OSDev.org

The Place to Start for Operating System Developers
It is currently Thu Mar 28, 2024 11:40 am

All times are UTC - 6 hours




Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 18 posts ]  Go to page 1, 2  Next
Author Message
 Post subject: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Thu Aug 11, 2016 8:15 pm 
Offline
Member
Member

Joined: Tue Sep 23, 2014 6:12 pm
Posts: 144
I found a site here:

http://www.vbtutor.net

I downloaded VB2012 (old version, I know) and I need your opinion at what point I should stop reading the tutorials and either practice with it or move onto something else, like C++.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Thu Aug 11, 2016 9:28 pm 
Offline
Member
Member
User avatar

Joined: Tue Mar 06, 2007 11:17 am
Posts: 1225
In general you should find tutorials, books and documents that teach based on final projects made from everything we worked and learned in the book. In this way you can learn anything in no time.

Also do this:
- You could implement some WinAPI functions into Visual Basic (probably impractical due to the language), and most importantly take double advantage of your VB tutorials by translating the programs you're studying or that you like manually into C++ so you can understand it by reusing what you already did in Visual Basic. The opposite is also possible (learn Visual Basic by translating C++ programs into Visual Basic). In this way you will really take the most of any tutorial in any language.

- Read the book's questions, requests and problems, also read what is needed to be done where it gives implementations. Also figure what each of a section of a chapter should contain and write/solve it yourself. Then implement your own solution in place of the implementation and the explanation shown by the book. In this way you can practice how to implement what the book says. Then you can compare your solutions and what you know with what the book contains.

- From all that you have solved and thought in the book, try to determine what the final project or main application of the book could be (what sort of program or function was originally developed with the algorithms of a book, even if the book tells you what the final project is). In this way you can get more than what the book itself has to offer, you can understand the programming style of the author (the more authors read the more programming styles understood), and in general start doing useful things with any language (the more platforms support that language, or the more of them you can port it or run the programs written in it, the better it is in the immediate term).

- You can always try to translate a program written in a language into any other. Visual Basic is excellent for real small beginners. But currently HTML5 and Low Level JavaScript is much more extended and easier (although you wouldn't be able to write native programs with it unless you implement the WinAPI and other APIs in JavaScript and then translate the JavaScript manually into other programming language). HTML/JavaScript is really outstanding for sketching the most complex common algorithms of all kinds you could ever imagine (file formats for executables, graphics, PC and game emulators, file compressors, keystroke recorders, text editors....).

- You should truly find your your favorite language for practical reasons that really help you progress. For example my favorite language is x86 Assembly with Intel/NASM/YASM syntax. I like to make it fully portable across 16/32/64 bits. It's by far the highest-level assembly language available although the language itself needs a little bit of work to be as portable as C. It's also my favorite because I can translate C and C++ code manually into it and abbreviate/debug it with a fully manual process (and secondarily with a language of my own called RealC).

_________________
Live PC 1: Image Live PC 2: Image

YouTube:
http://youtube.com/@AltComp126/streams
http://youtube.com/@proyectos/streams

http://master.dl.sourceforge.net/projec ... 7z?viasf=1


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Sat Aug 13, 2016 2:16 pm 
Offline
Member
Member

Joined: Sat Mar 28, 2015 11:23 am
Posts: 103
SeanMc wrote:
I found a site here:

http://www.vbtutor.net

I downloaded VB2012 (old version, I know) and I need your opinion at what point I should stop reading the tutorials and either practice with it or move onto something else, like C++.


If I were you, I would start with Java as it's much more complex and "C++ -like" than Visual Basic. It has a much bigger library, with OpenGL java interfaces and classes (much like c++'s).

Regardless of the language, you need to follow the tutorials until you feel confortable to write anything in said language. After finishing the tutorials, try and write something more complex and actually useful in the real world. Only then can you move to harder and harder languages.

_________________
If some of you people keep insisting on having backwards compatibitity with the stone age, we'll have stone tools forever.
My Hobby OS: https://github.com/heatd/Onyx


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Sat Aug 13, 2016 2:32 pm 
Offline
Member
Member

Joined: Tue Sep 23, 2014 6:12 pm
Posts: 144
Okay well I was going to move to Java and C++ after I got VB basics down. Is that fair?


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Sat Aug 13, 2016 2:43 pm 
Offline
Member
Member
User avatar

Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2016 1:52 pm
Posts: 286
Location: East Riding of Yorkshire, UK
SeanMc wrote:
Okay well I was going to move to Java and C++ after I got VB basics down. Is that fair?


Java is an excellent language but I wouldn't use it for OSDev.

