Sure, Web Edition has more than its share of bugs. Like all bugs, however, it all depends upon the beholder.  What bug causes the most pain for RS’ is the one that gets fixed first.  I’ve seen a lot of the same things the community has discovered and have just worked around them (where I can).  I was using WE in a commercial project during the first beta ( a year ago) and while we got it to work it wasn’t very good.  That one project probably generated over a hundred feedback reports.  In my opinion WE really hasn’t really been usable until 2011 R3.

Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that RS has NOT created enough Web Edition applications for themselves.  If you don’t thoroughly exercise the framework you just don’t see the things you’d see in a big, complex application (like we are creating).  There is ONE real world example of Web Edition on their website.  While I don’t know how many examples are ‘enough’, I know that one is definitely not enough.

Web Edition exposes the same problems that we all see in Cocoa, Carbon, and in the IDE on a regular basis.  Unless RS experiences the pain it won’t get fixed in a timely manner because it’s not as important to them.  The Reporting editor and generator and the database editor are but two examples of things in the IDE that RS doesn’t use in ANY of their products. It shows because there are gaping wholes in usage that make them unusable for many developers.

RS takes pride in saying they eat their own dog food because they use Real Studio to make Real Studio.  Admirable, but they tend to be on a restricted diet since they don’t eat everything on the menu.  They rarely change the menu’s for the IDE so the Menu Editor hasn’t seen many changes or enhancements.  As far as I know, they don’t use a database in the IDE so I see no reason why they’d be using the database editor on a regular basis.  They don’t do much with StyledText or Movies so its no surprise that those classes are minimalistic (at best).

Since the IDE has no need for date pickers, they have never provided one.  Likewise, the Listbox is good enough for the IDE while we’ve been asking for a more powerful grid component for years.  Full RTF support?  Forget about it because StyledText is good enough for the IDE. A better toolbar control? Well that one’s a bit of a mystery since the IDE is obviously using something different than what they provide to us.

My point is I’m not sure why anyone would be perplexed about long standing bugs.  Sure, they’re painful to you and me (and my clients), but they’re not (as) painful to RS.

Lobbying the community to get Feedback reports higher in the list is about the only way to realistically get a bug fixed. But even that is a crap shoot as there are quite a few bugs (not feature requests) very high on the list that have been there for a long time. So the only thing conclusion that I can come up with is that the bug that all the rest of us are seeing isn’t painful to RS so therefor it isn’t a priority for them.

This is my opinion as a ten year Real Studio consultant.  I know and respect most of the engineers and staff at RS and I think they do a remarkable job.  However, I think as a company they mostly ignore those like me (an Enterprise user that ponies up thousands of dollars per year) and focus, almost exclusively, on the hobbyists (that bring in a hundred dollars a year at best).  If they could make me happy(ier) the hobbyists would come along anyway (see history of Visual Basic).

Bugs happen in every software product. I remember grousing about Visual Basic bugs when I was a big VB6 user. I know that my code back then had plenty of work arounds for bugs in their API. There is no doubt that Microsoft had more developers working on the product (as a whole) than RS has working on Real Studio. There’s also no doubt that VB6 has a considerably larger user base than Real Studio. I feel that this resulted in more workarounds being posted and more alternate solutions.  The reverse is that our smaller community doesn’t have as many solutions and documented workarounds so it feels worse but I feel that it isn’t.

Anyway, that’s enough on my opinions about bugs and such.  Have a good New Year and be safe. Happy coding!

Visual Basic seems to have taken a big hit at the end of 2004.  I’m not entirely sure of why this happened because .NET had been released in February of 2002 in Visual Studio.  Visual Studio 2003 was released in April of 2003 and the next update was Visual Studio 2005 which was released in November of 2005.  Vista was released in January of 2007 so I don’t believe it has anything to do with the operating system either.

Perhaps what’s interesting is that it nearly regains its former popularity in about two years.  Could this have been a reaction that people found .NET to not be as easy to use as VB6?  I know that some people were dismayed that VB.NET wasn’t much like VB6 and abandoned it – especially since Microsoft operating systems weren’t breaking their old VB6 apps.

