It looks like the beginning of the end for one of my most popular articles on devCity (at least, most popular, according to the number of hits and the general positive feedback, that is ).
It’s the one that deals with Multiple Forms in VB.NET. http://www.devcity.net/net/article.aspx?alias=multipleforms
This particular article helps to solve that first day problem that many of us have when moving from VB6 to VB.NET. That is the sudden sinking realisation that you simply don’t know how to show a new Windows Form any more. :-{
In VB.NET prior to 2005, the tried and trusted VB6 code of :
Form2.Show
Will only reward you with the soon-to-be-hated wiggly blue line.
Of course, like so many things programming related, the answer – once you know it – is simplicity itself. But it’s something that has caused a lot of grief, frustration and general gnashing of teeth for upgraders since VB.NET first hit the streets.
The good news then for current VB6-ers is that with the release of VB2005 (soon to be known simply as “VB” - now won’t that cause a cartload of confusion in the forums for the next few months?) this particular stumbling block to happy upgrading has been removed.
The default Windows Form instance is back! If you really, really don’t want to create your own first instance of a form then you will be able to use the VB6 style syntax, as shown above, to do it for you.
Whether you should, of course, is a different question and I look forward to reading many long and heated discussions, arguments and flames appearing on the VB Forums in the coming months.
So it looks as though that my article will become almost totally redundant. At least for VB2005 users. In the meantime, I suppose I’d better find some replacement VB2005 (Excuse me! VB) stumbling blocks to write about in future devCity articles. Although from my experimenting with the latest version to date, this might actually be a more difficult challenge. It’s a much improved version from the 2002 and 2003 offerings in many ways, they seem to have taken on board all the major complaints of upgraders/potential upgraders and fixed them. Add that to the already existing benefits of .NET and I reckon it’s going to be even harder to resist the change now.