Visual Basic on a Mac

[LFrascogna]

Ok, for a programming class I have to run Visual Basic 6.0. Are there mac versions or is my only option running virtual pc with visual basic. Any suggestions...

[TEG]

Visual Basic is the primary programing language for Windows.... So therefore you must use Windows to run it. That is one of the reasons as to why it takes a long time to port games and other software from PCs to Mac... They have to completely rewite the code, whereas if You program in C (Coca) you can pretty much just recomplie, and change a few calls and a Mac program can run on a PC.

TEG

[MisterMe]

Originally posted by LFrascogna
Ok, for a programming class I have to run Visual Basic 6.0. Are there mac versions or is my only option running virtual pc with visual basic. Any suggestions... Visual BASIC is a commercial product. REALBasic (http://www.realbasic.com/) is compatible with VB, cross-platform (Mac, Windows, and Linux), and is endorsed by M$. It has been used to develop a lot of small shareware Mac apps. There is a demo mode available. You might give it a try.

[LFrascogna]

I HAVE to run visual basic. It is a required course. I was wondering how well vb runs on an emulated machine. Is it even worth it or should I break out the old 500MHz laptop and reinstall windows (it is a linux laptop right now).

800Mhz (1gig of RAM) Powerbook running emulated XP vs. 500MHz (256 RAM) running XP. Who wins in a Visual Basic Competition?

[caveman_uk]

Originally posted by TEG
Visual Basic is the primary programing language for Windows.... So therefore you must use Windows to run it. That is one of the reasons as to why it takes a long time to port games and other software from PCs to Mac... They have to completely rewite the code, whereas if You program in C (Coca) you can pretty much just recomplie, and change a few calls and a Mac program can run on a PC.

TEG
I very much doubt anyone seriously writes any games in VB. It's used a lot for in-house corporate apps that are not performance-critical. Most games take a long time to port as they use directX and that has no equivalent on the mac. If a game uses openGL (like all ID games stuff) then it gets a lot easier. I don't see how cocoa programming makes anything more portable as it's only supported on Mac OS X and Next. It's not C though...objective-C or Java (though it sucks in Java TBH). If you REALLY want to be cross-platform use C++ and trolltechs Qt GUI framework. It's nowhere near as nice to use as cocoa but is pretty easy to get to work anywhere with recompilation.

BTW, LFrascogna...get that laptop formatted and XP installed. It'll be slow but VB really crawls on VirtualPC....I've tried.

[TEG]

DirectX is an offshoot of VB. And Although RB is similar/compatible with VB, they are really different.

TEG

[edesignuk]

Originally posted by LFrascogna
I HAVE to run visual basic. It is a required course. I was wondering how well vb runs on an emulated machine. Is it even worth it or should I break out the old 500MHz laptop and reinstall windows (it is a linux laptop right now).

800Mhz (1gig of RAM) Powerbook running emulated XP vs. 500MHz (256 RAM) running XP. Who wins in a Visual Basic Competition?
I think you'd be far better off with your 500MHz laptop, VPC performance really is awful!

[caveman_uk]

Originally posted by TEG
DirectX is an offshoot of VB. And Although RB is similar/compatible with VB, they are really different.

TEG
No it isn't. It can be accessed from VB true but it's native language is C or C++. DirectX from VB is really slow and was added later as VB programmers whined 'cos they were too stupid to learn C but wanted to do pretty pictures

Check out this link (http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article578.asp) for sample code if you think directx is a VB offshot.

[robbieduncan]

Originally posted by caveman_uk
I very much doubt anyone seriously writes any games in VB. It's used a lot for in-house corporate apps that are not performance-critical. Most games take a long time to port as they use directX and that has no equivalent on the mac. If a game uses openGL (like all ID games stuff) then it gets a lot easier. I don't see how cocoa programming makes anything more portable as it's only supported on Mac OS X and Next. It's not C though...objective-C or Java (though it sucks in Java TBH). If you REALLY want to be cross-platform use C++ and trolltechs Qt GUI framework. It's nowhere near as nice to use as cocoa but is pretty easy to get to work anywhere with recompilation.

BTW, LFrascogna...get that laptop formatted and XP installed. It'll be slow but VB really crawls on VirtualPC....I've tried.

Cocoa is portable using the GnuStep libraries as long as you do not use a few of the recently added Apple extensions to the OpenStep specification. Also Objective-C is a superset of C. It is pretty much C with a special runtime. Java is a great language although not used very much for GUI work. It is more ot less the de-facto web server standard where I work.

To those trying to claim that DirectX is an offshoot of VB you are so wrong. DirectX started out as a direct hardware accessability API on Windows. It was expanded to provide a better abstraction of the underlying hardware. It written in C++ (and maybe a bit of assembly). It can probably be accessed from any language with the correct bridge.