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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 ...
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Presumably you can continue to run VB6 alongside VB .net.
I have a VB6 package that I installed in my computer because I still have a few legacy programs, and I've never had any problems with it.
I've also got ARJ and LHA still as backup unzippers, although I think I may dispense with these legacy programs when I move to my next computer.
I think I had VB4 and VB5 on my last computer, as well, to run old stuff, although I don't seem to have them anymore on this one.
"Maybe it's just that they LOVE what they do"
I would submit that many of these VB6 signatories were quite accomplished programmers at one time too (have to be to be an MVP I assume) and undoubtedly went through many upgrade cycles themselves. Some of them probably have to keep legacy systems going as well as running businesses. The whole world doesn't necessarily need or revolve around all of MS's ambitious innovations as valuable and essential as those are going forward. If this obsolescence schedule were applied to many other areas of our lives...well I've gone on too long. We know what happens and usually no one cares. Only the winners write the histories.
I made the tranistion to VB.NET.. And it was a little tough.. having done one consulting gig in Java certainly helped (they basically copied many aspects of Java for .NET languages)...
I then transitionted to C#.. a little tough also (like trying to figure out how to pass optional variables to a function -- you can't have optional parms in C#, but the workaround is to use the SqlString datatype which accepts null values, hence making the values optional....)
.Net indeed has it's own problems, and I will admit not everyone is cut out to be a OOP programmer -- which one reason why VB became so popular in the first place. However, these people just need to apply themselves and stop whining... They never bothered to learn .net -- I had to do it on my own and in my spare time...
The benefits of .NET are awesome, especially for websites... Nothing like populating a datagrid with a few lines of code..
>>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.
Exactly. I myself took this route: Bought the VB.NET web apps certification book, created about 300 flash cards with defintions and concepts I didn't know... Spent weeks studying.. Then started to make my own on-line web app.. Then got a .NET contract, worked my tail off to put what I memorized into practical use.... and after about a month, I was doing fine...
It takes work, and these people are whining about having to do something extra to stay ahead. I'm surpriesed they aren't complianing that VB3 isn't supported any more.
I LEARNED THE HARD WAY WITH C# -- I put off learning it until last Q of 04-- and it was a mercy project -- had it not been for that I would not have gotten the gig... Looking at the job market, I have tons more C# offers than VB... And C# hasn't been in practical use for more than a year or so in most places, so I'm not toooo late. These people are gonna be way behind the curve when C# is the "defacto" .NET language and they have just barely started .NET v 1.0....
In this age of outsourcing, one MUST keep on top to stay afloat...
No. VB.Net is not backwards compatible. There are tricks to migrate some 60% of VB 6 code to VB.Net, but it's error-prone and unreliable.
Ever program in DIBOL?
Technically, the older VB 6 has the superior error detection and correction architecture; the newer VB.Net drops support for industry-standard error checking and falls back to the ancient days of Machine-Language "check-it-yourself" formats.
Now I understand what SAP brought me in for an interview for. Or maybe not. No body knows which way the tides are going on this -- C#, Java, .NET. Not MS, Ballmer, Gates even.
The old Tower of Babel redux.
Probably a time when the small will whoop the big -- because the big and the herd that follows their every fart as if it is a deep mighty nuance are wandering blind and headed into the swamp at dusk.
Well, I just ordered up a VB 5 package today in order to support a product I helped develop years ago. We'll see.
Seriously, Microsoft pulls this because they know they can. If they don't FORCE adoption of new products, new tools, and relearning they'd never keep up their revenue stream and lock-in. It's not about innovation, it's about keeping the milk flowing and that milk is in their consulting and training not in end-user products.
It's like having a career of playing whack-a-mole every time someone itches another 'standard' into existence.
"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."
I do mainframe storage for a large corporation and I'm the youngest on my particular team at 55. The guys I work with actually wrote some of the software that IBM uses. We are constantly installing and upgrading software and really have to stay ahead of the game. It does keep you sharp.
One big problem about software: there are programs that run important processes that have been chugging along for years. Then, when you're told to upgrade you discover that the app won't run on the new machine, the developer that created it and understood it left 2 years ago, and you are not quite sure where the latest version of the source code is.
Except that I doubt that they are. No support for VB6 just means that you can't telephone them with a programming question -- something I would never do anyway -- and there won't be a VB6 Service Pack 7. Well, you know what? Service Pack 6 wasn't much good, so not having a 7 will be no loss.
We still have some Microsoft Fortran programs running under DOS. And how many years has it been that that one hasn't been supported? Yes, a lot of times it is worth rewriting stuff in abandonned languages into the new stuff, but I never believe in doing it just for the sake of being able to say your whole inventory is "supported."
Indeed, then you are in trouble.
>> "So does VB.NET run older VB.6 code, unmodified?"
> No. VB.Net is not backwards compatible. There are
> tricks to migrate some 60% of VB 6 code to VB.Net,
> but it's error-prone and unreliable.
Sounds like the enterprises using VB6 have a bigger
beef with MS than the VB programmers do.
> Then, when you're told to upgrade you discover that the
> app won't run on the new machine, the developer that
> created it and understood it left 2 years ago, ...
Been there at the front end, documented that, backed it
all up, labeled the media, and they never had to call.
> ... and you are not quite sure where the latest
> version of the source code is.
Hmmm. I thought that one of the main reasons for using
an interpreted or run-time-compiled language like BASIC
was that the source WAS the executable ...
... or are you now going to tell me that MS VB can be
fully compiled to binary files that can get separated
from the source, and the source lost?
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I would like to salute Microsoft's development team for finally finding a way to rid the industry of VB programmers. It's a giant step forward for us all.