Hello World

[Jenner]

Howdy all! Programming isn't my primary job function, but it certainly falls into secondary functions and I've been doing it since my Commodore 128 (Yea, I'm an old programmer).

These days, I mostly use the .NET platform, making the transition to .NET6 and still prefer Visual Basic over C# for the syntax. I don't do much work beyond desktop application programming and I'm entirely self-taught, but always open for pushing the boundaries of my skillset.

In my spare time, I'm an avid gamer (Conan Exiles, RimWorld, Skyrim, Minecraft, Satisfactory to name a few), tabletop role-player, and during COVID, with the help of my wife, ripped my massive DVD/Bluray collection to a 40 Tb NAS I picked up running a media server. We've been doing "random movie night" now for the last year and a half and re-watching all of them. Starting with 880 movies, we're finally down to our last 50.

 

[BorkedSystem32]

Welcome to the site, @Jenner!

Interesting that you still use VB - any specific reason why or do you just simply prefer over all of the "cool" new stuff like C#?

Also, I love the idea of movie ripping. What notable films have you enjoyed from those sessions?

Welcome again!

 

[Jenner]

Welcome to the site, @Jenner!

Interesting that you still use VB - any specific reason why or do you just simply prefer over all of the "cool" new stuff like C#?

Also, I love the idea of movie ripping. What notable films have you enjoyed from those sessions?

Welcome again!

Thanks! I've always preferred the more "modern" syntax of Visual Basic. Also, I'm NOT talking "old" Visual Basic, like VB6. I'm talking the Visual Basic formerly called "Visual Basic .NET" that's part of the .NET eco-system, the same one that C# belongs to. There's nothing that I know of that you can do in C# that you can't also do in Visual Basic, though syntax may differ wildly. It all compiles down to the same MSIL code.

But I suppose I like the compiler knowing the difference between when I'm using "=" to mean "set this variable to" and "is this equals to", as well as know where the ends of my lines are by context without the need for semicolons and knowing where my class ends, my function ends, my while-loop ends and my if-then block ends without staring at the "flock of seagulls" and wondering which ones I'm going to shove my code between.

            End If
        End While
    End Function
End Class

vs.

            }
        }
    }
}

LINQ always seemed a lot cleaner as well.

I've programmed in .NET since 2003 (Framework, Core, 5/6) with both C# and VB and Visual Studio just seemed so much "smarter" when I use Visual Basic. It's difficult for me to program in C# without something like Resharper, but I have zero need for the tool when I'm programming in VB.

As for my "personal Netflix" server as my wife likes to call it. I'm running a Synology DS920+ NAS with 4x Western Digital Red 10Tb HDDs in a RAID-5 configuration and a 256Gb Samsung 980 Pro NVME SSD as a cache. The NAS is running a PLEX server. It took about 3 months to rip all those disks, but the amount of wall-space we freed up in the rec-room was unbelievable! We packed all the disks up into storage boxes and tossed them in the attic.

For the playback device, we have a first generation NVIDIA Shield Android TV which still runs playbacks beautifully thanks to it's overpowered ARM processor.

For the ripping, I bought a license of MakeMKV which packages up the video, and potential multiple audio tracks and subtitles into one container file. There was another MKV utility program I also used... I think it was just called "MKV Toolbox". One thing we noticed on a large number of the movies ripped is there may be two "English Subtitles" tracks. One is "full subtitles across the entire length of the movie" the other is "subtitles only for those scenes where the actors are not speaking English".

Normally, the later is "enabled by default", but after the rip, while present, it didn't get marked as such in the file. Every time we watched a movie and saw a scene where actors were speaking in a foreign language and no subtitles were popping up, we had to question whether the original had subtitles, or if it was simply "left it to the audience to wonder and guess by context", so we were running to grab the original disk and checking. In the cases when there should have been subtitles, MKV Toolbox allow that little tweak.

Recently, we watched The Brothers Grimm (2005), Priest (2011), Dune (2021) and Three Amigos (1986). If you have a LARGE video collection taking up space in your home, and the means to do so, I HIGHLY recommend this project!

 

[BorkedSystem32]

I used to think VB was more basic and limited in its features, but I guess I'll take your word for it(especially since it's part of .NET too). What separates VB6(and prior) from VB.NET? Or is there nothing major?

I get your point with the end statements. I don't like Python's way of using indentation to indicate when a function/control statement ends, because then I start asking myself "Where does this end? Does it end on this line or that line?" I like to toy about with Lua sometimes and I think the "end" keyword comes in handy, however, once you start going 2+ end keywords, I find that it starts getting messy, hence why I prefer the brackets, because personally I find it easier to read over keywords.

I don't have any interest in hardware, as long as I know the components in my system are decent, I'm happy. That however, sounds pretty awesome! I thought about getting an RPi and one of my ideas was perhaps setting up a media server, however, I don't really watch much TV or film aside from a few big hits. I gave away practically all of my DVDs a while ago, so I'd have no use for such a server, except perhaps for music. :3 I'm not really much of a streamer either.

I'm glad that worked well for you and your partner. Just make sure to maintain it!

 

[Jenner]

I used to think VB was more basic and limited in its features, but I guess I'll take your word for it(especially since it's part of .NET too). What separates VB6(and prior) from VB.NET? Or is there nothing major?

Everything. Completely different language. Completely different compiler. Prior to 2002, Visual Basic was a language that was compiled to native machine code similar to C++. It ran up to "version 6.0" so when talking classical "Visual Basic", one is usually referring to VB6. When Microsoft developed the .NET Framework, they took the general syntax rules of Visual Basic and created the entirely new language framework-based language of Visual Basic .NET. Likewise, they took the general syntax rules of C++ and created the new language C#.

Between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET there's no "code migration". You're only real option is to re-code a VB6 program from scratch in VB.NET. While the syntax looks similar, they're about as equivalent as C++ is to Java.

The early versions of .NET Framework had some functional/feature gaps between the two languages though. Visual Basic .NET could do some things C# couldn't and C# could do some things VB.NET couldn't. By around .NET Framework 3.1, they had pretty much completely closed all the functional gaps between the two and made an announcement that there was nothing one language could do that the other couldn't, though sometimes, the syntax may be wildly different.

Around .NET Framework 4.7... Microsoft - to further confuse Visual Basic users and the rest of the world - dropped the ".NET" off the end of the name. It is now, once again referred to only as "Visual Basic".

As I said, I do most of my work in Visual Basic, this time under the .NET 6 platform. I've done everything from big-data mining engines, to professional machine driving software, to Discord bots, to some simple arcade games utilizing DirectX, to some client-server middleware stuff.

 

[BorkedSystem32]

Wow, wasn't expecting that. VB to me has always been a beginner language for basic Windows applications, nothing more. Guess it's capable of more than what I expected. But hey, if it works for you, good, keep using it. Don't change what isn't broken.