outside looking in

[Gary Gorski]

Right now Im planning on sticking with VB6 for the time being

[Pronk]

Great thread!:) I had been thinking about the question posed in this thread since Gary did the interview at sportsdigs relating how he became a programmer.. Thanks for the info!

[matth3322]

I think that Gary has inspired a bunch of us. Hopefully he will have some future employees in this group when he becomes big.

[Gary Gorski]

Believe me, if someone can come to me with a game that I'm not interested in programming myself and its a solid game with a solid foundation I would definitely take a look and consider adding them to the WS Team. So I hope some of you do get inspired to do games that aren't already being done (especially if you could do a really cool non-sports game to help expand our audience) and will bring them to me when you finish them.

[FranklinNoble]

I'm trying to learn VB .Net 2005 (I get the software free at work). The online books are pretty solid. From what I understand, the SQL 2005 integration is a pretty compelling reason to consider an upgrade (and you can get VB.Net 2k5 and SQL 2k5 both in free "express" versions from Microsoft - as well as free books online).

[21C]

I used VB6 to create a cricket sim that I've worked on for about 3-4 years off and on ( mainly off ). I got some very realistic results for the teams I used in testing but I got bogged down in the result stage as well as team selection. I put it aside for a while and have never managed to finish it.

[Randy Chase]

Are you thinking of upgrading Randy, Gary to the next version (free version offered.. ) or are you guys going to stay with what works?

Dale,

I've been very reluctant to make the move to VB.net. However, if Microsoft had managed the original .Net release the way they are doing the 2005 release I probalby would have made the move a long time ago.

The bottom line is that we are all going to make the switch at some point. (It's hard to make your living using a development system that is no longer supported - and is no longer fully compatible with the dominant version of the OS in play in the world.)

For me, its going to be a slow migration. I've started rewriting some of the various supporting applicaitons on the server side, but will be very slow to make the full conversion for the game clients. (For SpiritWars, the upgrade wizard told me that I have about 8,000 lines of code that need to be modified. That was an incomplete count, however, since the wizard blew up before it finished its evaluation.)

For client-side applications, I'm very excited about what MS is promoting as VB Fusion. You can write .net modules and compile them in a "wrapper" that will allow them to be integrated into VB6 applications. This provides a means of making the migration in steps instead of one total rewrite. (Of course, this also means that the .net framework has to be installed on the client machine which increases the download/install for a lot of folks. When people begin moving to Vista, the framework will be in place and that won't be a factor any longer.)

The development time is slower (it isn't an upgrade - it really is a new language and was written primarily by the C++ folks, not the guys who have been developing VB) but there are tons of performance advantages.

[Icy]

Another language that could be used for text sims (and that in fact i'm already using for my own project) is the new Visual C# that is also part of the .NET familly. It's basically the same than VB .NET but using the C++/Java/PHP synthax instead of VB one.

It's being easy to learn for me as i have a programming base in Java and specially PHP. Also C# is supossed to be the language choice for Windows Vista (the future Windows) so it could be a good language to learn if you guys are starting from zero.