Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • openscad-graph-editor

    OpenSCAD Graph Editor

    I find dragging-dropping and re-arranging far more expressive for 3D modeling using BlockSCAD than I do the equivalent OpenSCAD code:

    https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/

    I'm trying to achieve a similar fluency using OpenSCAD Graph Editor:

    https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor

    hopefully a future version will be even more useful than BlockSCAD/Blockly.

  • HelloWorldDriver

    twinBASIC Kernel mode driver demo

    I'm a big fan of twinBASIC, more successor than clone.

    It's working on full backwards compatibility with VB6 (and very, very close to it, even many complex UserControls work), with a lengthy list of new features (x64-- through compat. with VBA7 x64 syntax, multithreading (via API for now, native syntax soon), generics, overloading, Unicode-everything, defining interfaces/coclasses in language instead of TLBs, easily makes standard DLLs, Implements-Via syntax to extend classes, parameterized class constructors, can specify UDT packing, bitshift operators, inline initialization of vars, forms support modern image formats/transparency/alpha blending, AddressOf works on class members... well, the list goes on for quite some time: https://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?890181-TwinBasic&p=5...

    One thing I'm sure lots of people here will find blasphemous, it lets you make kernel mode drivers, provided you stick to WDM (you could do this as a hack in VB6, but you had to strip the runtime dependency out-- which dramatically limited usefulness, not to mention no WOW64 for kernel mode. tB has no runtime dependency so all you have to do is avoid strings/variants/most but not all arrays, as those call user mode APIs behind the scenes). Proof of concept: https://github.com/fafalone/HelloWorldDriver

    Main downsides are that it's also like VB6 in being closed source/commercial (only restriction on the free version is a splash screen on x64 exes though, and won't have access to compiler optimizations or cross-platform compilation when they're implemented; no restriction on commercial use or royalties), but the creator seems amenable to changing that if it's viable, and since we've had 20 years of no community stepping up for something like this, it's just a practical matter that for one person to do it they'd need income as it's a major undertaking, not something you can do as a hobby with full time employment doing something else, at least if it's going to get done in years instead of decades (*cough* Radbasic, which has made near zero progress after being announced around the same time, and is barely a step above Hello World support).

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • WPF

    WPF is a .NET Core UI framework for building Windows desktop applications.

    WPF is definitely not dead. It may not be the latest shiny thing, but it works, it is maintained (judging by https://github.com/dotnet/wpf or https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/wpf-on-dotnet-7/), and it is fully and officially supported on the modern .NET platform.

  • hx

    hx dev (by wekan)

  • hello-express

    Discontinued A simple Node app built on Express, instantly up and running.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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