Posted on 03/13/2005 6:00:05 PM PST by baseball_fan
An online petition gathering signatures to save Microsoft’s Visual Basic 6 programming language will not change the company’s intention to cut free support on March 31, a Microsoft representative said on Thursday afternoon.
Microsoft’s plan to stop support has been discussed for almost three years and the deadline already has been extended once, said the press representative, who requested anonymity. Visual Basic 6 has been supported longer than any other Microsoft product, according to the representative. “Extended” support, which is fee-based, will continue through 2008.
The vendor has spent the past few years encouraging Visual Basic 6 programmers to migrate to the new Visual Basic .Net platform, which has had its share of complications. The Microsoft representative acknowledged that the company “dramatically altered the Visual Basic language-syntax in Visual Basic .Net.”
As of Thursday afternoon, 1,009 signatures had been added to the petition, at http://classicvb.org/Petition/. One signatory interviewed stressed the difficulties in moving to Visual Basic .Net.
“It’s a different language,” said Visual Basic programmer Don Bradner, who has been part of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Programmer community. “It’s like me telling you that you have to write InfoWorld in French.” …
The petition asks that Microsoft further develop Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic for Applications, continue supporting the language, and allow customers to decide when to migrate code to Visual Basic .Net. An updated version of Visual Basic 6 is requested by the petitioners…
“Microsoft should demonstrate a commitment to the core Visual Basic language. This core should be enhanced and extended, and changes should follow a documented deprecation process,” the petition states.
But all future versions of Visual Basic will be based on Visual Basic .Net…The company has provided “a wide range of resources to help Visual Basic developers make the transition…
(Excerpt) Read more at infoworld.com ...
There are a significant number of programmers who are at a certain stage in life where they will not be able to make the next "transition." Imagine hearing, "We're sorry, but we will no longer be supporting algebra and English." Not everyone can be a Bill Gates and leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Business decisions which are made on the basis of sentimentality are not good business decisions, and ultimately benefit no one.
Bump
Bill Gates hasn't had to personally learn a new trick since he pulled the DOS wool over the eyes of his partner and of IBM way back in the 70's.
"Business decisions which are made on the basis of sentimentality are not good business decisions, and ultimately benefit no one."
I assume if they cannot show enough muscle, as you say, they will lose.
I wonder if they had the same outcry about Basic? Technology is rapidly moving forward and if you cannot adapt then you don't belong in the field. I think its insulting to insinuate that certain people are too old to adapt. I just came from a meeting with a guy in his 70's that was as sharp as they come on the latest and greatest.
"Technology is rapidly moving forward and if you cannot adapt then you don't belong in the field."
Tell that to the folks referenced in post #3
Well, they can just fork off the source tree, and start an independent project...oh, wait...that's right...they can't do that without the source code and an open source license, can they?
Gee...tough break, there fellas.
Laugh - well my husband 47 ... not exactly 70 .. but he's made the change... he's gone through a bunch of languages.. mostly on his own - having good jobs. You make a great point that if someone can't adapt they don't belong in the field.
I'm not a programmer - but I live with two - my husband and son.. Maybe it's just that they LOVE what they do - but to them they love the challenge of learning something new.
Well said!
Yup. Welcome to the wonderful world of closed-source proprietary development tools.
Microsoft can do what they like. It's their product.
But here, suddenly, people aren't talking free markets. They're talking proprietorship, and a sort of command approach. Interesting.
The free market works differently. If there is something in VB or VBA that isn't found in .NET, and there may be, then some in the free market will hold both to older versions, and will seek a reliable substitute as equally as the substitute now offered by Microsoft. The sentimentality is all on the side of Microsoft. The practical view is that Microsoft provides a product. If that product doesn't meet the needs of customers, customers will look elsewhere - in a free market.
Just because VBA, say, in entrenched as the macro language of Microsoft suites is no reason to forever maintain it. On the other hand, THE ONE THING people point to as Microsoft's advantage is that they rigorously encouraged backward compatibility. The old DOS accounting programs could still be run on XP, they say. So here, Microsoft is abandoning that practice. In doing so, the abandon the ONE THING that set them apart from competitors. From a competitor's viewpoint, I might sugggest, Microsoft - go right ahead. It depends on whether they can use .NET to do what they used to do, even if in a different manner. If there's just no way, then great - obsolete your base. Anger your customers. It's a free market, and a proprietary product.
Sounds like they want to halt progress so they won't be forced to hit the books and learn something new. Sorry, but you don't go into IT and expect things to stay still.
Crap - and I was just thinking of learning VB6. I guess I'll stick with my GWBASIC and hope they come out with GWBASIC.NET some day. ;-)
The instructor said that when you make your living with your knowledge, in IT you can expect that your value will decline by about 25% a year. I jokingly mentioned that in that case, at my current job I have a technical competancy level of -200%!
But he's right. Things change so rapidly in the IT world that you have to learn new things every day, otherwise your knowledge becomes obsolete, and so do you.
There are a significant number of programmers who are at a certain stage in life where they will not be able to make the next "transition." Imagine hearing, "We're sorry, but we will no longer be supporting algebra and English." Not everyone can be a Bill Gates and leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Sorry, but I disagree with you 100% here. That's just part of the job. Have you done much support for MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 lately? How about QEMM? Or SCO Xenix? OS/2 v2.0? NT Server 3.51? Configured many ARCnet or Token Ring networks lately? All of these were terrific technologies that were really leading edge at one time. But they've all fallen by the wayside.
As people in the technology field, we've all implicitly agreed to keep up with the technology, otherwise we'll be obsolete as surely as the technology that we're experts in...
Heck, I'm in a situation where I'm trying to come up to speed ASAP on Microsoft products. As a Novell specialist, they've got the technology, but they don't have the "mind share," as my instructor put it... Novell could sell a server that prints money, and still, nobody would be buying it. Because they lost the "mind share," and now they're losing the market share as well. (Thanks to Mark G for those statements... They're right on target.)
Mark
> ... intention to cut free support on March 31, a
> Microsoft representative said on Thursday afternoon.
MS reminding programmers why it's dangerous to build
your career on what is effectively a proprietary
programming language (that runs only on MS Windows,
and probably not all of the installed base thereof).
> The vendor has spent the past few years encouraging
> Visual Basic 6 programmers to migrate to the new Visual
> Basic .Net platform, which has had its share of
> complications. The Microsoft representative acknowledged
> that the company “dramatically altered the Visual Basic
> language-syntax in Visual Basic .Net.”
So does VB.NET run older VB.6 code, unmodified?
Does VB.NET run on all the deployed platforms where
VB6 apps exist today? Seems like there might be issues
here beyond annoying a community of programmers.
> “It’s a different language,” said Visual Basic
> programmer Don ...
And from what I hear from my relatives in IT, learning
a different language is the last thing that too many VB
programmers want to do.
"Who moved my cheese?"
or
How do you distinguish between an MS product and a mouse trap?
From Microsoft's Website:
About the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award Program Microsoft started the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award Program in the early 1990s as a way to recognize those members of the general public who devoted their time and considerable computing skills to helping users in the various newsgroups hosted by Microsoft. Since that time, the Microsoft MVP Award Program has grown and awards are now given to the most outstanding members of Microsoft technical communities for their exceptional contributions to hundreds of online and offline technical communities, including Microsoft public newsgroups, third-party Web sites that include Web boards and Web logs (or blogs), and user groups -- all popular forums for communicating with peers about Microsoft products, technologies and services.
Hmmm maybe if they spent less time hanging out on the boards and learning .net it wouldn't be so tough for them...
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