Since the midway point of 2009 it seems like the bottom has dropped out in VB6 popularity.  Could it be because Microsoft officially ended support for VB6?  Again, speculation on my part, but that is about the time that I started seeing an influx of requests for quotes from people wanting to convert their VB6 apps to Real Studio.

Another huge drop happened in early 2011.  Was this due to the confusion of whether or not Windows 8 will support VB6 applications?  Perhaps.  I have seen another increase, in the same timeframe, of people looking to convert from Visual Basic to Real Studio.

Is Real Studio (i.e. REALbasic) the right choice for your Visual Basic 6 application?  The answer is a qualified maybe.  If you want one code base that works the same on Macintosh OS X, Windows, and Linux and perhaps a similar code base for a web app (Web Edition has separate UI classes than the desktop) then Real Studio might be a good fit.

If you’re looking at converting to Real Studio please do your homework.  Learn a little bit about the language (<shameless plug>Like my training videos<\shameless plug>) and work with it a bit.  Do NOT depend upon any VB6 to RB converters working – there are simply too many things that REALbasic is better at.  You’re better off rewriting your app to take advantage of moderns things like subclassed controls and threading rather than try to force a Real Studio app to behave like a VB6 app.

My final bit of advice is to forget about your ActiveX controls you’ve spent so much money on.  They probably won’t work and they won’t work on the Mac or Linux anyway.  Find and switch to an equivalent, if possible, but you’ll probably create some of your own subclassed controls.  In the long run you need to think in RB-speak rather than VB6-speak.

Real Studio, in the long run, is pretty inexpensive compared to Visual Studio, in my opinion.  I know people that thought of nothing of dropping over $1000 per year per developer on control suites.  Real Studio is much cheaper from that perspective since subclassing controls, canvas controls, and container controls eliminate the need for much of those expensive suites.  The drawback is that you end up doing the work yourself rather than some other developer.  And some things just can’t be done in RB that you might have come to expect in VB6 (like specialized controls in a grid cell) simply because on the Mac or Linux there is no equivalent.

If you want to convert your VB6 app to Real Studio, you can take a look at our conversion page at http://www.bkeeney.com/consulting/vb2rbconversion

Visual Basic 6 is 20 years old.  It’s stood the test of time and it while it’s showing its age it still functions and apps written on it still run in Vista and Windows 7.  To its credit, Microsoft has made sure that this venerable product still runs on modern computers.

But the question of Windows 8 compatibility has hit the fan, so to say, in the past month or so with Microsoft saying that apps can be written in html and javascript.  That threw many developers into a tizzy.

I don’t believe for a second that Microsoft is abandoning .NET, Win32 or COM simply because those are the foundation for nearly everything ever written at Microsoft.  It simply doesn’t make sense for Microsoft to move to another set of API’s even if you believe that Microsoft moves to a new technology every now and then to make themselves a moving target.  If anything, I believe that this might simply be a new way to develop apps but not replace anything.

While doing research for this post I ran across an unattributed quote supposedly from a person in Microsoft Support:

“We can’t make an official comment on our Windows 8 plans yet but it would be a likely outcome that VB6 applications will continue to work. “

I believe that statement but it’s not exactly a definitive statement.  The real question, I think, is how bad will it suck?  VB6 apps work in Windows 7 but without some work they look like they’re from the 90′s.  Most app developers I know don’t want their apps to look that dated.

Microsoft has stated that the Visual Basic 6 runtimes will not ship after Window 7.  This presumably means Windows 8 and beyond.  I have heard that Windows 8 will be 64 bit only and that means that the VB6 runtimes will either not work at all or will have to be run in some sort of compatibility layer.  So this means that existing apps MAY work, but only after jumping through hoops to install the runtime libraries and making sure the compatibility is set.

Let’s face it.  VB6 is an old, old development environment.  It was written in an age where computers didn’t have much memory and only one processor.  Threading isn’t impossible, but the few times I tried to get it working in a VB6 app the result was instability and crashes.  Threading is such an important thing in modern applications.

VB6 is object oriented – somewhat.  For the time it was state of the art but since subclassing controls is impossible it makes for interesting workarounds and wrappers.  Frankly it makes life more complicated than it needs to be.

Twenty years ago, VB6 was the cats-meow.  The Macintosh was around but it was considered a toy (I disagree but that’s not the argument) and few cared about it.  Microsoft was pretty much the only game in town.  Linux hadn’t been invented yet and the internet was for a few hard core geeks.

