Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

Seeing as this is a comment thread all about VB, an anecdote:

A few weeks ago, I decided to convert the 300 or data CDs and DVDs to ISOs - there's no point keeping large stacks of discs around these days - especially now that most OSs allow you to natively mount ISOs as virtual drives.

I wanted a quick and easy one-click ISO creator (for Windows), so hunted online for one, and couldn't find a good free one, so turned to Visual Studio to knock up my own utility (as I tend to do often).

Not wanting to waste too much time on this (after all it's a one-time ripping project) I found some C# and VB.NET partial code examples of how to stream the data byte by byte off the disc, and into an ISO file.

Try as I might, I just could not get the code to work. Again not wanting to waste too much time, I remembered I'd also seen some VB6 code snippets during my searches.

I fired up a VM that has VB6 installed (as I never use VB6 anymore), and threw in the snippets, and 10 minutes later I had a rough cut of the utility ripping it's first disc to an ISO.

People are very quick to decry older technologies, but if they still work, and take less time to use, then where's the harm?

Screenshot of the util (that happily converted over 300 random data discs over the space of a few days, without error):

http://www.jaruzel.com/files/dvd-to-iso.jpg

I agree with you. If I remember correctly there is also a x86 debugger written in VB. And I claim that those who write C++ by using all the "boost" they can in fact just use too much energy to write VB-style in C++ (or Python style, or Java style). And once they achieve that, having a separate allocation for everything, reference counting etc. even the performance converges, once the allocation patterns are similar.

All that being said, for the task you needed, have you seen ImgBurn? It's a native application, written in Delphi. There's a button "create the image file from disc."

http://imgburn.com/index.php?act=screenshots

I have ImgBurn installed, and use it a lot, but i needed the 'play a sound when done' and 'eject when done' features - as they really help with bulk rips if you are doing something else at the same time.

I also know from experience, that the simpler the UI, the faster repetitive bulk tasks become - years ago I wrote something similar for Audio CDs when I was ripping my (at the time) 500+ music CD collection.

> but i needed the 'play a sound when done' and 'eject when done'

I believed both are present in ImgBurn, see Settings/Read/Page 2 "batch mode: eject tray before next read" and Settings/Sounds "Play sound after read"?

Wouldn't you in ImgBurn just have to put the next disc once the previous is finished, it would even detect when you close the tray and continue automatically with the automatic name, you wouldn't have to click anywhere in the GUI?

I wouldn't describe myself as a VB fan but I don't hate it either.

I would say however that there is harm in picking technologies that less developers know (or will be willing to learn).

For your use of VB6 clearly it doesn't matter but I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone started a commercial project with VB...

Totally agree. If someone paid me to write something, I'd do it C#. I'd moan and grumble about it, but still I wouldn't use VB.NET as the Article says - millions of people use c#, and only a hundreds of thousands use VB.NET.

I can code adequately in many languages, I just seem to be more comfortable in any dialect of Basic.

You can get cdparanoia for Windows these days. (And I think even dd; which would be enough if your CDs don't have scratches.)

dd was going to be my last resort if I couldn't get something built.

dd is usually my first resort. cdparanoia is my last: it really tries all kinds of techniques to recover data from CDs with all kinds of read errors.

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