Hello everybody,

I have never programmed in any variant of Visual Basic before and now I am
having to start - any help gratefully received!

My background is as follows:

I have two pieces of software (robot control packages, to be exact) that
seem to be reliant on Visual Basic - I suspect VBScript, to be exact.

In one of the pieces of software you can enter in VBscript code using an
inbuilt editor to handle variables to be passed on to particular robotic
components, etc.

In order to learn how to program this code I got myself a couple of cheap
Visual Basic books on Amazon. One of these came with the Visual Basic 6
Learning Edition CD (don't they all?! :-)

Already, I have been able to program much more capable windows
applications, with custom windows, different font sizes etc. than either
of the robot control packages offer. Sure, they allow you to bring up
dialogues to enter information etc. but they are rudimentary - the robot
software only allows you choices of "Yes/No/Retry" boxes and so on, or
maybe a 10 character wide box to type into.

When I try cutting and pasting my VB6-LE code into the VBScript editor
within the robot software, it doesn't run. It doesn't like anything but
the most basic dialogue boxes etc. Examining the accompanying VBScript
help files, only the rudimentary dialogue boxes just described seem to be
supported.

OK, so my first question is:
Can you program somehow more capable dialogue boxes in VBScript?

For instance, I want to be able to vary the font size to make the text
easier to see. I also would like to program an application where you have
96 different boxes, and you click on each to activate or deactivate them.

I can see how I could do all this in VB6, but can it be done in VBScript?

Connected with this, what can people tell me about Visual Basic
Applications?  

Both pieces of robot software particularly like accessing Excel etc. so it
is tempting to leave Excel running in the background and use VBA.

However, other than accessing cells etc., how does VBApplications compare
to VB6?

Can I use it to flexibly design forms etc.?

Or does it suffer from the same sort of limitations as VBScript?

The robot software can call other applications, so left to myself I would
upgrade to the professional edition of VB6 and design the sort of complex
interfaces that I need in that as standalone programs. The books I have
already cover accessing Excel cells etc. from within VB6, and even
Internet Explorer (I might need to download data from the Internet at some
point)

So, I checked to see how much the professional version of VB6 cost - and
hey presto, Microsoft is withdrawing it and replacing it with VB.Net!
The accompanying blurb seemed to be "We have rewritten Visual Basic so it
is now completely different, in our opinion better, but basically you  
can't assume any of your existing VB6 code will work when you upgrade"!

So - which is "better"? VB6 or VB.Net?

Which should I get?

How different are they?

What does VB.Net offer that VB6 doesn't?  

What about OS compatability?
(I only really need my applications to run under Windows 2000
Professional, which is what the two robot packages run under)

Are all my VB6 books basically obsolete now?

What is the difference between the different VB.Net packages?  
On the Microsoft web pages, I only saw mention of Visual Studio.Net
Professional and then the Visual Studio.Net Enterprise versions.

Is Visual Studio the same of Visual Basic? - or

Is Visual Basic part of Studio?
(I note that my copy of VB6-LE installed as a folder called "Microsoft
Visual Studio", for instance)

However, on a UK academic reseller's list (from which I can get big
discounts) I saw that VB6Professional was still on sale, but also there
was VB.Net Standard.
What's VB.Net Standard?

How do VB.Net Standard and VB6 Professional compare?

To confuse matters further, VB6 Professional was more expensive that
VB.Net Standard, which is odd if VB.Net is the hot new thing in town and
VB6 is being withdrawn.
Does that mean that VB6 Professional has actually got more features?

What do people think - should I grab VB6 Professional whilst I can and it
is still in stock, or get VB.Net from the outset?!

I know this is a lot of questions but I am a loss as to what to do. VB.Net
seems too new for there to be that many reviews or books about it out
there.

I would be very grateful for your comments!

Please feel free to email me off-list.

Many thanks

Oliver

VBScript and VBA are subsets of Visual Basic. ASP used on Web Servers
is also VBScript. VBScript hasn't got any real data types and isn't
compiled (to an .Exe).

VBA is used within a program that can enterpret it, such as one of the
office apps.

VB.Net is Visual Basic 7 and yes it is very different. For one, the
computers that will run your VB.Net app will need the .Net runtime
installing. Windows .Net server has this pre-installed, and future
versions of windows will have it too.

It is also likely that service packs for XP or 2000 will begin
installing the .Net runtime at some point.

I personally prefer VB6. It is faster than .Net on older machines. and
to run a VB6 app on an unknown machine, it is much easier to ship and
install than it would be for a .Net app.

I can see you're from the UK, why not put an add in Loot for a used
Orig. copy of VB6 pro. I did this where I live and got VB6 Enterprise
Edition (unopened) for 130!!

-nick

On Fri, 25 Oct 2002 16:48:50 +0000, Oliver De Peyer