Visual Basic on Virtual PC???

[Zerobo]

Hi everyone, hope this is in the correct forum.

I am a devoted mac user and current grad student in behavior analysis. I am taking a class next spring that requires programming using visual basic. I figured i would have to suck it up and do something i said i would never do, buy a pc. Anyway, a fellow mac user told me that I may be able to do my programming using visual basic running on virtual pc. Does anyone have any experience doing this??? I really don't know much about visual basic so i don't know what kind of programming we will be doing. If anyone does have experience with this, what kind of hardware would i need to be able to run this smoothly? I would much rather buy a new powerbook than a crappy pc to get me through one semester! Anyway, thanks for your time everyone!

 

[slimflem]

I've been a MS developer for over 10 years. That's the career I fell into. At work, several of the guys have PowerBooks and run Visual Studio.NET on Virtual PC which is way more resource hungry than VB could ever be. You should be fine.

 

[MisterMe]

Hi everyone, hope this is in the correct forum.

I am a devoted mac user and current grad student in behavior analysis. I am taking a class next spring that requires programming using visual basic. I figured i would have to suck it up and do something i said i would never do, buy a pc. Anyway, a fellow mac user told me that I may be able to do my programming using visual basic running on virtual pc. Does anyone have any experience doing this??? I really don't know much about visual basic so i don't know what kind of programming we will be doing. If anyone does have experience with this, what kind of hardware would i need to be able to run this smoothly? I would much rather buy a new powerbook than a crappy pc to get me through one semester! Anyway, thanks for your time everyone!

You ought to look into REALbasic. It is MacOS X native. It handles Visual BASIC projects. It is supported by Microsoft.

 

[G5Unit]

Does visual basic even use that hardware demanding engines?

 

[slimflem]

If you are going to learn VB, then I suggest you use MS VB. Others are never 100% compatible and will not help you if a job depends on knowing VB. Experience with this type of tool will probably not count very much for real experience with VB. Clones come close, but never quite get all the way. Read the site, it says highly compatible which means to me there are gaps and I would not use it for career-based or school-based learning, especially if the instructor is teaching from MS VB. On your own time and for fun, sure, go for it, but I have never, ever seen or heard of a company asking for experience in a tool like this or requiring it for an application. Any company that uses VB to produce in-house or commercial applications is not going to use something like this. Especially commercial apps. No way. Besides, companies using VB are probably already heavily invested in MS products and have Windows environments or maybe some one-off applications are being built for an isolated Windows machine or something, but can almost promise you RealBASIC or other clones will not get you anywhere practical. You will invest your time in learning these other tools and still have to learn the real VB or have a longer ramp up time compared to just starting with VB to begin with.

That's just an opinion from someone developing MS applications for over 10 years.

 

[Zerobo]

Thanks for your input everyone. I think you are right slimflem, i would rather use MS software for this. I know my instructor will be using MS and I would really hate to have to redo something because I used slightly different software. That semester is going to be very demanding and stressful from what i have heard from the older students, the last thing i will want is more work. I may email him and see if he has ever had a student use VB on virtual pc before and see what he says. I would like to test it on my 1ghz eMac to see how well it runs. i will need a laptop though so i will probably have to sell my aging G3 800 ibook and by a new ibook or powerbook which is again much better than spending money on a pc! thanks again for your help everyone!