So Long VB6, and Thanks for all the Fish

7. April 2008 07:41 by Jaguilar in General  //  Tags: ,   //   Comments (0)

I may be a little late to the obituary, but VB6 support is finally, officially, irrefutably gone. The IDE, as stated in Microsoft's Product Life-Cycle guidelines, "... will no longer be supported starting March 2008". Even though VB6 (or Basic for that matter) didn't enjoy the best reputation as a programming language (best illustrated by the famous Edsger W. Dijkstra quote), you can't deny the huge influence it's had over the past 15 years. The easy-to-use paradigm followed by VB IDEs lent itself to be used by both amateur programmers, that caused many headaches during the years, and professional developers that were really able to harness the power and ease of use to create impressively robust solutions that are still running to this day.

So if you are thinking of moving away form VB6, obviously I'm going to steer you in the direction of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion.  There is, however, another reason for this as well... pretty soon we are going to release a completely updated version 2.0 of the tool, which has some very interesting new features and does an incredible job of converting your VB6 code into the .NET language. Watch this space, as I will be writing about this new version soon!!

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