_________________
com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus.InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonWindowNotFocusedState
Compiler Development Forum


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Sun Aug 14, 2016 3:36 am 
Offline
Member
Member

Joined: Sat Mar 01, 2014 2:59 pm
Posts: 1146
SeanMc wrote:
Okay well I was going to move to Java and C++ after I got VB basics down. Is that fair?
I guess so. Bear in mind that Java and C++ are actually quite different languages. I'd recommend learning Visual Basic with the .NET API, then transitioning to C# which gives you the same .NET API as Visual Basic but a somewhat more powerful language. C# is also very similar to Java, so once you're familiar with C# you should be able to learn Java quite easily (although you won't have the .NET API available any more, so you might want to look into alternative GUI libraries such as Swing ( :-O ), SDL, or LWJGL (openGL binding) for Java). If you want to learn C++, start with C and a simple GUI library such as GTK (the raw Windows API in C is a pain to work with).
zenzizenzicube wrote:
SeanMc wrote:
Okay well I was going to move to Java and C++ after I got VB basics down. Is that fair?


Java is an excellent language but I wouldn't use it for OSDev.
I don't think he's looking specifically for an OSdev language.

_________________
When you start writing an OS you do the minimum possible to get the x86 processor in a usable state, then you try to get as far away from it as possible.

Syntax checkup:
Wrong: OS's, IRQ's, zero'ing
Right: OSes, IRQs, zeroing


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Fri Aug 26, 2016 3:32 pm 
Offline
Member
Member
User avatar

Joined: Mon Dec 28, 2015 11:11 am
Posts: 401
SeanMc anyways do not know programming but he registered there :| . Very interesting.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Fri Aug 26, 2016 7:39 pm 
Offline
Member
Member

Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2010 11:26 pm
Posts: 1801
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Lukens, plenty of people here don't know 'programming' as well as they think they do.

SeanMc, if you like visual basic or any other language you should use it. Don't pay too much attention to other people's opinions.

_________________
If a trainstation is where trains stop, what is a workstation ?


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Sat Aug 27, 2016 1:35 am 
Offline
Member
Member
User avatar

Joined: Sat Mar 31, 2012 3:07 am
Posts: 4591
Location: Chichester, UK
+1

Visual Basic is very different from traditional Basics and is a good learning language; and Visual Studio is an excellent environment to learn programming in. Perhaps not so good if your eventual aim is OS development; but it will give you a good basis to later learn other languages.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Sat Aug 27, 2016 2:35 am 
Offline
Member
Member

Joined: Tue Sep 23, 2014 6:12 pm
Posts: 144
iansjack wrote:
+1

Visual Basic is very different from traditional Basics and is a good learning language; and Visual Studio is an excellent environment to learn programming in. Perhaps not so good if your eventual aim is OS development; but it will give you a good basis to later learn other languages.


What are you talking about as in "not a good language if your eventual aim is OS development"? I would love to develop an OS eventually. But I'm weird like that.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Sat Aug 27, 2016 3:37 am 
Offline
Member
Member
User avatar

Joined: Sat Mar 31, 2012 3:07 am
Posts: 4591
Location: Chichester, UK
Visual Basic compiles to an intermediate language called MSIL, rather than producing native machine instructions. I'm not saying that it would be impossible to program an operating system using Visual Basic (I'm sure you can use any language if you are clever enough), but it would be considerably more involved than using a language designed for the job, such as C. In this respect it is similar to C#, which is an excellent language but not a good beginner's choice for OS development.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Sat Aug 27, 2016 4:13 am 
Offline
Member
Member

Joined: Tue Sep 23, 2014 6:12 pm
Posts: 144
MS Intermediate Level code, I just had to Google that.

So I should focus more on a different language that produces native machine instructions, right?

But I just have an itch for OSdev for some reason. I know I'm not that experienced as you guys.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Sat Aug 27, 2016 4:59 am 
Offline
Member
Member
User avatar

Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2014 3:57 am
Posts: 568
Location: Moscow, Russia
Just code in the language you like first. Then, once you feel ready, switch to something like C and eventually start doing OS development.

_________________
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
- Alan Kay


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Sun Aug 28, 2016 12:34 pm 
Offline
Member
Member

Joined: Tue Sep 23, 2014 6:12 pm
Posts: 144
Still, I can say that I learned some basic knowledge about how computers work, like the boot process, for example.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Visual Basic 2012
PostPosted: Thu Sep 01, 2016 11:35 am 
Offline

Joined: Thu Sep 01, 2016 11:13 am
Posts: 4
There's nothing wrong with VB.NET. It has a bad reputation thanks to VB6, but that was for all intents and purposes an entirely different language. VB.NET may as well be C# with different syntax and fewer features.

You might wanna wait 10 years or so before you start an OS though.


Top
 Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 18 posts ]  Go to page 1, 2  Next

All times are UTC - 6 hours


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 24 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group