Daily Archives: May 11, 2007

software development, windows

Developers still miss VB6

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A couple of years ago I wrote a piece on why Visual Basic 6 was frozen.

The topic is still of interest, and some reason reddit.com picked this link up recently, so the article has thousands of new readers.

If nothing else, it proves that developers still miss the old Visual Basic. Perhaps not so surprising; as I pointed out, it once had a reasonable claim to be the most popular programming language. That would not be true now; C# seems to be more popular than VB.NET, certainly among professionals, and I suspect Java is the number one overall (though these things are hard to measure intelligently).

Would I write the same article today? More or less, though the arrival of Vista and Office 2007 would make me state more forcibly that neither COM nor the Win32 API is dead. I still think that maintaining old-style VB would not have been feasible for Microsoft, except like FoxPro as a legacy thing and sadly now a dead end.

It’s also worth noting that VBA lives on, even though Microsoft is focusing on VSTO in its place. Except on the Mac, which is another story.

PS: I’ve fixed the comment feature on the article, so you can now have your say.

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internet, web authoring

Sweet harmony between W3C and WHATWG

The new-ish W3C working group set up to create a new version of HTML has voted to adopt the work of WHATWG as its starting point, in particular the work on HTML 5. Here are the details from the co-chairs. This will speed up the process, and more significantly, brings together the W3C and the WHATWG. WHATWG was set up by browser vendors (Microsoft excluded) out of frustration with the W3C process and its abandonment of HTML in favour of XHTML.

Does this now make WHATWG pointless? That’s the obvious conclusion; but the group may not want to disband itself.

Thanks to Simon WIllison for the link.

 

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security, software, windows

Why you should keep UAC enabled on Vista

Ian Griffiths has a nice post on why you should not disable UAC, even if you are are a developer.

I’ve followed that advice and it works for me, though there are still one or two apps where I have to Run As Administrator.

That does not include Visual Studio 2005. Despite the warning which it issues, I find it works for me without it (I realise there are scenarios where this won’t be the case).

The intriguing thing is that (as Griffiths notes) even Microsoft is not solidly behind UAC. I’ve commented on this before.

Since there is still a myth that running Vista with UAC enabled results in an avalanche of intrusive dialogs, it’s worth popping up from time to time to say that it is not so.

Windows security affects all of us, even if you do not like Windows or use it. UAC (and IE7’s protected mode, which depends on it) is a step forward and worth supporting.

 

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borland, software development

JBuilder 2007 comes to the Mac

Codegear has announced a new JBuilder 2007 release which includes Mac, Vista and RedHat support (the earlier release only ran on Windows). It is to be made available later this month (May 2007).

There are three editions, Turbo (free), standard and Enterprise. Enterprise has “Team Server” features, with tracking and source code management; it’s not clear from the release how this ties in with existing team offerings from Codegear/Borland. The standard edition replaces both Developer and Professional editions in the previous range; the release says there is: 

Special upgrade pricing of $250 and new user pricing of $499

You would have thought this would be a free upgrade for existing JBuilder 2007 users, since cross-platform support should have been there from the beginning, but the release doesn’t say that it is. I’d like clarification.

This of course is the “JBuilder” based on Eclipse. I was interested in a discussion on one of the JBuilder newsgroups about Eclipse updates. Eclipse is a platform for add-ins, each of which is constantly being updated. The idea is that you run the update manager from time to time to get the latest version of each add–in, or perhaps install new ones. There are multiple dependencies with obvious potential for conflict. Borland’s JBuilder is a tailored build of Eclipse, and in consequence it is apparently dangerous to use the update manager. One user complained about this and drew the following comment from JBuilder expert David Orriss:

Do not try to use the Eclipse updater in JBuilder 2007. It can lead to problems, as you have seen. I’ll agree that it could have been documented better, but to try to effectively block the updater [which] (via plugins or code modifications) causes problems in the Eclipse platform.

It is a significant point. On the plus side, one of the attractions of JBuilder 2007 is that it offers a consistent, supported build of Eclipse unlike an uncontrollable open-source installation. On the minus side, blocking the update manager blocks the key Eclipse benefit: its extensibility and continuous improvement.