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Visual Basic Developers Revolt Against Microsoft
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."
Does VB6 not work, all of a sudden?
I am so used to Free Software that such problems seem almost unbelievable. It must be really frustrating to be so dependent on one company who can render your skill set irrelevant by one decision. You might say: isn't it possible for FSF to stop supporting GCC? Of course it is. But the point is that they cannot make it illegal for others to support. Just imagine how much more productive the time spent by those revolting developers would be if they were allowed to support that project themselves. But they are not. They have to beg or threaten Microsoft to support it for them. And that is just not a good business strategy in the long run, when eventually all of the products meet the end of line time. Sad.
This is correct. I have managed to pry my company's flag ship product out of the cold dead fingers of VB6 and move it to VB.Net.
It constitutued a complete rewrite and rearchitecting (made up word?), as VB.Net is really an entirely new language with a similar syntax to VB6.
The best thing about VB.Net is that it has the words "Visual Basic" in it's name which causes managers to think that it is the same thing, allowing people like myself to rewrite dying applications in a somewhat better language. (It is *MUCH* more difficult to push for a port from vb6 to java or c++ or something similar)
However, this is typical Microsoft behavior in the whole "ummm ya... it's time for you to upgrade. no, we don't care if you are still doing fine with your old technology, we need some more money" tradition.
The really sad thing is that there are many MANY people who earn their living writing VB6 code that either do not have the ability or just don't care to learn a new development paradigm. These are the people that will be left out in the cold. On a personal level I'd love to see VB6 die a quick and merciless death, but on a professional level i think it is stupid to throw away years of investment in a reasonably mature platform because it isn't fashionable anymore.
They do have a valid point despite your vitriolic rantings.
Consider this: How long has VB6 been around? Given the they will no longer be promoting VB6 as a viable language, how would you feel if $SOMEONE were to declare your favorite language (perl, python, java, bash, C, C++) was no longer a viable language and that you would have to learn a completely new one.
In ten years, how many people do you think will still be writing code in Perl 5 instead of Perl 6?
I think they are entirely justified in their revolt. It's not about them and their lack of willingness to learn a new language. I am willing to give them some credit. Rather this is indicative of the common historical practice of turning everything over every 5 years.
When I worked in MS Access I started on Access 2.0. When everthing migrated to Access 95/98 it was a complete rewrite of everything that we had done. With the Access 2000 it's another complete rewrite of the applications involved and we are finding some bugs that simply cannot be circumvented.
The point I'm hoping to make is that even Fortran code can still be run under Unix if you have no need to change it. But to simply drop a programming language and move on is an unnecessary cost to the company and society.
Look at the mousetrap. How long has that thing been around without a design change from Victor? Sure, there are other newer methods and mousetraps that have come along, but the old tried and true model is still around and doing well. Similarly, VB6 applications, if they work well and do the job, should not be forced into obsolescence in this manner.