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Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

(github.com)
377 points porterde | 4 comments | 14 Nov 24 21:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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rkagerer ◴[14 Nov 24 23:42 UTC] No.42142507[source]▶
It's an awesomely inspirational vision, but within 2 minutes of trying it out I found it's lacking a lot of little features (at least on the web build)... e.g:

Ampersands in button labels don't create an accelerator (e.g. &Go does not underline the G).

In true VB6 you could plop down a Label control and just start typing to change it's contents. Here you have to focus on the input field first (and you can't just click the "Caption" heading, you have to click within the input column). To maintain fidelity, one of the rows in the Properties grid should always be highlighted when a control is selected on the GUI designer (for Labels this defaulted to Caption, and I believe for controls without a specified default it defaulted to Name).

When switching to a different control with a property matching the name of the currently selected one, VB6 would maintain the selection on that property. This made it quick and easy to update for example the Tag property a bunch of controls in sequence with minimal clicks.

Obviously the menus for Debugging, Save, Help, Add-ins, etc. are missing implementation.

A working Build button that spits out an "exectuable" that runs in the browser would be killer!

My nitpicks are born out of love ;-).

replies(2): >>42142926 #>>42145194 #
1. magicalhippo ◴[15 Nov 24 00:46 UTC] No.42142926[source]▶
> Ampersands in button labels don't create an accelerator

This is a feature of the Windows common controls, not anything VB specific, so perhaps why it was missed.

replies(2): >>42142949 #>>42144327 #
2. runjake ◴[15 Nov 24 00:51 UTC] No.42142949[source]▶
Nonetheless, a critical part of mimicking the VB6 developer experience.
replies(1): >>42142976 #
3. magicalhippo ◴[15 Nov 24 00:57 UTC] No.42142976[source]▶
Certainly, not going to argue that.
4. ygra ◴[15 Nov 24 06:09 UTC] No.42144327[source]▶
Well, VB subclassed the Windows common controls for the most part (and their class names all's contained Thunder, so when I wanted to know whether an application was made in VB, I looked at a button with Spy++).

That being said, technically the controls and VB of course don't have to be linked that closely. In this case they're Avalonia controls anyway that just expose different properties.