This is where Real Studio starts to look more attractive.  It works the same on Mac, Windows, and Linux.  Web Edition brings some of the same ease of developing desktop apps to the web.  In Real Studio I can subclass controls and objects (for the most part) all day long.  It’s a modern object oriented programming language.  Is it without foibles and inconsistencies?  Certainly not, but it’s way more powerful than VB6 in many ways.  Threading isn’t perfect, but it’s still light years ahead of VB6.

We’ve seen an uptick recently with people asking us to convert their VB6 application to Real Studio.  Our VB6 Analyzer utility (found at http://www.bkeeney.com/consulting/vb2rbconversion) has been downloaded a lot recently.  It allows users to scan their VB6 project and sends us a simple report detailing the number of forms, classes, libraries and OCX’s in use and lines of code and some other simple metrics.  It’s no substitute for seeing the whole project but it gives us a nice way to guestimate the costs of rewriting the app in Real Studio.

Notice that I said rewrite the application.  The only thing that Visual Basic and RealBasic have in common is that they have ‘basic’ in the name.  It’s like comparing a computer from twenty years ago to a modern computer.  Real Studio does things so much easier, better, and faster than Visual Basic that it’s really not worth trying to convert it line by line or even form by form.  Believe me we’ve tried – the end result is that you end up spending as much time fixing VB6 code that has a better equivalent in RB than it would be to just rewrite it from scratch.

Is Real Studio a suitable replacement for every app?  The answer is simple:  no.  Real Studio makes a really good cross-platform app, but that doesn’t always mean it will have all of the buzzers and bells available in development environments meant for each platform (grids in Windows come come to mind).

We are Real Studio consultants.  That’s what we do and we’ve been doing it for ten years.  Most of us spent a fair amount of time in Visual Basic before moving to Real Studio.  If you decide to do the transition yourself you will hate it at first because Real Studio is different than VB.  We all went through it and for a while you want Real Studio to be just like Visual Basic – trust me it’s not – and after you stop trying make Real Studio function like VB6 you’ll start to like it and get it.  Transitions are never easy.  For training videos, we have over 30 hours available at http://www.bkeeney.com/realbasic-training-section plus you could always hire us to come on site for training.

If you have VB6 project you want to transition please drop us a line and we can talk.  If you want to get multiple Real Studio developers looking at your project, make a post at http://www.realsoftware.com/support/consultants.php which gets sent out to the Real Studio developers network.

Does this change with Windows 8?  I don’t know, but I’m already seeing an uptick in developers that are looking to convert from Visual Basic 6 to Real Studio.  Uncertainty is a bad thing and even the full-time Windows developers I know don’t seem to know what’s going on.  Some of them are even worried that .NET and Silverlight support is up in the air.

The only thing that’s been mentioned for Win8 is JavaScript and HTML5.  No mention of .NET, Silverlight, or even Win32.  It’s very uncharacteristic of Microsoft to be so secretive and up-in-the-air over a future product.  Are they trying to be more Apple-like?  Perhaps that’s why people are freaking out.

Do I think MS is going to drop support for .NET, Silverlight, or even Win32?  Not a chance.  They have way too much invested in each of those to abandon them.  From a corporate standpoint there would be a revolt since almost everyone has invested, heavily, in one or more of those technologies/platforms.

But are Visual Basic 6 apps still safe?  That is a very good question and from the research I’ve done it appears that the VB6 runtime will not be shipped with Win8 though some in the community suspect that a hack will be found before release.  Other comments I’ve seen indicate that Win8 will ship as only 64 bit.  The VB6 runtime is 32bit only so that will mean running in compatibility mode which adds to the possibility of it not working properly for all applications.

Microsoft, at some point, has to kill compatibility.  Visual Basic is an old development environment that doesn’t take advantage of many new technologies.  It’s also not a very good object oriented language – it just wasn’t designed to be that way.  If the MS dev tools of the future are Silverlight, .NET, and JavaScript/HTML5 (does anyone really believe that!?), then it sure seems that VB6 might be on its way out.

So while VB6 apps might work with Win8 using hacks and compatibility mode, I believe developers have every right to be worried.  They’ve invested heavily in VB6 tools and controls and now the (long) honeymoon is over and it’s time to look at alternatives.

