Yesterday a bug was uncovered in an old application what was written in VB6. The bug had to do with forms not being unloaded because of some of the nice features in VB6. I'm talking about the Global Forms collection and the Default Form Instances.
Both of these features where useful, but lead to a large and dangerous group of people who produced a lot of bad, buggy software.
Until this recent event I was very impartial to the fact that the VB.NET dev team decided to re-introduce the Default Form instances into whidbey. Now I'm not so sure.
Are we going to end up with hoards of ex VB6 developers writing apps in VB.NET using the default form instance. I think yes.
I suspect the real reason behind this decision is to make the transition of VB6 developers to .NET a little easier. I think however, that we could well end up with many of the old habits that proved to be a problem in VB6 reappearing in VB.NET. This in turn could easily lead to VB.NET regaining the old stigma of VB6 in the general development community.
I for one am more than a little worried.
2 comments:
The question on my mind is why introduce it now, after .NET has been out for a few years and most of the VB programmers have already gotten used to properly instantiating their forms?
I would have least understood where Microsoft were coming from if this "feature" had shipped in earlier versions but why bother now?
Do you have a supporting link Eddie? This was news to me.
Paul B
Here is the official list of changes from Microsoft.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/languageenhancements.asp
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