Microsoft Remains Firm On Ending VB6 Support

An anonymous reader submits "CNet reports that Microsoft is remaining firm an ending support for VB6, despite a petition and many requests from its developer community. If only VB were a F/OSS project instead of a proprietary customers could be assured of continued support as long as there was demand. Are there any good F/OSS implementations of VB out there for customers to migrate to? One can only hope that enlightened groups like the Agility Alliance would warn about the risks of using such software that can be end-of-lifed even while they're in heavy use."

Comments

VB 6 != VF.NET

[tepples]

No, Mono is for replacing Visual Fred.NET, not VB 6, which is a different language entirely.

VB Alternatives

[podperson]

You might care to look at:

RealBasic -- a VB-near clone with cross-platform development options that actually work, and which produces standalone .exes which don't require a magic set of DLLs to be installed correctly.

Extreme Basic -- an open source VB-like development tool which looks very promising, being developed by the original developer of RealBasic.

Re:Financial Services

[YrWrstNtmr]

It's not a case of VB6/VBA applications suddenly refusing to run. Rather MS is cutting off 'mainstream' support, and putting it on what is called 'extended' support.

* Mainstream support includes all the support options and programs that customers receive today, such as no-charge incident support, paid incident support, support that is charged on an hourly basis, support for warranty claims, and hotfix support. After mainstream support ends, extended support will be offered for Business and Development software.
** Extended support includes all paid support options and security-related hotfix support that is provided at no charge. Hotfix support that is not security-related requires a separate extended hotfix support contract to be purchased within 90 days after mainstream support ends. Microsoft will not accept requests for warranty support, design changes, or new features during the extended support phase.

Currently, they have a date of Mar 31, 2008 to stop extended support. 10 years for one particular IDE is pretty good.

Copyright law

[tepples]

Excerpted from Title 17, United States Code, Section 106:

Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of a copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:

1. to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
2. to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
3. to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

Most countries that trade with the United States have something similar in their legal code.

Now if you believe that a company may lawfully customize someone else's all-rights-reserved proprietary software, then it's your turn to provide a reference to the exemption from sections 107 through 121.

The danger of doing it wrong the first time

[Monkelectric]

You're going to read lots of comments along the lines of "This is great VB is horrible!" and "I can't believe they are doing this, my legacy application X depends on VB. This is horrible."

Both view points are correct. VB needs to be scrapped BADLY. It is a horrible horrible language. The second problem -- MS *FORCED* people to use VB, people who *KNEW* better, by making it the only way to do certain things (office automation comes to mind). So lots of developers have been forced into a language they didn't like when it suited MS, and the irony of being forced out of it again is deliscious.

The real mistake was making an inadequate langauge/API in the first place, that painted MS into this corner. I suspect some people will defect to open source, and it will radically slow uptake of new MS products which no longer support VB and VBA. Companies are *NOT* going to redevelop hundreds of VB applications because MS wants them to. *HUGE* companies like UPS rely on VB everyday to do their business (I've interviewed there).

REALbasic

[shking]

You can develop for Mac, Windows and Linux using REALbasic is very. They have a free Visual Basic project converter tool. Porting from Visual Basic is quite straightforward

Re:Financial Services

[TheCodeFoundry]

Thanks for RTFA. Spreading FUD isn't limited to MS, I see.

VBA and VBScript have nothing to do with Visual Basic 6. Not to mention, just because MS is no longer supporting VB 6, it isn't going to "cease to work" tomorrow.

Not quite right

[darkpurpleblob]

If only VB were a F/OSS project instead of a proprietary customers could be assured of continued support as long as there was demand.

Wrong! Customers could only be assured of continued support as long as there is demand and there are capable developers who are interested in supporting the project.

Re:Meet The Forkers

[Azghoul]

Let me give you an example of why it's a big deal. I'm going to be abstruse so try and keep up.

Company A, pretty big company, has a simple document management system written in VB 4. VB 4! you exclaim. Yes, VB 4. But it worked well enough. It worked fine, same executable for nearly 7 years.

Now, unfortunately, IT being what it is, new machines are needed every few years - it's impossible to find replacement parts for Pentium 2 machines these days, and that doesn't work well for tax purposes, etc.

Uh oh! New machines come with Windows XP - can't get approval to get Win2k any more. And guess what: The good old VB 4 app won't run under XP.

Company A then gets to decide how to spend a wad of cash rebuilding their little document management app from scratch.

Thanks, Microsoft!

(And yes, this is a real example I've just finished a contract with. Whether or not you think it was foolish of Company A to keep that same app for 7 years - as I did - it was and remains a usable app, if not for forced incompatibilities by your favorite fucking company.)