I’ve seen recently an increase in the number of people with business critical applications written in Visual Basic 6.0 that are looking more actively towards making the transition to the .NET platform. I think that this may have been triggered in part by the proximity of the end of Microsoft’s extended support for VB 6, in March 2008 (mainstream support ended 2 years ago). For
Independent Software Vendors specially, this is a source for considerable market pressure. According to some analysts, most people moved to .NET because of the demand from clients or for the need to keep up with the latest trends, aside from the platform’s own capabilities and features, of course.
In the past, there’s been a consistent lack of perceived need for .NET among VB 6 developers, but .NET usage continues to increase from year to year. And with more successful migration stories every day and a broad range of related resources and incentives available (take for example Microsoft’s
NXT initiative for ISVs), many are starting to consider the .NET upgrade as an unavoidable step to avoid the legacy quicksand.