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Visual Basic Developers Revolt Against Microsoft

Posted by Hemos on from the the-battle-of-the-programmers dept.

daria42 writes "More than 100 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) developers have signed a petition demanding the software company reconsider plans to end support for Visual Basic in its "classic" form. Developers claim the move could kill development on millions of Visual Basic 6 (VB6) applications and "strand" programmers that have not trained in newer languages."

15 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Breaking news by zeath · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Stuff gets old as time goes by and tends to be replaced. This is just a testament to the way those VB developers have been educated - they have been handed a series of recipes for developing applications without any theory or background information, and now their recipes are outdated. They're trying to swim in the wake of a new language (or, in the case of VB.NET, a new interface and toolset for the same syntactical language), and all they can think of doing is scream for help and flail around wildly hoping someone else will fix the situation. Languages evolve. Life goes on. It's the nature of the industry.

  2. Ah, the joys... by TuringTest · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... of a proprietary-source based community.

    --
    Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
  3. No surprises by ross_winn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Like MS cares. They have spent a huge amount of money developing .net and c#, and now thay want cash to try and staunch the bleeding. Not that they cannot afford to lose money, but they don't want to lose money if they can help it. besides, if visual basic is the only language you know, can you really call yourself a programmer? I don't think so.

    --
    Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
  4. VB6 People Whine Too Much by nberardi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a problem with some developers they get too comfortable and don't want to learn anything new, and they don't want to loose their job. I have a friend who works with many people like this. They are horrible developers and don't want to learn .NET, because it scares them. From stories that he has told me they shouldn't be programming VB6 code much less programming a VCR. So I am not sure if putting these guys out of work is such a bad thing.

    Also why should Microsoft continue to support a language that they are no longer developing, or using, or plan on using. They have moved into a new area of development, over 3 years ago. The developers that use VB6 had plenty of time to learn .Net or move into PHP, Java, Pyton, etc.

    Stop whining...

  5. I'm sure there are people who want support for NT6 by datastalker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...but to be realistic, Microsoft can't continue to support everyone forever. They've added an EOL for VB 6, and they have an upgrade path (yes, it will be difficult) to the better languages they're using now.

    --
    Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
  6. Cry babies by LordNimon · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Any decent programmer should be able to pick up a new language quickly. Not only that, but change is part of the industry. If you can't deal with changing technologies, then you shouldn't be a programmer.

    Besides, we're talking about Visual Basic! VB programmers who complain about having to do more work and learn more stuff deserve to have their jobs outsourced.

    --
    And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
    To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
    1. Re:Cry babies by daviddennis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think the main complaint, which I think is reasonable, is that millions of lines of code have already been written in VB 6.0.

      These millions of lines constitute already running applications, many of which have taken years of work. True, they will continue to run as long as people still have copies of VB 6.0 to use. But when Microsoft adds new technologies for, say, interacting between VB programs and Word, the old software won't be able to take advantage of this.

      Products are indeed eventually end of lifed, but generally they are replaced by new, comparable products. I've owned Mercedes-Benz cars for all my life, and the same basic driving techniques I've used on the ancient 1972 280SEL 4.5 work now on my 1991 420SEL. If I walk into the showroom tomorrow and buy a 2005 S500, I can drive out without an extensive retraining course. I might want to learn the new features, but the core driving techniques don't change. All my old skills and habits will still work fine.

      In many respects, VB is actually a very nicely designed environment. The concept was brilliant, despite what all you code snobs say today. I loved VB and then I grew to loathe it, because bugs and bloat made the product I wrote in it much less than it should have been. As a direct result of my VB experience, I grew to loathe Microsoft with a passion, and became an all-Macintosh kind of guy.

      I remember in particular how awful the change from VB 3 to VB 4 was. Every SQL statement in my program - and there were hundreds - had to be found, tracked down and recoded. It was a real nightmare. I can only imagine what today's VB programmers are doing trying to imperfectly convert 6.0 to .net. Even though I no longer use VB, I shed a tear of pity for them and their present fate.

      So I would not be so harsh on VB developers, because converting thousands of lines of code into an all-new environment with completely different designs and challenges is a tough, thankless job.

      No wonder a lot of them switched out of the Microsoft domain. Clearly, you can't trust Microsoft. And doesn't that make most of us, well, actually agree with them for a change?

      D

  7. Perfect opportunity for Microsoft by MobyDisk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Microsoft could open-source VB6. This is a perfect opportunity for them to show that they are truly open. The community could maintain VB6 for as long as they want, and Microsoft could be hands-free. You wanna code in our old dead language? Go for it. Just maintain it yourself.

    I suppose they won't do that because it would bring competition to Microsoft that they don't want. It would be interesting to see what someone would do with it. Maybe make a new language?

    1. Re:Perfect opportunity for Microsoft by sahala · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Microsoft could open-source VB6. This is a perfect opportunity for them to show that they are truly open.

      This is probably one of the more constructive posts on this topic.

      I don't think VB6 programmers are upset about not being able to build new applications in VB. Since they're on the Microsoft train they'd probably love to take on .net projects since it's the sexy new thing for them. I think the main issue is the fact that they probably have a gigantic codebase built on VB6 to fit some gargantuan business needs.

      Someone mentioned that giving VB6 to the community would be a bad move for MS from a competitive advantage standpoint. This is only true from one standpoint: if VB6 is free, why use .net. Yes .net is probably orders of magnitude better of a platform, but free is free, and some customers would probably love to have at the VB6 platform, even sans MS support.