If you are only interested in Microsoft then the options are easy with .NET or Silverlight (assuming they aren’t going away).  If you’re thinking of a Mac or Linux version than the options are limited.  You could do Java, but as a long-time Mac user I’m not a big Java fan and try to avoid them because their UI generally isn’t native (I’m a Mac snob, but then most of us are).  Qt is a possibility but it’s not a RAD option either.

I am a little biased but I think Real Studio is a good choice for those coming from Visual Basic.  They are very much alike in how they work though REALbasic is MUCH better at object oriented programming than VB ever was.  It’s newer and is on a regular update schedule.  And, with just a little work, you can easily make apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux that look the same on all three platforms.  And now that Real Studio can make Web Apps there’s a fourth platform that you could potential support (though making a web app involves different controls, editors, etc so it’s not as easy as clicking a checkbox).

Is it a quick and easy conversion?  No.  Don’t trust any conversion program and, from experience, any converter will be just as time consuming (if not slightly worse) as rewriting from scratch.  We’ve found that taking a look at the UI and making it a bit more object oriented to take advantage of the strengths of REALbasic is always worth the investment.  We like to say you’re writing the apps for the next ten years and not only for right now.  So doing the extra work now will pay off for years.

Is Real Studio perfect?  Absolutely not.  It currently is not 64 bit compatible either though I know of many developers that have no issues with running in Windows 7 64 bit.  I do know that 64 bit compatibility is the next big upgrade for Windows after Real Software finishes up on Cocoa builds for the Macintosh side.  If memory serves they are on track for late 2011 64 bit compatibility (though that’s always subject to change).

With Win8 on schedule to be released next year (does anyone really believe that either?), you might need to be proactive and start thinking about the alternatives now.  Waiting until Win8 is released might be too late for your product.  Do you really want to be under the gun from management to get something that works on the CEO’s new shiny Win8 laptop?

If you would like to get a rough estimate on cost to convert from VB6 to Real Studio, we (BKeeney Software) have a VB6 Analyzer Tool for you to download (written in RB of course) that analyzes your project and gives us some metrics on lines of code, controls used, numbers of classes, etc, that help us give you an estimate.  More information can be found at http://www.bkeeney.com/consulting/vb2rbconversion.

If you have an Android phone and you have an issue with <insert problem here>, who are you going to turn to?  The hardware manufacturer, the carrier, or Google?  The end consumer doesn’t care they just want the problem solved and just like how Microsoft is responsible for their hardware partners problems, Google will probably be left holding the bag for their hardware partners too.  Let’s hope their Android support is better than their business services help.

I’ve been experiencing issues with my mail server on my virtual private server and thought that going to GMail might be a good solution for a variety of reasons.  Because of Google ID issues I messed the registration up (hey, I didn’t say I was very good at this stuff now did I?) and locked up the domain registration for GMail.  After searching fruitlessly (ironically using Google search), I came to the conclusion that Google doesn’t really want to help you.  It’s downright impossible to talk to a human being or even send off a plain email to a support department.

I was never able to find an official tech support phone number for Google.  Sure, there are forums and articles and other information but nothing to get hold of a real life person – even at a price (as far as I can find).  There are some ways of getting hold of them through forums and other means but it’s all indirect and after sending off what I hope was a message to someone that can help I’m still waiting on even an automated response email saying they’d get back to me.  I’m not holding my breath.

Now, do the same thing for Apple.  It doesn’t take long to find a whole web page full of ways to get help.  Phone, instant messaging, email are all prominently displayed after two clicks on their website.  Sure, some of them cost money, but as a business, when I need support I’ll pay for it.  If that’s still not good enough I can go to one of the over one hundred brick and mortar stores around the world and talk to an Apple Genius for nothing.  If that fails, I can find Apple Resellers and other Apple certified experts in my area.

Apple’s been doing this for decades as a computer and consumer electronics company.  They’ve consistently been ranked very high on support satisfaction surveys.  As a family, we’ve had various minor issues with our Apple components over the years but nothing that a phone call or trip to the local store (either Apple or local reseller) didn’t fix promptly to our satisfaction.  I’m sure there are example of poor customer support with Apple but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

People say that one of the great things about Android is that it’s free.  The old axiom that you get what you pay for holds true in this case.  Google’s support is awful in my opinion.  To say that Google is the new Microsoft is an insult to Microsoft.  At least Microsoft got support right even if you have to talk to someone on the other side of the world.

