Visual Basic

[Jam0864]

since Sunday I have started learning visual basic, using the "Visual Basic Express Edition 2005" software (2008 refuses to work on my comp... something about me not giving it registry access...so i installed 2005! ) and i gotta say, I love it. So far I have made a few apps... basically they were all test apps and stuff I had to do while following the tutorial, the two I made on my own are attached. A simple web browser, and a calculator.   (comments/questions/queries/concerns? XD)

the original sgdk was made with visual basic right? How could you sort through all the code bluemonkmn? lol I was getting a little confused even with just the calculator... did you do it with different projects, like one was the map editor, one was the graphics editor etc to make it easier, and then grouped them togethor?

well the thing i love most about visual basic, is that its visual... and fairly basic... lmao.
its easy to understand, most of the if, do, then, else etc i learned from sgdk2, and the rest was just variables i also learnt from sgdk! sgdk has taught me heaps. :O


...discuss!

[bluemonkmn]

Most large scale software engineering is done with a design phase where the developer plans out the overall structure of the program and how logic will flow (flow charts), how the logic will be divided among various objects (object model) and how screens will look.  Then they can work out fundamental problems before they have any code.  I, however, tend to work a little differently (although I confess I haven't been 100% responsible for a project larger than 1 person could accomplish) because I find that modern programming languages (or at least the way I work with them) are just as easy to develop with as design tools are to design with.

So how do I keep all the code straight?  Visual Basic kind of pushes you in to putting code for different screens into different files.  Since I suspect your code was only 1 main file per program, you didn't realize that once there started to be multiple files, sorting out larger projects had a better way of organizing code.  That's probable the most helpful thing -- splitting off code with different purposes into different objects, which are defined in different files.  After a while, you develop an instinct for how to write short code and split the code into sensible units in different files.  If you find yourself writing very repetitive code, there's probably a shorter way to do it that's easier to manage by splitting up the logic into different functions/objects.

Another thing that I find myself doing a *lot* when working on larger files is searching.  I search for a keyword or phrase  that I know is in the piece of code I'm looking for.  That's probably my primary means of locating code, next to the F12 key.  F12 will jump to the implementation of a function that the cursor is on.  So if you have a function called "AddDigit" and you are looking at some code that calls AddDigit, if you click on that word to put the caret (cursor) on it, then press F12, you'll be looking at the code that implements the AddDigit function.

I don't really think about it any more.  I've been practicing programming in various languages (though a variant of BASIC was my first language) for 20+ years.  I can write code as easily as English (maybe easilier ).

[tprime]

I have just downloaded visual basic 2005 express. I don't understand what registering helps with though. But I still register anyway.