VB6, Collections and a mini-Rant

I enjoy where I work a lot. There are great people, an interesting and relaxed work environment and some interesting challenges.

But every once in a while, things turn a little sour... mostly when dealing with Visual Basic 6. To give any non-programmers a run down, VB6 is a crappy, slimmed down programming language that, thanks to it's ease of creating interfaces, became quite popular. But VB6 has a lot of limitations that just don't exist in other languages. Some of these are easier to get around than others... As an example, one of our applications has many issues with focus and how VB6 handles change of focus from other apps to itself. Or, rather, how it doesn't handle it nicely. Not pretty.

Today, I'm trying to add some functionality that should be quite easy. I want to use a dictionary to store some data. A dictionary stores data in it, using a key to reference a dataset (similar to a real life dictionary that uses a word to refer to a definition). Dictionaries are quite nice in that it is easy to look something up, since we just ask the dictionary for "ephemeral ", for example, and it returns it's definition "Short-lived; existing or continuing for a short time only" (Dictionary.com's word of the day). Dictionaries are simple, have a fast lookup (key for what I need) and store anything. VB6 has a container that is very similar to a dictionary, but is called a Collection.

The problem with collections is that they don't allow you to use user-defined structs. A struct is just a very simple way of combining some related data together. There is a different way of doing this called a class in VB6. Classes can be used with no problems with collections. So why am I complaining? Because I can place a struct inside the current codebase without having to add another file (each class in VB6 needs to have it's own file). I don't mind adding new files, but for something as minor as holding three items (that's right, just three), I now have to add an entire new file with a grand total of four lines of code in it. Four lines of code. Talk about a waste of time and space.

And don't get me started on classes in VB6. They are a perversion of the programming term class. But that's a rant for another day.