VBGamer

I've just attended Microsoft's TechEd 2000 conference in Amsterdam, and in the session "What's new in Visual Basic 7.0", they presented some info about the next release of VB, which I thought I'd share. Please note that VB7 is still in early beta, so much of this may (and will) change before release. One major (and stoopid) change is that Microsoft appearently have renamed the whole Visual Studio, so it is now called Visual Studio .NET instead of 7.0. And hence, Visual Basic .NET is the release we're waiting for (Microsoft talks a lot of "the dot-net platform"). Hopefully they will come to their senses before it is released :-) One of the coolest new features is inheritance. The way you will do this is as follows Let's say you have a class called GameObject, containing this: Function Move() 'Some code... End Function Then you could make another class called Player, like this: Inherits GameObject Function Run() mybase.Move End Function So you can tell which class to inherit from, using the "Inherits" keyword, and also inherit code from certain functions using the "mybase" keyword. Also, the way forms work have been redesigned, and you can now have forms that inherits some controls from other forms. This is REALLY cool in my opinion. The error handling have been improved. You will now be able to do this: Try Open "TESTFILE" For Output As #1 Write #1, Data Catch Kill "TESTFILE" Finally Close #1 End try If you have used similar syntax before (in C++ for example) you'll see the benefits from it. No more "On error goto... " Threding... You will be able to use free threading, in this way: Set t = New Thread(New ThreadStart(AddressOf MyObj.MyFunc)) t.Start Type Safety... They've intruduced a new option, "Option Strict", which turns off implicit type conversion. This way you will have do explicitly convert your variables. Constructors... these allows a new object instance to be created and initialized in a single expression Shared Members... This is cool... you can create shared variables across instances of classes Also, they've finally added the ability to initialize variables on the line they are declared, just like in C++. The development environment itself have also changed a lot. They are now using the exact same editor for all the parts of Visual Studio. In fact, you can have one Visual Basic project and one Visual C++ project in the same project group! They said that the interface were going to change alot, but the way it looks now is almost exactly like the Visual Interdev editor. VB 6.0 projects will not load directly into VB7/VB.NET, but it will ship with a project conversion wizard, which will help migratig the code. Some sections will have to be rewritten though. I hope someone found this interesting... As for release date, they wouldn't let us know yet... /Corre, MiCo Games http://www.micogames.com