Way, way, way "back when," I swore to myself I'd never do
one of these self-promotional pages. I won't lie and say I'm frequently asked
for this sort of information, but, well, I had a page like this on the old site
and redirects from there to here would 404 now if I didn't put something
up in its place.
Back in the summer of 1994,
Microsoft deemed me worthy of bestowing with their new Most
Valuable Professional award. The MVP program has expanded greatly since
then, of course. There are now almost 100 "Visual Basic" MVPs, and
several thousand other MVPs designated for a wide variety of en vogue
products. I'm not sure it still represents what it once did, but I haven't
turned them down yet as the reward has been re-offered annually.
I've been using various dialects of BASIC since the mid-1970s, I guess. No
matter what other languages I try, I keep coming back. Nothing has ever beat it
for simply getting the job done. I thought I'd found the ultimate language in
Microsoft's Visual Basic, after settling into their dialect in QuickBasic and
PDS. I even made a hobby out of writing magazine articles
and even a book about solving
problems with VB, in addition to helping folks out in the virtual community that
surrounded this wonderful tool. Actually, "helping" in the newsgroups
is such a two-way street, that the common characterization is sadly missing
what's really going on.
But anyway, the bottom then fell out, and a
quarter-century of progress was abruptly derailed as the whiz kids in Redmond,
none of whom apparently ever used VB, "cleaned it up" so the
rest of us wouldn't have to suffer from our own foolishness any longer. The
product Microsoft was founded upon was destroyed, in my opinion. After messing
around with beta1, I decided I wasn't in their target demographic, so I've never
bothered with it since. I can't recommend anyone else do so, either.
Microsoft Basic has been relegated to the role of writing disposable code
only, as it's now firmly entrenched in an unmistakable pattern of breakage at
approximately 5-year intervals. For six million customers who couldn't take
their code assets with them to this new-fangled thing I'll just refer to as Visual
Fred, that's really a shame. Never before has Microsoft cast aside their
customer's investments like this, though I fear it's now become their
vision of the future.
Anyway, as I said, with Classic VB you can just get things done! That's what
I'm still doing. I hope you'll enjoy the examples of some of those things that
I've provided here. If you like them, feel free to drop some spare
change in the jar. If you have suggestions, or would like some custom coding
done, feel free to leave some feedback.
Who Is That Guy?
