Inadequacies

So I spend a decent amount of my time programming in VB6 at work. This is mainly for historical support reasons and we haven’t made the switch to anything .NET yet. Though my next project that doesn’t involve being needed for production next month I do plan using it.

The one major problem I have with VB is that its object system support really sucks. The class system is handled primarily in the development environment instead of inside the file. So this means each object that is its own class must have its own class file so the environment will identify it correctly. Even if the classes are part of a collection you can not put them in one file. Basically the annoyance becomes apparent when making data structures like trees, or in my case state machines (one of these days I will have to write a generic state machine system that actually makes sense and doesn’t have huge entries and exits for errors). See the problem is since each class requires its own separate file that means you have a to declare a file for a node, and a class for the entire data structure.

Then you have to include all of those files into the project every time you want to use that structure. Or you compile it into a dll. The later I find annoying because this is a structure only used for this program.

I know there are well documented cases of major inadequacies in VB6 but this is just the one that annoys me.