This sounds great but I’m genuinely unable to figure out how to get to part one.
Not the thumbnail. Not the pink text “A History of Visusl Basic”. Not the number one on the list of chapters. Not the chapter ousted at the very bottom.
The next button is for a different article.
How am I supposed to navigate to the thing the article is advertising to me? It’s a very strange decision not to make it really easy with a strong call to action or obvious link.
Any time VB comes up I repeat my same wishlist item. I would love for Microsoft to open source it, in any way, shape or form. I would love for the community to take a crack at adding things to VB6 like bugfixes, any missing features (my understanding is they don't own everything about VB6) and just overall general improvements, imagine VB6 with threading. I know its ancient, but it can still produce a native GUI application effortlessly.
I’d want this if only because I’m stuck maintaining old industrial software written in VB6 (it is omnipresent in manufacturing) and I’d like to have a development experience that is actually somewhat usable.
(No, TwinBasic isn’t adequate. No, a VB.NET migration isn’t feasible.)
You might want to mention the comedy series Microsoft used to run on MSDN. I think it was called “The .NET Show” or “VBTV”. It featured characters like the “VB Rapper” and “Head in a Box” (Ari and Chris). It was genuinely funny and they made at least a few episodes. I loved Microsoft back in those days. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any trace of it online now. This was really long ago - around 2002, I believe.
Why on earth would you use an AI-generated image [1] (let me be clear: POOR AI IMAGE) for the banner of this project?
If you're going to use genai, you need to make sure it actually looks acceptable. Do at least one careful pass over it before publishing. Just look at the details:
- The text on the book spines doesn’t even spell “Microsoft” correctly.
- Dartmouth is spelled "Darmouth". SIGH.
- The screenshot on the CRT monitor doesn't remotely resemble any version of Visual Basic I’ve ever used and I’ve been using it since Visual Basic for DOS.
Using an image like this sets the tone and impression for the entire book going forward. Right now, that first impression isn’t good.
It won't be long before people realize that having poor AI images looks worse than having no images, in the same way that having a reaction GIF every other paragraph of a blog post fell out of style or deeply generic and unillustrative clip art or stock photos of puzzle pieces or featureless-white-3D-figure-with-hard-hat-holding-question-mark.
I sympathize with the motivations behind it, but it does look cruddy and cheapens the end result.
That computer (and chonky-boy floppy disk) look so unlike any real computer from back in the day that it honestly makes me question if the author knows anything about what that era was like.
My first impression was that the text style is dismayingly like either an AI wrote most of it or (to be charitable) the author’s writing has been heavily influenced by the current generation of LLM output. So the image style goes perfectly with it.
These AI images are an absolute plague these days. I’m glad more people think they’re genuinely awful. To me they’re absolutely disgusting. I think I’d honestly prefer Macromedia Flash ads over this.
Get used to it. This is the future we've created for ourselves. It's only going to get worse as people everywhere try to use AI to distinguish themselves. Expect everyone to be an artist, everyone to be an author, everyone to be a programmer. Slop. It's what's for dinner.
VB was practical and useful at the time, especially as a learning tool in school. I enjoyed testing the competitors that arose to emulate its abilities, including RapidQ Basic, Envelope Basic (a.k.a Phoenix Object Basic), some of which are documented here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
I think it would be cool to see a Documentary on programming languages, e.g. their history, rivalries, successes and downfalls, of the 80s, 90s and 2000s. If it is made correctly, with humor, it could be entertaining, perhaps even profitable.
There is definitely a story to be told in GUI based development environments, from VisualWorks / Digitalk smalltalk to VB to Delphi. Along with the also rans (PowerBuilder, the death of Clipper and dBase systems).
GUI interfaces were going to be a massive productivity goldmine compared to green screens and TUI interfaces. Now here we are back to those again in various forms and web browsers won in the end anyway.
Was a wild ride in the 1990s when it was happening in earnest.
Not the thumbnail. Not the pink text “A History of Visusl Basic”. Not the number one on the list of chapters. Not the chapter ousted at the very bottom.
The next button is for a different article.
How am I supposed to navigate to the thing the article is advertising to me? It’s a very strange decision not to make it really easy with a strong call to action or obvious link.
(No, TwinBasic isn’t adequate. No, a VB.NET migration isn’t feasible.)
I remember saving up for it at high school with my student discount. From memory it was about $120.
If you're going to use genai, you need to make sure it actually looks acceptable. Do at least one careful pass over it before publishing. Just look at the details:
- The text on the book spines doesn’t even spell “Microsoft” correctly.
- Dartmouth is spelled "Darmouth". SIGH.
- The screenshot on the CRT monitor doesn't remotely resemble any version of Visual Basic I’ve ever used and I’ve been using it since Visual Basic for DOS.
Using an image like this sets the tone and impression for the entire book going forward. Right now, that first impression isn’t good.
[1] - https://evilgeniuslabs.ca/uploads/content/2026/05/6fd5a7b327...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
I sympathize with the motivations behind it, but it does look cruddy and cheapens the end result.
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
and how other competing products such as RealBasic (somewhere I have a book on it) factored in.
VB was practical and useful at the time, especially as a learning tool in school. I enjoyed testing the competitors that arose to emulate its abilities, including RapidQ Basic, Envelope Basic (a.k.a Phoenix Object Basic), some of which are documented here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
I think it would be cool to see a Documentary on programming languages, e.g. their history, rivalries, successes and downfalls, of the 80s, 90s and 2000s. If it is made correctly, with humor, it could be entertaining, perhaps even profitable.
GUI interfaces were going to be a massive productivity goldmine compared to green screens and TUI interfaces. Now here we are back to those again in various forms and web browsers won in the end anyway.
Was a wild ride in the 1990s when it was happening in earnest.