Top 3 missing VBScript features

Journal entry
June 16, 2003

Why oh why am I stuck developing ASP/VBScript - that language is so crippled I can’t believe it. Every time I try to do something Right™ I bang my head against silly limitations of the language. At the moment I am really really missing

  1. Proper including of external files. Server Side Includes and/or Server.Execute doesn’t quite cut it when the scripting language doesn’t have namespaces or any way of checking if a certain class already exists. If you have defined one name somewhere in a file, the language provides you with no way to avoid including that file a second time elsewhere in your code, which results in a compilation error.
  2. Proper objects. Currently there is no inheritance, no typechecking of objects, no polymorphism. Objects are nothing more than a way to group functions. Actually they might be the a way to provide namespaces if it was possible to avoid including files more than once.
  3. Crappy error handling. I want exceptions. Just telling the scripting engine to continue to next line if an error occurs doesn’t cut it.

Hm, I wonder if it is possible to migrate seamlessly to a .NET solution without having to rewrite the entire codebase at once.

Categories
Selling out
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Jakob is an independent web application developer who builds awesome stuff for the web. You can hire him to build awesome stuff for you.

Comments and Trackbacks

Morten Wittrock June 17, 2003

Judging by the features you miss, VBScript probably isn't the tool you need. ASP.NET written in C# might be more up your alley; as for migrating seamlessly from "classic" ASP, I don't know. Good luck :)

Morten Wittrock June 17, 2003

Actually, a complete C# rewrite (very nice language, BTW) would be quite an undertaking, if you want to take full advantage of the C#'s features (which is, like, the whole point of the rewrite effort).

Jakob S June 18, 2003

Yeah, it is a matter of choosing the right tool for the job. Unfortunatly in this case, the tool has been chosen and I am not sure it is feasible to rechoose after a couple of years of development.

C# is probably what I would be aiming for (from what I have seen and read it looks real nice), however I am not certain it is possible to run both classic ASP and .NET on the same web application without asking for major problems. And no, I don't (at the moment) have a good way of testing it.

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