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.
> ... 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?
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.
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.