REALbasic 5.5 FREE but only until 4/15/05

[schmosef]

As a fair compromise, I'm not going to start bashing Borland.

In truth, I'm not sure how good their tools are these days.

I do remember that some Delphi apps I'd seen in the late 90s were not very well polished.

And I was personally burned by Borland's lackluster transition to 32bit native compilers.

[schmosef]

I was talking about Enterprise apps.

To be fair, you were talking about MS Enterprise apps. Unless you forgot to mention that they were covering a different platform in that MS Lab.

What's all this with RAD?

That's what, up until very recently, MS was positioning VB for.

.Net and VS.Net 2002+ have managed to break down a lot of barriers to RAD in various languages. With .Net and the visual tools built into Visual Studio, the language you use isn't so important any more.

[Jessterw]

And that's saying a lot

[xortam]

Yes well, you were talking about a MS lab and their use of VB with Enterprise apps. Where RAD fits in there seems rather obvious to me.

I was talking about the Enterprise and ActiveDirectory. An Enterprise of any significant size is typically heterogeneous in nature and wouldn't be comprised of solely Windows platforms. A Directory, of which ActiveDirectory is an example, is used to manage network entities across an Enterprise. I rolled my eyes up at Microsoft AD code examples being implemented in Basic because it's not a suitable language for coding serious heterogeneous Enterprise applications. This week long session of classes and labs took place while Microsoft was finishing up development of W2K and the rhetoric then was that they wanted to provide services to the Enterprise. This specifically meant to them that they wanted to include support of Unix systems into their architecture, but at least that was a start. Microsoft also started working with the IETF at that time to further support Directory Services and other network services throughout the Enterprise.

I did concede that they were probably using the Basic code samples as an example of RAD administrative tools rather than demonstrating Enterprise apps.

[Jessterw]

We'll just have to agree to disagree that any enterprise of significant size is going to typically be heterogeneous, but you're right that VB is not the first choice language for creating applications that will interact within a heterogeneous network.

I stand by the fact that VB excels at developing powerful applications quickly, and that this will often be the goal of system/network admins who employ the use of Active Directory and, by extension, other MS-centric systems. There may be a few rare cases to the contrary, but if an organization is running AD, chances are that their network is going to be rather MS-centric.

On another note, Visual Basic is not BASIC, so while you've stated you have worked with the latter, you've also stated you've never used the former. At my former employer I wrote a VB-based laboratory information management system that interfaced with AD, Exchange, and a few other services, as well as applications/services that ran on non-MS platforms. The time required to develop the solution using VB was far less than have been required by most any other language. True, it only ran on Windows, and while that wasn't a downside in this case, it admittedly could have been given different circumstances.

[Nowhere]

PythonCard is fun...

[cjolley]

Of course there is PowerBuilder
It is a really great RAD tool for DB front ends.
@ $3,000 a seat it's not much for home use though.
(for Enterprise, you don't want the other two)