http://www.infoworld.com/a
Microsoft rep says petition won’t change decision to cut free support at month’s end
:-(
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VB6 Mainstream Support Retired
As we all know, Microsoft is phasing out VB6 in favor of its .NET technologies.
VB6 will be "Mainstream Support Retired" as of March 31, 2005.
I just came across an article which may be interesting to all you developers out there:
"A Petition For The Development Of Unmanaged Visual Basic And Visual Basic For Applications"
Click through this link: http://vbnet.mvps.org/
(In the mean time, I'm studying VB.NET)
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Answers
I'm not a developer at all, but I'm also someone who doesn't believe that I shouldn't be forced to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. I signed it as well.
Unfortunately, like so many things, the only action that Microsoft will understand is the one people take with their checkbooks. One of the articles on the subject I read -- http://news.com.com/2100-1
ep
Imran,
It's a small step towards Unsupported phase in VB6 life-cycle,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/
"After the Mainstream phase, service packs will no longer be delivered for Visual Basic 6.0."
But last two blogs (by S. "Soma" Somasegar and Jay Roxe) mentioned at http://www.classicvb.org have promises for new SP for Windows Longhorn.
And yes, they are removing VB6 samples.
"REAL Software Offers Free Upgrade to Stranded VB Users"
http://www.windowsitpro.co
(but with that free version you cannot deploy to Unix/Mac)
Personally I think they should drop VB.Net when they finally drop legacy VB. When I started using .Net I could find no redeeming qualities of vb.net - the structure and syntax of C# makes a lot more sense to me even though the VB.net syntax was more familiar. The paradigm is so different in VB.Net that it is like learning a new language; I figured that since I have to learn a new language anyway, it should be the more java-like syntax of C#.
I completely agree that abandoning VB6 is really stupid. I have been developing basic since the old CPM days. I have developed projects that still bring in millions of dollars a year and depends on the ability to have a completly secure compilation. It appeared (maybe I am wrong since I stopped looking) but the .NET is a sort of intermediate compile which led to others having to create an "obfuscation" engine. My code depends on extremely rigorous security and the idea that someone can readily look around in it to see what is happening which created the need for obfuscation is unsound.
I will never switch to .NET.
I think the real disaster is not the election of a new language to learn in order to develop NEW projects.
Sure we all can learn another one (in this case why .NET and not other able to run in multi-platform?).
The REAL problem is all these projects running (and running secure, stable and quickly) in thousands of sites.
The wizard for "migrating" vb6 to vbNet is a real pain, impossible task for not trivial programs.
Then, how you can continues the developing of natural changes and improvements in these applications?
Converting medium-complex vb6 projects to vb.net may cost already one-man-day per each 100 or 200 lines of code, and you will never be sure if the programmers really was 100% in all the details. Testing, distributing, and so on can cost you another big bucks.
Sure it is a big business for software houses.
I think the real solution is MS providing an 100% migration wizard, even at an little price, it would be an good business for MS, the opposite to spit to the vb6 users.
Other solution is donate vb6 internal resources to sourceforge or similar, maybe you can see even vb7++ running in Linux competing with .Net...
In light of the fact that a 'switch' from VB6 to .NET requires a re-write of applications (this is even recommended by MS), why would one stay with MS? Why would you spend all that time, effort and money in re-writing using another language from a company that has clearly demonstrated it cares not a fig about people/companies having to make this expenditure? Wouldn't you be wiser re-writing in a different language from another company that does seem to have some long-term commitment to its customers and is not going to simply abandon them when their next bright idea for the future comes along. How long is it going to be before one has to start re-writing the .NET code in the next flavour of the month?
Bye MS.
"...why would one stay with MS?"
I don't see there is any real choice, since they write the operating system. But since we are all learning a new language I think it makes sense to learn C# as the .NET language of choice. The term "Basic" is now far from what the developers of the original Basic language intended. They may as well call it Visual ThisIsSoNotBasic.NET.
Anyway, it seems that the thousands who signed the petition *may* have had an impact:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/
"Welcome to VBRun: The Visual Basic 6.0 Resource Center. I’m Jay Roxe and I’m the Product Manager for Visual Basic."
I wonder how long Jay will keep his job!
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by: PaulHewsPosted on 2005-03-11 at 08:51:25ID: 13518711
Thanks for that Erick. I signed the petition, although most of my development is in .NET. :)