My Experiences with Visual Basic 4.0
Yes, by working moderately well for a whole week, Windows95 was
softening me up for a great disaster, just as I had figured.
That great disaster was Visual Basic 4.0, which must have set some kind
of record in the "out of the box, installed, found it unusable, threw it
out" derby.
I installed the 16 and 32 bit versions.
Total Recall (the program I'm writing) would not load properly into
the 32-bit version. Turns out that they've replaced the VBX system of
custom controls with the OCX system, based on their infamous OLE
technology.
OLE! :-(
When I tried the 16-bit version, Total Recall would load into it.
Then I attempted to run the program and pull up a list of clients.
Error city. Something about something not being in this collection.
I called Microsoft. As you might have guessed with a new product,
Microsoft didn't have much of a history of complaints, and so they
were unable to find a solution to the problem.
So:
- Out of the box and on the hard drive
- One hour of trying to get it to work
- 1.5 hours of trying to get Microsoft Technical Support to help me.
- Back in the box it goes.
But I will say in VB's defense that they have made one giant
improvement in the package. They finally updated the font used to
display program code from 12-point really hideous (which cannot be
changed) to a pleasant 10-point courier. So I'm back to 12-point
hideous.
I don't think I have ever had such poor results with a software
package before. In fact, look at my track record with native
Windows95 applications in general:
- Netscape for Windows95 - Occasional crashes
- CorelDraw for Windows95 - Frequent crashes, loss of data
- VB for Windows95 - Won't run a program that ran perfectly in their
previous version.
Okay, okay, we really should be fair and add:
- Windows95 Networking - actually works well.
(Some minus points for the FTP wierdness I mentioned to you earlier,
where if you upload a binary file as ASCII, it will complain, stop
and halt).
However, we can add 24 intense hours with a SGI Indy:
- Graphic converter program: Never crashed; easy to use
- Photoshop: Never crashed
- Illustrator: Never crashed.
- Networking: Flawless
The Indy did run out of swap space when I tried to run Photoshop at
the same time as Illustrator. However, it just put a nice looking
dialogue box up that told me what happened. I lost no data and the
system kept on running. I suspect that the system was configured for
too little swap space, and adding more would have solved the problem.
Another nice touch: When the AUI thing slipped off, it put up a nice
little alarm box that said I'd lost my network connection. I put it
back and the box went away. Very nice.
This is looking amazingly bad for Windows95. I really thought that,
with a complete redesign of the 32-bit stuff, that there was a chance
of things actually working for once.
I do not appear to have been entirely correct in this assertion.