Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

I worked for a company that was prototyping a ground-up rewrite of their flagship product in VB, while a team of Visual C++ programmers was building the "real" version. It was basically an industry-specific CRUD application.

I probably don't even need to finish this story, because you know what happened: We knocked out a fully functional application in VB while the C++ programmers struggled to replicate it with a less-rich environment. Back then VC++ lacked numerous controls that were available in VB.

The app connected to the database with ODBC and it was easy. Management saw that and said WTF are we building this other thing for, and asked the C++ to join the VB effort and finish the product. They turned their noses up at it, and were all summarily fired. I was put in charge of design and continued working with a team of contractors to finish the app.

I was pretty young and learned a couple of obvious lessons there.

And oh yeah, I actually started my professional programming career writing complicated macros in Word. If I ever meet the guy who approved WordBasic, I will buy him a drink. A word processor with a freaking GUI builder in it! I wrote a macro that could parse and rewrite thousands of SQL modules when a bunch of table structures changed.

I lived in Word. What a great product it was, and what a sorry state it's in now.

On one hand, assuming no embellishments are made: Clearly a triumph for the simplicity and effectiveness of VB.

On the other hand: A pretty good illustration of why every modern app is now a webview.

No embellishments at all, and none needed; it was an ideal app for VB.

Speaking of webviews... the next place I worked decided that an entire CRM system should be a 300 MB ActiveX control that clients would download and run in IE. Why? Absolutely no reason other than it was trendy and they thought it would seem impressive to the client.

This was in the '90s, and a 300 MB plug-in was outrageous. To top it off, I and another new hire found that they were storing all kinds of state in the UI controls. The manager was agog when we told him that the entire thing had to be rewritten. It's incredible what goes on at... I was going to say small firms, but we all know there's crazy-bad code at firms of all sizes.

Today, of course, it would be suspect if such a system weren't browser-based.