What’s your experience been with Google support?

Geeze.  How many levels of wrong is this rumor?  You think Apple is going to trust Microsoft with the keys to their iPhone/iPad kingdom?  I don’t think so.  Apple has worked too hard building xCode and Cocoa Touch to let a 3rd party develop for iPhone/iPad.  If this does happen, then Apple might as well give Adobe a call and let them know they can restart their iPhone/iPad programs too.  And we all know where that feud isn’t over yet.

Where this might make sense is desktop applications.  Microsoft, while doing all that work to write Microsoft Office for the Mac in Cocoa, wrote their own Cocoa libraries and other Mac GUI editors and put it into Visual Studio.  Seems like an awful lot of work with minimal gain for Microsoft unless they’ve decided to make a push in REAL Software’s corner.  They certainly have the knowledge and resources to do such a product.

While I don’t think this rumor has legs it does make you think.  No doubt Microsoft is feeling the pinch of developers learning Cocoa which does nothing for Microsoft.  If they developed a cross-platform Visual Studio it stems the bleeding because now developers don’t have an either/or decision to make.  Learning a new development tool and frameworks suck and letting all those Windows developers develop for Mac and Windows using their tool keeps Microsoft in the game.  It doesn’t help them with iPhone/iPad development (now) but in five years who knows.  If it does happen it will generate some serious buzz which is something Microsoft wants (needs?).

What does this do, if true, to our favorite development tools company located in Austin?  I don’t think it would be good news.

It’s why I chuckle when people talk about ‘cloud computing’ being the wave of the future.  I have no doubt that we’ll see more cloud computing but there are just certain things that don’t belong in the ‘cloud’ and should be taken care of by your own IT department.

I did a fair amount of work a few years ago on a commercial accounting application and every now and then the boss would get all excited about cloud computing and he’d kick the tires and make some noise about moving the entire operation towards it.  At first blush it makes a LOT of sense to have the software and data reside elsewhere because it puts the burden on the host company to keep the software up to date, upgrade the hardware on a regular basis, have regular on-site and off-site backups and have decent security.  And then you realize that its strength is also a weakness as the Microsoft case has shown.  You are depending TOTALLY on someone else doing the right thing.

The other reason is the data.  For many companies their data IS their business.  It’s their competitive advantage.  You really trust all the pipes between your office and the cloud computing servers?  Sounds paranoid but this is your sensitive data you’re talking about, right?  How many stories have been published about SSN and credit card numbers being compromised (at the minimum) and outright stolen (at the worst) in the past couple of years?

If you’re in a larger metropolitan area you probably have decent internet access, with decent speeds, that never goes down.  There are a lot of places even in the United States where this is simply not true. I’ve always enjoyed pulling the network cable from a computer when someone is on their high horse about cloud computing.  Tough to get work done when you can’t load the software or the data.  At least with the software and data on my computer and local network I can still get work done.  My job requires internet access and I can tell you that when my internet goes down I’m not very productive (and keep in mind that I’m in a top 40 metropolitan area with all underground utilities!).  I’ve also had web servers get attacked and be so unresponsive that they might has well have been shut down.

In the long run, can you go to your boss and guarantee (because it might mean the difference of having a job or not, after all) that the data is 100% secure, backed up and available 24/7?  Food for thought, no?

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-24statement.mspx is talking about how European users might get to choose which browser is used by their machine.

The second is http://www.aeroxp.org/2009/03/ie8-functionally-removable/ is about how Internet Explorer is functionally removable from Windows 7.  The article states that the procedure only removes the Internet Explorer executable and not all of the supporting libraries so it shouldn’t be much of a concern to RB developers.  Or is it?

During the ARBP chat last week, REAL Software president and CEO, Geoff Perlman stated that he was unaware of any Windows 7 incompatibilities.  No one asked specifically about what happens if the user uninstalls Internet Explorer in Windows 7 or a European users chooses FireFox, Safari, Chrome or Opera as their web browser rather than Internet Explorer.

