Comment MS abandoned VB6 coders since .NET (Score 1) 169
The product I'm working on for my job is a rather complex, real-time, client-server application written in VB for the most part. It has evolved for about 12 years and includes today about 3 million lines of code. Works great. Performance is unbelievable (positively) for a VB6 app.
While the transitions from VB4 to VB5 and later to VB6 had been relatively easy (upgrade GUI controls, recompile), migrating to VB.NET quickly proved to involve a great risk for an incredibly high cost. The migration wizard provided by MS was something to laugh - or cry - at, for example failing to upgrade most controls & components to their .NET successor and falling back to COM interop as soon as possible.
We have abandoned the migration option in favor of a progressive rewrite (in C#). There is no other viable option, from an economic point of view: our customers don't care at all about the technology on which the system is based, but they do care about new useful features being added to the system at regular (reasonably short) intervals.
Not so long ago, VB had replaced Cobol as the world's most used programming language (with C, C++ or Java far behind - this had been covered on /.). Given this, and no matter how superior the .NET platform was, I still find it really incredible that MS did not provide any decent solution for migrating the huge VB6 code base to the new technology.
Did I mention that VB6 became obsolete as soon as .NET appeared? No corrective or security updates any more. No such thing as a phasing out period.
Nowadays many people would say that it's the price of using a proprietary development environment (compiler) compared to an open source one. However probably no one would have dared sustain such an opinion when the development of our product started 12 years ago...
Some time ago I read someone's proposing an open-source VB6 compiler as an interesting project: has anybody heard something about that?
While the transitions from VB4 to VB5 and later to VB6 had been relatively easy (upgrade GUI controls, recompile), migrating to VB.NET quickly proved to involve a great risk for an incredibly high cost. The migration wizard provided by MS was something to laugh - or cry - at, for example failing to upgrade most controls & components to their
We have abandoned the migration option in favor of a progressive rewrite (in C#). There is no other viable option, from an economic point of view: our customers don't care at all about the technology on which the system is based, but they do care about new useful features being added to the system at regular (reasonably short) intervals.
Not so long ago, VB had replaced Cobol as the world's most used programming language (with C, C++ or Java far behind - this had been covered on
Did I mention that VB6 became obsolete as soon as
Nowadays many people would say that it's the price of using a proprietary development environment (compiler) compared to an open source one. However probably no one would have dared sustain such an opinion when the development of our product started 12 years ago...
Some time ago I read someone's proposing an open-source VB6 compiler as an interesting project: has anybody heard something about that?
