Hehe... I actually thought the same thing when I first started learning VB. "What the heck does Dim mean??" I kept associating it in my head with dimming light bulbs or dim wits, etc.
I'm so used to it now that it's just a good ol' comforting variable declaration statement to me now.
I kind of chose to learn VB for a couple of reasons. Years ago when I was first hired as a programmer (with absolutely no prior experience), the language my company was using was called Powerbuilder. I worked with that environment for about 2 years before I found myself kind of liking programming work. About that time Visual Studio 6 was just being released by Microsoft and I had an interest in learning C++ for eventual game development. I was so excited at the prospect of really doing something "cool" with programming that I ordered the Visual Studio 6 Enterprise which came with not only VC++ but VB and J++ as well. I thought... "Great! Now I can really dig into learning new stuff!!". Well needless to say, once I actually received the product my fascination faded and it ended up sitting on my shelf for another year and a half or so.
Occassionally I would run the IDE and browse around the features and look at the different languages but I never really accomplished anything. I did note however that VB sure looked and worked pretty similar to what I was already familiar with, Powerbuilder. My interest started to rekindle as I realized that I might be able to use Visual Basic to start doing to home programming work right away instead of having to learn C++ from the ground up. So I began to tinker with Visual Basic 6 and found that it was a pretty advanced (for the time) language and the Visual Studio development environment as a whole worked a lot better than Powerbuilder 5.
The more I messed with it casually, the more I began to learn things such as what "Dim" meant and how to navigate the IDE and what features did what functions. I even started learning how the code structure actually worked such as subroutines, functions, classes, etc. Well if this wasn't a foreshadow for things to come... 4 years after I started at my old company as a Powerbuilder programmer and less than 6 months after I started to seriously dink around with VB 6, I get a new job as an I.T. Manager for a company who uses TWO in house applications built in VB 6! If I hadn't started to figure out how Visual Basic worked six months earlier I probably wouldn't have gotten the job.
Working for the new company was terrific! However, I had been put into an environment where I had to seriously pick up learning Visual Basic as fast as possible to continue the company's development in their core applications. I was a little unsure of myself at first but as time passed I became pretty good at the programming work and found myself able to fly around VB 6 and do all of the tasks my company required and even innovate new ideas for them.
It wasn't until this past summer when Microsoft released Visual Studio .Net 2003 that I finally made the decision that I wanted to specialize my broad range of I.T. skills into programming. Since I was so familiar with VB 6, I thought it would be a breeze to pick up .Net 2003 and start using the latest technologies in VB. Hehe... that didn't work out as I had planned.
Although I really like using VB .Net, I'm still figuring out how to do even simple things some times. But I guess I'm having fun doing it and I figured what better way to learn it than to jump right in and try to swim. I'm in the process of trying to rebuild from scratch my company's main applications over to .Net. Let me tell you... the integrated MSDN help is a constant companion for me, heh.
I still want to learn C# someday, but I've decided to get really good at VB .Net first since that directly effects my career and future ambitions as a contract programmer.
Malys
Topic: This might interest you Visual Studio.Net users. (Read 4726 times)