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You don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.

(1) VB6 is an object-oriented language. Its support is poor--eg. no inheritance, clunky syntax--but programmer-defined classes exist. If you meant just the new OO features you should have said so--your wording is imprecise throughout.

OK, I'll bite hard - a little bit. If you're going to accuse someone of not having any idea it is usually a good idea to get a fracking clue yourself - which you evidently do not.

Classical VB did not, and does not, have inheritance and subclassing (utterly fundamental to a language actually being object oriented) nor the polymorphism you see in proper OO languages as a result. If you don't have that you certainly do not have an object oriented language and you most certainly don't know what one is. My wording is not imprecise. It is very clear and there are no such thing as 'new OO features'. Anyone who actually programs with half a clue understands what a language has to satisfy to be object oriented. Seriously, you can Google this stuff.

Point 2 is utter, utter twaddle and cant be replied because you obviously know nothing about classical VB.

(3) .NET and VB6 are comparable in speed (except loading times, .NET is worse there).

Yay. Let's rewrite our applications that replicates existing functionality and have them startup at least five times slower. Seriously, you can go away and have a cup of coffee before a decent sized .Net application starts up. Sorry, but that's not a rational business case.

(7) You'll be able to create .NET Metro style apps. Converting an existing desktop app may or may not require significant work.

No one cares. Windows.Forms, WPF, XAML, Silverlight and the other smorgasbord of pointless crap cranked out via MSDN have already ensured that few people who need to get work done actually care. For the handful of consultancies peddling this they will probably make some money rewriting everything again for people who are stupid enough to do so. Seriously, I've had MSDN weenies crawling out of my ears over the last ten years peddling a rewrite in *insert latest nonsense from MSDN magazine here*. It's all pointless hand-waving.

(6) Lots of people care about .NET apps. Glance at the Tiobe index, for instance.

Yep. There's people as far as the eye can see crying out for .Net 1.0 and 1.1 support because so much was written with them. The companies who are using VB who have prompted Microsoft to do this don't go anywhere near the Tiobe index, and they are the silent majority..............

(8) You greatly exaggerate the backwards compatibility problems and you know it. Some large projects are suited to automated/assisted migration; just read these zillion testimonials. It's far from perfect, but it's also far from nothing.

No, I don't - and being somebody who possibly sells this shit to people you know it. If it wasn't a problem we wouldn't be commenting on this article because it wouldn't exist, would we bright spark? 'Zillion testimonials.........' What are you? 11?

You do have at least a few good points--lots of businesses absolutely rely on very old technology and wouldn't upgrade without support

If Microsoft actually had a clue about supporting existing code in their new development products this wouldn't be up for discussion. Oh, and trust me, if you think VB applications are 'old technology' then think COBOL. Many VB desktop applications perform fairly critical business functions and they are going to have to be supported for decades. Just like the lines of COBOL out there runni

...fully object oriented thingy called VB.Net ... the overhead of that object oriented nonsense didn't make any sense at all ... The fatal mistake that Microsoft made with VB.Net is that it was completely backwards incompatible ... No one cares about .Net applications

You don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.

      (1) VB6 is an object-oriented language. Its support is poor--eg. no inheritance, clunky syntax--but programmer-defined classes exist. If you meant just the new OO features you should have said so--your wording is imprecise throughout.
      (2) VB6 has no class library to speak of--you had to write your own routine or hack together a ListBox to sort a string array. That should be a couple lines of code. Forget hash tables, queues, etc.--you have to implement it all yourself or find somebody else's random crap, which is wildly inefficient. The .NET class library is very good and is a huge potential "appreciable benefit" to upgrading.
      (3) .NET and VB6 are comparable in speed (except loading times, .NET is worse there). Which wins depends on precisely what you're doing. For math-heavy problems, .NET is often much faster. But honestly, why the hell do you care about the speed (/memory use/whatever you meant by "overhead") of VB6 apps? It's almost always irrelevant in light of user input delays.

      (5) .NET is not even remotely dead, so no "fatal mistake" was made.
      (6) Lots of people care about .NET apps. Glance at the Tiobe index, for instance.
      (7) You'll be able to create .NET Metro style apps. Converting an existing desktop app may or may not require significant work. Your backend will be mostly to entirely reusable, so you won't have to "rewrite everything".

      (8) You greatly exaggerate the backwards compatibility problems and you know it. Some large projects are suited to automated/assisted migration; just read these zillion testimonials. It's far from perfect, but it's also far from nothing.

You do have at least a few good points--lots of businesses absolutely rely on very old technology and wouldn't upgrade without support; Microsoft's chances of getting a significant mobile presence are slim. You came close to the truth behind the continued success of VB6: people don't want to learn new systems and some people are stuck maintaining old ones that are too difficult to convert. Most of your points are garbage though.

There are a number of good tools to minimize the impact of rewriting a vb6 app in .net. While it would, in many cases, be most beneficial to do a rewrite, it should only take 1 or 2 programmers a few months to do a full conversion.

In fact, Microsoft has an upgrade assessment tool to help get an idea of what's involved. If the app was written well in the first place, as you say it was, then it should be even less of a problem.

For example, Artisoft offers their VB Upgrade Companion product. It really isn't prohibitive to upgrade VB6 codebases, unless the app really isn't that mission critical anyways.

Actually, VB6 was not anywhere near as deterministic as you think it was.

VB6 was based on the COM model (which is one reason it was so easy to interface with COM). While COM does usually release objects when the reference count reaches 0, it's not required to, and can do so when it makes sense.

VB is basically just as garbage collected as VB.NET is. The only difference is that VB.NET is a little more lackadaisical about finalizing, which is why features like the using keyword in C# are so nice (I wish VB had it).

I realize that a conversion is still a lot of work, but it's nowhere near the work that a rewrite is, though of course the real cost is retesting everything.

There *ARE* lots of business reasons to rewrite as well. There are a ton of productivity enhancements coming down the pipe, and a ton of new windows foundation features you can take advantage of (for example, the Windows Workflow Foundation, which an amazing number of VB/database sytle apps could make very good use of).

No doubt, it's hard to stay on top of technology. That's the inherant cost of it. Even Java deprecates features and makes changes.

The problem here is that VB -> VB.NET was a major jump. But, in my mind, it was a necessary one, and the right choice. I think MS could have made extra effort to improve the conversion process, but that's a different argument.

You might also consider the cost of a commerical migration tool, such as ArtinSoft's http://www.artinsoft.com/

You might also want to read this article:

http://www.ftponline.com/vsm/2003_06/online/meader /

In the end, you can't sit still. Plus ca Change.