Will the HTMLviewer still work?  I think it will because it’s dependent upon the supporting libraries but it’s a question that I’d like reassurance on from RS.  But perhaps the real question is whether the HTMLviewer.IsAvailable is an adequate check and it jumps into the libraries or if it’s simply a check on what version of Windows you’re running?  After all, if you’re using Windows XP or Vista you HAVE TO HAVE Internet Explorer.  But it seems like Windows 7 might be changing that rule.

I’ve been particular critical of the HTMLviewer control over the past several years.  Yes, RS has worked some of the bugs out but it’s still not as stable as I’d like to see it.  My biggest beef is that it’s not using the same supporting libraries on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.  On Mac OS X it uses WebKit.  On Windows it uses Internet Explorer and on Linux it uses GTK.  This leads to platform incompatibilities, instabilities and downright bugs between the platforms.

If you didn’t read the release notes for RB 2009 R3 you’ll find that RS isn’t shipping REALbasic with the Language Reference for Linux because HTMLviewer has too many issues so Linux users have to rely upon a PDF version.  Ouch.

REALbasic’s strength is cross-platform so why not use a cross-platform web browser as the basis for HTMLviewer?  Use Gecko (Firefox) or Webkit (Safari and Google’s Chrome)!  We might need it for Windows 7 which is being released in October?

Thoughts?

So I wiped the drive.  I reinstalled Windows XP SP1.  Of course I couldn’t find the original Dell drivers CD so I had no network connectivity.  So I had to download a network driver from the Dell website using my trusty iMac (which now runs XP, Vista, and Ubuntu) and burned it to a CD so I could install it on the Dell.  Great.  Finally got the network up and running via ethernet cable – forget about the Wireless network for now.

So I figured I’d just bite the bullet and activate Windows sooner rather than later because I know it’s going to choke on some new update that requires Windows to be a certified genuine live advantage BS (or whatever they’re calling it these days).  I knew this was going to be painful as I just activated Windows on not just one, two but three copies of XP on two separate iMac’s running VMWare and one running Parallels.  Each time it failed validation and required a phone call.

So this brings you to the validation window and an 800 number that forces you to type in what seems to be a gazillion set of 6 digitis.  Since I’ve been through this before I went to the bathroom got a drink and got into my best yoga position to achieve a zen moment even though the pleasant recording said it would only take ‘about’ six minutes.  After speaking into the phone like a friggin’ idiot with all those numbers, I’m oh so pleasantly told that she couldn’t help me.  No shit.  I could have told her that before I started but that wasn’t an option.  So now comes the really fun part.

I get transferred to someone half way around the world where I have to give them the numbers AGAIN!  Come on folks, this is computer company that is supposed to help companies do a better job with their data.  Couldn’t the call router send an id to the db record that I’m sure it just recorded?  Obviously not.  Instead I have to talk to someone half way across the world with a horrible phone connection and after the first three sets of numbers their phone system hangs up.  Good thing the kid was asleep because he would have learned a few things.

So I go through the whole process again even though my zen moment is gone.  The computerized activation system, the transfer to a human being and I this time somewhere on the planet a phone rings twice and the system hangs up again.  So Microsoft has now wasted about 6 hours of my time between reformatting, not having all the drivers needed and trying to activate Windows.  And I’m not.  Done.  Yet.

It would have been far simpler and cheaper to just go buy a new computer and throw the old one away.  And people wonder why I’m pro-Apple.

If I wasn’t  a cross-platform software developer I would be a Microsoft free household.  At least with REALbasic I can develop on the Mac and only use Windows when I have to.  VMWare and Parallels makes this incredibly easy to do and more or less pain free.

Do I feel better now?  Only partially because I know that I’ll have to go through this whole process again tomorrow sometime.

Why do I bring this up?  With RB 2008 due to ship soon, I thought it nice to put things into perspective.  The worlds LARGEST software company with nearly unlimited resources (money and manpower) rewrote their development studio and it had bugs.  Yes, bugs.  And people complained about them.  A lot.

Real Software is tiny compared to Microsoft.  So let’s give them credit where credit is due.  They don’t have the same resources but are eating their own dog food (i.e. using RB to develop RB) and have to deal with all the crap that goes on with Apple, Microsoft and Linux operating systems.

Thank you to the developers at RS!