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Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives
theodp writes "Microsoft recently extended 'It Just Works' compatibility for Visual Basic 6 applications through the full lifetime of Windows 8, so VB6 apps will have at least 24 years of supported lifetime (VB6 shipped in '98). So why has VB6, 'the un-killable cockroach' in the Windows ecosystem, managed to thrive? 'Cockroaches are successful because they're simple,' explains David S. Platt. 'They do what they need to do for their ecological niche and no more. Visual Basic 6 did what its creators intended for its market niche: enable very rapid development of limited programs by programmers of lesser experience.' But when Microsoft proudly trotted out VB.NET, the 'full-fledged language' designed to turn VB6 'bus drivers' into 'fighter pilots,' they got a surprise. 'Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content with what Visual Basic 6 did,' explains Platt. 'They were happy to be bus drivers: to leave the office at 5 p.m. (or 4:30 p.m. on a really nice day) instead of working until midnight; to play with their families on weekends instead of trudging back to the office; to sleep with their spouses instead of pulling another coding all-nighter and eating cold pizza for breakfast. They didn't lament the lack of operator overloading or polymorphism in Visual Basic 6, so they didn't say much.'"
I thought there were major compatibility problems with the VS98/VB6 IDE on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (caveat: I heard this from a large desktop consultancy that were brought in to provide new systems for a large organisation - I haven't validated it myself).
There is your answer right there. I've heard this myself from large consultancies trying to sell you the latest alphabet acronym soup of Microsoft's latest development technologies so they can make a bundle. Those who have bought in then get to upgrade and rewrite all their code in the new latest and greatest .Net version 77.4 and whatever the latest name for Windows.Forms is in perpetuity. It never ends. You end up firefighting and upgrading more than you do actually coding useful updates into the application
History over the past decade should teach us to be very, very wary of buying into any of the latest development technology from Microsoft. Silverlight developers are soon to be dumped on from a great height and these pitiful Metro applications we're all supposed to write now make me laugh, all so little baby Ballmer can have yet another expensive failure at being Apple or Google on mobiles.
I'm genuinely interested in your strategy going forward, as a friend maintains a VB6 application that is going to be a nightmare to port to VB.NET, so it might as well be rewritten in something else.
The quiet secret is that a lot of companies if they've rewritten anything over the past decade have rewritten their applications to be run over HTTP and a web browser. Anything that can't has stayed as it is. Not that web applications are perfect by any stretch of the imagination but at least there is a relatively stable target there now and you have other browsers besides Internet Explorer, and even other operating systems besides Windows, so the rug doesn't get pulled out from underneath you. Deployment is quite a bit easier as well.
3, and 4 are fair points. 1 and 2 are just wrong. VB6 apps are no worse than any other, and you can run VB6 on windows 7 64bit with a patch that you can download from MS.
I do think that VB7 would have killed .NET dead, which is exactly why they didn't make one. I understand MS wanted the original .NET to be much more VB compatible, but the .NET guys didn't (or rather couldn't) want to do this, they wanted to make their own version of Java and nothing was going to stop them. Well, until today when MS has realised .NET performance and efficiency is crap and they need to go back to native code. Maybe now they'll make a VB7 that is geared toward quick-n-easy Metro apps, then Windows8 might actually become popular.
Now .NET as a language isn't that bad, I actually like it..
.NET as a language isn't that bad because it's not a language. It's a frikkin framework.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.