish, perhaps.

these tools could be the modern vb6, having modern UX paradigms such as responsive design etc... yet it is just producing something one would use only for nostalgia or explicitly support for a niche market still needing actual vb6... which i didn't know existed till now.

Given that there are already other, more modern, languages and frameworks that do you want you describe I don't think there is a market for that kind of modern Basic. That's why nobody has done it.

I think this is the way.

Also quite similarly soon after VB, learned C# so I could make mods for RunUO, which was a reverse engineered server implementation for Ultima Online that people would run free game servers with. At that point I was pretty hooked, and tried making things like dragon eggs that would hatch over time and evolve and such. There's something about other people being able to experience your code in a virtual world and also the creative aspect that makes it somehow addicting.