      So the question is whether the potential loss of revenue for releasing VB6 OS is greater than the value of goodwill and lowered support costs. Then again MS has every right to simply cut support.

      Honestly if I were a VB6 developer I'd consider this a good thing. I'd point my finger at MS discontinuing support then start writing up nice expensive proposals to my customers for migrating the existing VB6 codebase to .net. That's probably a good few years of consulting revenue. Money in the bank.

  8. Re:100 MVP's signed? by BillAtHRST · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This has nothing to do with whether VB is good or bad -- pay your money and take your choice. What it has to do without is forced conversion of large numbers of apps for which VB.Net provides no added value. Cost of conversion is significant, since VB.Net is not backward compatible with earlier versions. VB.Net also requires .Net runtime, which is ~23MB -- adding to deployment issues. Dropping support for VB clearly benefits MS, but just as clearly does not benefit users -- since when is this a good thing?

  9. Wait a second.... by wandazulu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I hope there are no OO purists armed with mod points reading this, but VB is actually pretty decent, at the end of the day, for things like rapid development, interface prototyping, etc. All things being equal, VB is *easy*, and sometimes you just want easy. Yes, you can be easy in any language, but to the non-programmer, VB was the ultimate double-click and get started tool. Learn a few concepts about forms and controls, and you're pretty much set (who here knows VB and hasn't seen an app where every single line of code was crammed into the form, narray a module in sight).

    VB allowed me to write my first app: a little one-screen program that calculated exposure times for pinhole cameras (in VB3). Knew zilch about programming at the time, but I was able to slap it together and it worked. The code was absolutely horrible and for such a simple thing, it had bugs simply because I didn't know what I was doing. When I gave it out to a few people (just the .EXE and vbrun300.dll) they came back with suggestions/bugs and before I knew it, I moved "up and out" and became a professional C++/Oracle developer. Not everyone who works with VB becomes a programmer with a capital P, but some do, and some are simply happy to have scratched that particular itch and glad it came off so easily.

    VB6, honestly, is the only tool I can think of that retains that ease of use with a very forgiving nature ("don't worry about declaring your variables...we'll trust you") to allow the uninitiated a chance to come up with something that may be only for him or her, or becomes the next killer app. If I were starting today, looking for something to write my little pinhole calc app, what would I use? VS.net? I wouldn't know what project to start with. Java? Sure, what IDE? Python/Ruby/Perl? All good, but if I only have Windowz, and am not a programmer, I may not know they exist. I knew VB existed because quickbasic was already on the machine, and the high school student working at Software etc. knew to point me at the VB box when I said "well, I know qbasic, but I'm looking for something to run under this Windows thing..."

    That is my only justification for really liking VB, even after all these years; sometimes you just want the functionality and don't care how it looks and it needs to be done fast (and hopefully with a minimal runtime if it's going to moved to another machine). MS is free to put the .net framework on every copy of windows forever, but try to wrap your head around the classes and concepts if you're not already familar with them. VB dispensed with all of that and was just what it was.

  10. Re:Artificial Jobs? by ralphdaugherty · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Damned, if any of my programmers came to me bitching about this I'd likely fire them immediately.

    The people complaining are owners of a lot of code that won't work under .NET. I am quite sure they don't give a damn whether you think you can fire them or not, they probably employ a lot more people than you do.

    The knee jerks here go on and on about coding skills, but it's the code base that quits working natively unless rewritten that is what is being fought to protect, in other words, a lot of investment. Money.

    I don't code VB, but back in the day I wrote some big systems in DOS Compiled Basic, it's predecessor, which did the job well.

    Nevertheless I convinced a Fortune 200 when I was there to use Delphi instead of VB, which raised all kinds of havoc. The Microsoft Certifieds walked. But Delphi was the right choice.

    I guess Microsoft hired away the Delphi team, wrote C#, and now the Microsofties say C# rules.

    Go figure.

    rd

  11. I am glad I develop with free software tools. by Captain+Rotundo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I would find it terribly degrading to have to beg a company to please let me continue to be a customer. How totally absurd.

  12. Re:stranded by Nykon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Do you think the code will just convert itself for free? Many of the people complaining are justified. They are developing and/or running enterprise VB programs for a company. This means many many man hours to re-write,test, implement the new code just to get it back to where it was prior to MS dropping support. To Joe home user, it's easy to say "who cares, learn a new language and get a new job" but with comments like that you lose focus at who has the most to lose. The companies using VB6. It will most likely be costly to them to make the change and viewed by many as an unneeded expenditure since, as the petition shows, phasing out VB6 is not needed or welcomed.

    --
    "It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
  13. Re:VB6 isNot VB.Net and VB.Net is C# by Frans+Faase · · Score: 3, Insightful
    It has been almost ten years ago that they decided to select VB as their development platform. At that time it was the only platform available that allowed you to develop GUI without having to write incredible amouth of Win32 API calls in C. This was before the development of MFC. In the past ten years about five people on average worked on that application. And it went already through several redesigns.

    When developing a commercial application you often have no other choice than to select from the available tools if you want to finish your application before your competor does. And most often you are quit restricted in your choices, if you want to deliver fast and cheap. It is very difficult to look in the future, and often the people managing software development are not aware of the fact that every "short time" decision often has "long term" effects. The name software is very misleading, because over and over again reality proofs that "software" is much harder than "hardware". The hardware we have is completely different from the one that we had ten years ago. Everything has changed. It is relatively cheap to change hardware, even to change hardware interfaces, compared to the cost of changing software to another development platform.