Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

So nice to see this!

I was one of the original developers of the "visual" side of Visual Basic.

It was called Ruby at the time (no relation to the programming language) and was going to be a customizable shell for Windows 3.0. The idea was that individual Windows users would create their own personal desktop using our visual editor and "gizmos" (later called by the much more boring name "controls") to make their own personal environment.

Microsoft, probably wisely, realized that this was more suited as a developer tool rather than an end user tool. They combined Ruby with Basic to create Visual Basic.

If anyone here ever created VBX custom controls, you can blame me for that terrible API!

And if anyone wonders where the phrase "fire an event" came from, you can find the answer in Retool's article about VB:

https://retool.com/visual-basic

(Content warning: drug reference)

As they say, "AMA".

If I may indulge in a bit of shameless self-promotion, I am looking for work. My team at IBM was hit pretty hard in their recent round of layoffs, as we lost our one exclusive customer, McDonald's.

I know a lot about a lot of languages and frameworks, but I don't know everything. Does anyone?

I love working with customers to understand their needs. Like every programmer, I enjoy coding, but it is just a way to make my customers happy.

If anyone is curious, you can find me here:

http://linkedin.geary.com/

http://resume.geary.com/

Thank you for empowering my first foray into professional software development! It just made making small utilities to get things done so easy.

Any relation to the MS Dialog Editor?

This kind of post is what brings me back to this website :-)

I'm the guy with the enthusiastic thread earlier on in this post. I'd love to sit down and chat with you for an hour on zoom and hear all about those times, which we could then we could post the video on here - I think people would appreciate.

I have absolutely zero experience in interviewing people, nor do I have a media channel of any kind, but I promise I'd do my best to ask interesting questions. If that sounds interesting, shoot me an email (you can find it in my profile).

Wow, I see you made SQLWindows too. I am in awe!

No direct connection that I know of. I would guess that the Dialog Editor was brand new code. But maybe the VP editor served as some inspiration? I wouldn't know.

You have probably heard the saying "Never meet your heroes; you will be disappointed."

When I think about SQLWindows, I mostly think about what I got wrong.

Specifically, I had the mindset that "I don't know anything about databases, I'm just a Windows UI guy."

So I didn't put any effort into understanding SQL databases and maybe creating any kind of visual interface for the database.

Instead, I just worked on the Windows application side and dropped you into raw SQL for any database code.

You can also blame me for the outline code editor. All I can say is the classic excuse: "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Thank you! That sounds like fun. I don't have much experience being interviewed, so that makes us even.

I will drop you a note by email and we can discuss. :-)