Welcome to VB3D. This site is a resource for those interested in writing 3D graphics programs using the Visual Basic.NET programming language (henceforth referred to as VB). The ‘Beginners’ part refers to programmers, such as myself, that are new to 3D graphics programming in particular, but not necessarily new to programming in general.
Why VB you ask? Well… the short answer is ‘why not?’
The Long Answer
I grew up writing programs in one form of BASIC or another. I PEEK’d and POKE’d my way through BASIC on the TI 99/4A and Commodore 64. QuickBasic was my GOTO language on the PC for many years (haha!). I created cool ASCII user interfaces with Visual Basic for MS-DOS. I wrote real Windows programs starting with Visual Basic 1.0 and continuing up to 6.0. I even maintained an award-winning website that tried to help beginners use DirectX with VB6. Then Visual Basic.NET arrived and changed everything. I am currently using Visual Basic.NET 11.0 to write business and web apps, but what I really want to do is write code for games.
During my time using various incarnations of BASIC, I also dabbled in other languages such as Pascal, LISP, C/C++, Python, JavaScript, Java, C#. Even when writing code for these languages, I’m always mentally translating to/from VB code. In short, I think in VB. I learn new concepts better when I can see them in VB code. Game programming in general, and graphics programming in particular, are considered some of the more difficult areas of programming. I feel that being able to write graphics code in VB will help me understand how it all works better than if I tried following along with a C++ or Java tutorial. Hopefully, by recording my experiences here, I can help other VB thinkers like me.
I’m also doing this for a more personal reason. There are countless resources on the Web for other programming languages, such as C/C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, etc, but it’s very difficult to find truly helpful resources for 3D graphics programming in VB. I suspect this is because VB has become an endangered language and there’s little interest in writing programs with it. Microsoft assures me that VB is alive and well and talks about feature parity between C# and VB. While it is true that nowadays there are very few things you can do in C# that can’t be done in VB and vice versa, C# is clearly Microsoft’s language of choice. This is obvious when you look at the disparity in tooling between the two languages. The lack of tooling is a clear indication that VB is headed towards total obscurity. This is why I, with a great deal of sorrow, have decided to abandon VB and move on to another language—C# for my job and C++ for my hobby. I actually got a lump in my throat writing that last sentence. This site is my long goodbye and final love letter to a programming language that’s been a part of me for the last thirty odd years.
VB3D 