Robynsveil wrote:Bottom line, though, is that if it is no longer supported, feature list won't really count for much.
True.
wonder if something has happened to him.
That was my first thought.
Would it be a rude question to ask whether one such as I who hasn't really done hardly anything in real Visual Basic, but only in VBA would find your tool to do much good? or would the learning curve be fairly steep?
It's not rude at all. I have many years of professional development behind me and have just moved to Linux from Window$ because of Win8 - a horrble thing it is. There isn't much of a step between VB and VBA. As for going to PB, I had an awful lot of trouble with the Linux form editor; it's a bug-riddled beta. I've had to design my screens in PB 4.6.1 on Window$ inside a virtual machine just to make progress. However once the screen code was generated, it only took looking at a few examples to work out how events worked. From there, the rest should fall into place easily. Don't get me wrong about PB, it's very powerful, and fast. It's just a shame that Fred chose to include the beta form designer in PB5. There was no designer in the Linux version before then, I believe, so I assume the form editor was quickly bolted on just to 'get it out there'.
Anyway, that said, my screens are designed and now I can get down to doing some coding. Like you, I'm a beginner with PB, less than one week's experience - and the bulk of that was simply fighting with the PB5 form editor, which is not documented, btw. It's different, but the BASIC syntax is familiar. The only real annoyance with the languge is the use of the word 'gadget' for controls, 'String' for text boxes, 'Text' for labels and so on. It seems as if words used in the language have been chosen deliberately to avoid the most common names former Window$ programmers would likely be used to.
Thanks to all who offer opinions...
Beware. Opinions require no basis in fact or truth and need not be based on any knowledge of any kind.
My opinion is that you should consider PB. The only other real alternative on Linux is Mono, which is a Linux implementation of .NET, however the Mono IDE only supports C#, which isn't hard to learn if you're proficient in VB.NET; they're exactly the same except they have differently structured language constructs. I chose to go with PB out of boredom with VB and C#; it offers me the opportunity to learn something new.
If you decide to go with PB for Linux, you'd be well advised to install Window$ XP or 7 in a virtual machine and do your screen work there using the older 4.6.1 PB. That's the best advice I can give you.
like I used in DOS/QB45 (BRIEF editor)
That's what I was afraid of. Thanks for that - might have to do that. I was hoping to migrate my VBA app from Excel to a stand-alone app... wondering now if that's even feasible.