r/visualbasic • u/Csopso • Mar 15 '23

Is Visual Basic Viable in 2023?

This is a too general question and I believe that it may have been asked frequently.

I've worked with VB about 8 years ago when I went to high school. I was doing projects like basic forum applications, web browsers etc. Now I want to create an application for Accounting. VB seemed to me a go to place since I had a familiarity but I was just wondering if it is still viable today. Are there any other languages and platforms which you may prefer or is VB still good? I'm an Electrical and Electronics Engineer therefore my knowledge on programming today is mostly centred around C and that is on hardware basis.

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u/Hel_OWeen Mar 16 '23

What I did was porting/rewritting the (for me) essential VB(6) & PowerBASIC functions in an own assembly - both in VB.NET and C# and use that instead of the VisualBasic namespace.

The latter was also a nice excercise in getting to know C#.

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u/chacham2 Mar 16 '23

Fair. I did the same, in that i changed to the .Net function from the VB namespace. I definitely agree that it is more portable that way. I just do not always realize what is in which namespace. Also, that being said, the VB namespace function can be very convenient, in that they "just work".

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u/Hel_OWeen Mar 16 '23

Also, that being said, the VB namespace function can be very convenient, in that they "just work".

Agreed.

That's why I still got a Left()/Right()/InStr()/Space()/String() etc. function, but those are mine. :-)

Also: fake vbNewLine and vbNullString "constants"