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Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

(github.com)
377 points porterde | 1 comments | 14 Nov 24 21:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.43s | source
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0xmarcin ◴[15 Nov 24 07:34 UTC] No.42144675[source]▶
When you dig into the code you can see that the author did the bare minimum to have a nice demo. For example only 2 functions are supported: MsgBox and InputBox: https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/blob/383a005...

Still it is impressive to create something complex like this in a matter of 4 days (looking at the commit history). And it is a good start to develop a full fledged IDE.

The more advanced features like syntax highlighting & autocomplete unfortunately are missing. I did not run it (I am on macOS) but I also expect there is no debugger.

Now I also want to share my childhood story: I started my dev journey first by using Turbo Pascal and then by switching to Delphi 7. Delphi was pretty much like VB6, you designed an app by dragging and dropping components on a form. My first app that I have created was a Notepad++ clone, I still keep the code for it but it is so awful that I cringe every time I try to look at it.

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bandysc ◴[15 Nov 24 09:18 UTC] No.42145207[source]▶
Syntax Highlighting actually is there, it was added after the gif was recorded (you can see that on the web version), autocomplete, hmm, maybe later? :)

VB6 language is limited as well, it was more a toy/proof of concept, but given the positive feedback I am tempted to implement more functionality. Especially since the save format is compatible with VB6. It is still gonna be a toy, but actually working toy?

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1. nickpsecurity ◴[21 Nov 24 05:15 UTC] No.42201354[source]▶
One idea I had for a VB6 clone is prototyping of GUI's for deployment in any language. Obviously, just for simple, utility-style apps or web pages. The concept is to throw together a GUI, use VB6 to make it look right, save the form to a file, and convert that file into another GUI library.

Since I've been learning Python, I decided to try to prototype this idea with a naive VB6 to HTML conversion. The way its done maintains the properties of the controls so any backend could be used. The HTML is semi-useful templates at the moment.

Here's a temporary link showing each step:

https://pastebin.com/E5eqKp23

If it doesn't already exist, you could make this easier with an Export as XML (or JSON) option that supports easy parsing by any language with a XML/JSON library. They can use a list or tree depending on how they want to compose things.

From there, people wanting to build on it would have to add controls to your project (or placeholders for them) that match their own libraries.