Mainstream support for Visual Basic 6 (the last version before .Net) finished at the end of March, and there’s growing murmurs in the VB development community, calling for it to be resurrected. While “classic” VBers didn’t mind being shunted into the .Net framework, they objected to some of the bigger changes to the language itself, which made it difficult to migrate old projects over. And remembering that “classic” VB is the most popular computer language ever, there’s a lot of old systems out there still running with it. A petition has been organised, with nearly 200 MVPs having signed up so far.
Microsoft have put up a new site highlighting VB6 called VBRun (harking back to the pre version 5 days when the main DLL was called VBRun). It’ll have VB6 content on it, as well as nudging developers towards .Net.
I work with VB. I’ve got a lot of VB6 code still running. But I’m slowly moving some stuff over to .Net. I’m not convinced it’s better yet. It’s certainly different, but I’ll get used to it eventually.
The real problem here is that “Visual Basic” no longer exists as a language. VB.NET should have been called B#, but since Microsoft has a lock on the Visual Basic name, they can apply it to anything (even a toaster, which, come to think of it, would be more appropriate).
Prior to .NOT, VB programmers had the option of whether to use OOP or procedural; now they do not. The .NOT framework is really an OOP framework, designed by C++ programmers which does no justice to the language previously known as VB.
Microsoft has decided that all our accumulated knowledge is now null and void, and all the time and costs we have already incurred in bug-proofing must be entirely re-done, etc.
And here we are 3 years into .NOT and I have seen only a very small handful of shrink wrapped apps which run on it. Guess I’m not the only holdout…
P.S. VBRun from Microsoft consists primarily of links explaining why you should migrate to .NOT. This is scarcely my idea of “support”, which was its originally stated purpose.